The Romantic Revolution

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  2011 Modern Library Edition

  Copyright © 2010 by Tim Blanning

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a division of Orion Publishing Group, Ltd., in 2010.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Blanning, T.C.W.

  The romantic revolution: a history / Tim Blanning.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60500-3

  1. Romanticism—Europe. 2. Europe—Civilization—19th century. 3. Europe—Intellectual life—19th century. I. Title.

  PN751.B53 2011 700.9′033—dc22 2011004269

  Jacket design: Christopher Sergio

  Jacket painting: Rudolf Friedrich August Henneberg, The Fortune Hunter, c. 1868 (detail) (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, N.Y./Klaus Goeken)

  www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1 THE CRISIS of THE AGE of REASON ROUSSEAU ON THE ROAD TO VINCENNES

  ROUSSEAU’S LOVERS: FROM A MIMETIC TO AN EXPRESSIVE AESTHETIC

  NATURE AND NATURE’S LAWS

  THE CULT OF GENIUS

  THE ELEVATION OF THE ARTIST AND THE SACRALIZATION OF ART

  THE PHILISTINE PUBLIC

  2 THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

  THE WONDER-WORLD OF THE NIGHT

  THE SLEEP OF REASON

  THE OPIATE OF THE ARTISTS

  GREAT WITS ARE SURE TO MADNESS NEAR ALLIED

  ROMANTIC HEROES AND HEROINES

  3 LANGUAGE, HISTORY, AND MYTH THE LANGUAGE OF THE PEOPLE

  THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE

  MEDIEVALISM

  LANDSCAPE AND MYTH

  CONSERVATIVES AND REVOLUTIONARIES

  CONCLUSION: DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION

  Photo Insert

  Notes

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  Between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, Europe changed so rapidly and radically that one can reasonably speak of a watershed in world history. Those who lived through it were constantly using the word revolution to express their awareness that they were living in exciting times, as in “the American Revolution,” “the French Revolution,” or “the Industrial Revolution.” To these, historians have added several others, notably “the agrarian revolution,” “the commercial revolution,” “the communications revolution,” and “the consumer revolution.” Contemporary astonishment at the pace and variety of change was indeed acute. In 1818, for example, the German publisher Friedrich Perthes exclaimed that “in the three generations alive today our own age has combined what cannot be combined. No sense of continuity informs the tremendous contrast inherent in the years 1750, 1789 and 1815. To people alive now, they simply do not appear as a sequence of events.”1 Twenty years later, the Belgian music critic François Fétis, born in 1784, wrote that during his lifetime the world had changed in more ways than during all of previous human history.2

  It was not only the material world that was affected. Those who lived to see the world of Voltaire, Reynolds, and Haydn make way for the world of Hugo, Turner, and Wagner could appreciate that a great cultural revolution had also occurred. This was “the romantic revolution,” which deserves to be accorded the same status as the other revolutions. If it had no starting point as clear-cut as the Declaration of Independence or the fall of the Bastille, contemporaries were well aware that a monumental upheaval in the cultural world was under way. Even those chary of acknowledging their own affiliation had to admit that they had been affected. Delacroix, for example, wrote: “If by romanticism one understands the free manifestation of my personal impressions, my aversion to models copied in the schools, and my loathing for academic formula, I must confess that not only am I romantic, but I was so at the age of fifteen.”3 In just two or three generations, the rule book of the classical past was torn up. In its place came not another set of rules, but a radically different approach to artistic creation that has provided the aesthetic axioms of the modern world, even if a definition of romanticism has proved elusive.

  In December 1923 Arthur Lovejoy, professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, gave a lecture to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association of America titled “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.”4 He entertained his audience by listing some of the candidates previously nominated for the title “father of romanticism,” ranging from Plato to St. Paul to Francis Bacon to Reverend Joseph Warton to Rousseau and Kant, to name just a few. After reviewing the various types of romanticism and their manifold incongruities, he concluded wearily: “Any attempt at a general appraisal even of a single chronologically determinate Romanticism—still more, of ‘Romanticism’ as a whole—is a fatuity.”5 This was a verdict repeated with varying degrees of vehemence throughout the twentieth century. In an influential book on England, for example, Marilyn Butler used the word romantic in her title but then announced on the first page that it was “anachronistic” and would not have been recognized by the poets to whom it was applied.6

  Equally various have been the starting points identified. They include Piranesi’s Roman Antiquities of the Time of the First Republic of 1748 (Michel Floris
oone); the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (Kenneth Clark); Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse of 1761 (Maurice Cranston); Herder’s journey to France in 1769 (Rüdiger Safranski); Blake’s Songs of Innocence of 1789 (Maurice Bowra); and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck’s Heartfelt Effusions of an Art-Loving Monk of 1797 (Hans-Joachim Schoeps).7 Other popular runners are Rousseau’s conversion experience on the road to Vincennes in 1749; Horace Walpole’s nightmare that led to the writing of his Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764; and Goethe’s enthusiastic response to Strasbourg Cathedral in 1770.

  Much scholarly energy has also been devoted to establishing when the word romantic first made an appearance. The first recorded occurrence was in the title of a quaint little book published in 1650: Herba parietis: or, The wall-flower as it grew out of the stone chamber belonging to the metropolitan prison of London, called Newgate: being a history which is partly true, partly romantick, morally divine: whereby a marriage between reality and fancy is solemnized by divinity. This had been written by the Catholic royalist Thomas Bayly “while he was a prisoner there.”8 Nine years later occurred the first mention thought worthy of inclusion in The Oxford English Dictionary, this time by the Anglican divine Henry More of Christ’s College, Cambridge, when he wrote in his treatise Immortality of the Soul: “I speak especially of that Imagination which is most free, such as we use in Romantick Inventions.”9 It was also being used in English in the mid–seventeenth century to describe picturesque landscapes and buildings, as in Samuel Pepys’s view that Windsor Castle was “the most romantique castle that is in the world.” More usually, however, it was used in a pejorative sense, to refer disparagingly to fantastic baroque novels written “like the old romances,” and it was also in that sense that it first appeared as “romanesque” in the dictionary of the Académie française in 1694.10 By the 1730s, as “romantisch” it had found its way into German-language periodicals.11

  In the course of the eighteenth century it slowly began to shift toward its modern meaning. An early sign was the poet laureate Thomas Warton’s treatise On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe of 1774, in which he drew a distinction between literature he called “romantic” and the classical tradition. Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, he called “a wonderful compound of classical and romantic fancy.”12 But Warton was using the word in a descriptive and chronological sense. It was in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century that a clear program was articulated and called romantic. To the fore were the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August Wilhelm, whose mouthpiece was the periodical Athenæum founded in 1798. It was also there that one of the poetic masterpieces of German romanticism was first published: Hymns to the Night by “Novalis,” the nom de plume of the Saxon noble Friedrich von Hardenberg.

  This articulation coincided with a rapid dissemination of German philosophy and German literature. If the Germans of the proto-romantic “Storm and Stress” [Sturm und Drang] movement of the 1770s had been inspired by English writers, especially Shakespeare, the compliment was now handsomely returned by Walter Scott (by his own admission “German mad” in the 1790s), Henry Crabb Robinson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to name just three of the main transmitters.13 In continental Europe an even more important conduit was Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, not least because she was writing in the lingua franca of the educated. First published in London in 1813 in French, it was translated into English almost immediately.14 Among other things, she contrasted the literature of France—“the most classical of all” and therefore also the most elitist—with the romanticism of the Germans, populist and popular enough to have permeated society from the Rhine to the Baltic.15 Now the references to romanticism came thick and fast across Europe. In 1817 the romantiki in Russia were denounced by the old guard as “literary schismatics who have surrendered with body and soul to the depraved muses of the romantic Parnassus.”16 The first French intellectual to have called himself a “romantic” appears to have been Stendhal when writing to a friend in 1818 that “I am a passionate romantic, that is to say I am for Shakespeare and against Racine, for Lord Byron and against Boileau.”17 In that same year, the Polish poet Casimir Brodzinski wrote a dissertation contrasting classicism and romanticism, while at the other end of Europe, in Spain, the same distinction began to appear in the periodical press. It was also in 1818 that Goethe wrote of Italy: “The public is divided into two factions that stand facing each other ready for battle. And whereas we Germans when the occasion arises use the adjective romantic quite peacefully, in Milan the two expressions romanticism and classicism designate two irreconcilable sects.” In 1823 the Portuguese poet Almeida Garrett referred to “we romantics.”18 And so on.

  Not everyone was sure what it meant. Prince Pyotr Andreyevich Vyazemsky, although the most forthright of the Russian romantics, confessed in 1824: “Romanticism is like a phantom. Many people believe in it; there is a conviction that it exists, but where are its distinctive features, how can it be defined, how can one put one’s finger on it?”19 One thing it emphatically was not was a style. Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, mannerism, baroque, and rococo all had clear stylistic concepts, but romanticism never developed anything similar.20 Especially in architecture almost every conceivable style was tried—neo-Gothic, neoclassical, neo-Renaissance, neo-Egyptian, neobaroque, neo-everything. Heinrich Hübsch actually published a pamphlet in 1828 asking pathetically, In What Style Should We Build?21 The differences between—say—the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Eugène Delacroix, or the poetry of Novalis and Wordsworth, or the music of Wagner and Verdi (these last two were exact contemporaries born in the same year), provide sufficient evidence of stylistic diversity. The first French historian of romanticism—F. R. de Toreinx—defined his subject as “just that which cannot be defined,” while Baudelaire wrote that “romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth but in a way of feeling.”22

  That plenty more imprecise offerings of this kind can be found should not lead to an abandonment of the quest with a despairing shrug of the shoulders. What is needed is a willingness to enter the world of the romantics by the routes they chose themselves, however shifting the sands on which that world rests and however ethereal the atmosphere in which it has its being. By its nature, romanticism does not lend itself to precise definition, exegesis, and analysis. It is through sounds and images, dreams and visions, that the gate to understanding can be opened (to employ the kind of evocative language the romantics themselves liked). Words have to be used, but their limitations must be recognized. As Tennyson wrote in In Memoriam:

  I sometimes hold it half a sin

  To put in words the grief I feel;

  For words, like Nature, half reveal

  And half conceal the Soul within.23

  It was this “Soul within” that formed the core of the romantics’ concerns. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment had shifted attention away from the darkness of the human interior, a zone terrorized by fear of God, toward the sunny uplands of the world outside. It was a move from theocentricity to anthropocentricity, from an overriding concern with the far side of the grave (what the Germans call Jenseitigkeit) to making the best of this world (Diesseitigkeit), for it was now seen that “the proper study of mankind is man” (Alexander Pope). Thanks to the discoveries of the natural scientists, it was a world that could be investigated, understood, controlled, and improved.

  Yet when the tide was running so strongly in favor of this secular meliorism that all the old intellectual and cultural lumber looked like being washed away, it began to turn. The pace of change in so many spheres of human activity had picked up enough speed to make a growing number of people uneasy. Moreover, the jaunty triumphalism of many enlightened rationalists suggested that this was the beginning of an ever-accelerating process that would end with all the old religious, cultural, and social landmarks swept away. As one ruler after another embraced the enligh
tened program, it seemed that the barbarians were not only inside the gates, but in full control of the citadel. Nor could this brave new world’s culture satisfy all appetites. Many laughed at Voltaire’s mocking satires on stupid prejudices, and many felt edified by forms of religion stripped of superstition, but there were also those who thirsted after more sustaining fare than his thin gruel. On the other hand, they did not simply wish to go back to the institutions and values of the past but looked for alternatives. It was into this transcendental vacuum that the romantics moved.

  In doing so, they were initiating a new phase in the long-running dialectic between a culture of feeling and a culture of reason. The former had last been in the ascendant during the baroque era before being thrust to one side by the victory of Cartesian rationalism and French classicism.24 The family resemblance between the baroque and romanticism is especially clear in the visual arts, in the similarities between Rubens and Delacroix, for example. But the relationship between the two cultural paradigms has always been dialectical, not cyclical. The romantics were not repeating their ancestors. On the contrary, they brought about a cultural revolution comparable in its radicalism and effects with the roughly contemporary American, French, and Industrial Revolutions. By destroying natural law and by reorienting concern from the work to the artist, they tore up the old regime’s aesthetic rule book just as thoroughly as any Jacobin tore down social institutions. In the words of Ernst Troeltsch: “Romanticism too is a revolution, a thorough and genuine revolution: a revolution against the respectability of the bourgeois temper and against a universal equalitarian ethic: a revolution, above all, against the whole of the mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, against a conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality, against the bare abstraction of a universal and equal Humanity.”25

  As will be argued in subsequent chapters, it was Hegel who captured the essence of this revolution in his pithy definition of romanticism as “absolute inwardness” [absolute Innerlichkeit]. It will also be argued that its prophet was Jean-Jacques Rousseau: if not the most consistent, then certainly the most influential of all the eighteenth-century thinkers. Writing in 1907, Lytton Strachey caught Rousseau’s special quality very well: “Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world—to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart.”26 Shelley, who derided the philosophes as “mere reasoners,” regarded Rousseau as “a great poet.”27