The Romantic Revolution Read online

  Look at other nationalities! Do they wander about

  So that nowhere in the whole world they are strangers

  Except to themselves?

  They regard foreign countries with proud disdain.

  And you German, returning from abroad,

  Would you greet your mother in French?

  O spew it out before your door,

  Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine.

  Speak German, O you German!24

  Foreign travel never did anything to broaden Herder’s sympathy for other nations: During a visit to Italy in 1788–89, he wrote home that the more he got to know the local people and their ways, the more enthusiasm he felt for the Germans.25

  Herder was not alone in his wish to promote the German language. Societies for that purpose had existed since the seventeenth century. They were given fresh impetus in the late eighteenth century by a surge of cultural achievement, especially in music (the Bachs, Haydn, Mozart), philosophy (Kant, Herder, Fichte), and literature (Klopstock, Goethe, Schiller). As pride inflated, so did sensitivity to what was thought to be disparagement on the part of foreigners, especially the French. Voltaire’s merciless satire on the quintessentially clod-hopping German in the person of Baron Thunder-ten-Tronck in his bestseller Candide was only the most successful of many such satires. In his French and German Letters of 1740 the Provençal Éléazar de Mauvillon, who had spent most of his adult life in Germany, depicted the Germans as being exceedingly avaricious, addicted to alcohol, brutal toward their poor, pedantic, stupid, with strong bodies but feeble minds. Their food was inedible, he added, and their wine undrinkable. At the root of the problem, he maintained, was their dreadful language: “The difficulty that all nations have in understanding German provides good evidence of the country’s barbarism. I know Frenchmen who have lived there for forty years and don’t know two words of the language.” Is it their fault or the fault of a language that sounds ugly and has a clumsy grammar and syntax? he asked rhetorically. No wonder that even the best German writers were pedantic and devoid of wit.26 “Our language has become the language of Europe,” asserted a French musical periodical in 1773, while Antoine de Rivarol proclaimed that one could now speak of “the French world” in the same way that once one could speak of “the Roman world.” Mankind now formed a single republic, he added, under the domination of one language.27

  Then as now, advocates of the French language stressed its clarity, thus making it the perfect medium for the expression of enlightened truths. Diderot, for example, boasted: “French is made to instruct, enlighten, and convince; Greek, Latin, Italian and English to persuade, move and deceive. Speak Greek, Latin, or Italian to the people, but speak French to the wise.”28 German he did not even mention. This linguistic patriotism was only enhanced by the French Revolution and the ideological and military power it unleashed. Bertrand de Barère told the National Convention in January 1794 that French was “the most beautiful language of Europe, the first to have consecrated the rights of man and the citizen, and the language which is charged with the role of transmitting to the world the most sublime thoughts of liberty and the greatest political speculations.”29 Significantly, he went on, the minority languages spoken in the French Republic were ideologically suspect: “Federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; counter-revolution speaks Italian; and fanaticism speaks Basque. Let us smash these instruments of mischief and error!”30

  As the armies of the French Revolution swept across Europe, they took their Francophone imperialism with them: “Foreign languages! I believe that in future there will be only one language in Europe, that of the French republicans!” was the view of Mercier.31 Its rivals were dismissed summarily: “Italian suited to effeminate delights, German the organ of militarism and feudality, Spanish the cant of the Inquisition, English once glorious and free, now the patter of despotism and the stock exchange.”32 Not surprisingly, the imposition of the French language—and it should be remembered that no one knew at the time that French control of Europe would be of such short duration—provoked vehement reactions. Probably most influential were the fourteen Addresses to the German Nation, delivered by the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte at weekly intervals during the winter of 1807–08 in the amphitheater of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin, then under French occupation. They were given a special frisson by the knowledge that only the previous year, a Nuremberg bookseller, Johannes Palm, had been summarily shot on the direct orders of Napoleon for selling an anti-French pamphlet. Fichte said: “I know very well what I risk; I know that a bullet may kill me, like Palm; but it is not this that I fear, and for my cause I would gladly die.” The sound of French drums in the street outside, as he began his first lecture, no doubt greatly added to the sense of occasion.33 Published almost simultaneously in huge print runs, the Addresses caused a sensation and became one of the seminal documents of German nationalism in the nineteenth century.34

  At the heart of Fichte’s project to regenerate the Germans was language, for “men are formed by language far more than language is by men.”35 In this, and in much else besides, he was closely following Herder. But Fichte shared none of Herder’s cultural pluralism. The German language was unique, he believed, because only the German language had remained pure. All the others had been polluted to a greater or lesser extent by their assimilation into the Latin culture of the Roman Empire: “The Germans still speak a living language and have done so ever since it first streamed forth from nature, whereas the other Teutonic tribes speak a language that stirs only on the surface yet is dead at the root.”36 For this reason, the Germans had a special mission to redeem mankind from the abyss into which it had tumbled: “Of all modern peoples it is you in whom the seed of human perfection most decidedly lies and to whom the lead in its development is assigned. If you perish in your essentiality, then all the hopes of the entire human race for salvation from the depths of its misery perish with you.”37 Although censorship prevented him from naming names, the presence of the French occupation force in Berlin left no one in any doubt as to the identity of his target. When war had broken out in 1806, he had volunteered his services to the Prussian army as a chaplain, promising to preach to the troops with “swords and lightning bolts.”38

  Fichte’s belief in the linguistic superiority of the Germans was both nationalist and populist. “In Germany all culture has proceeded from the people [Volk],” he declared.39 Here too he was following Herder’s lead in shifting the location of cultural value in any community from the elites to the common people, who formed “the greatest, more sensual part of mankind.”40 What the educated classes paraded as evidence of their classical knowledge was nothing more than a meretricious bird of paradise, all show and no substance, fluttering around in the sky and never touching the ground. The culture of the Volk, on the other hand, was better likened to an oak, with a rough exterior but deep roots, majestic branches, magnificent foliage, and a long life. Folk art, folk dancing, and folk songs were not to be despised for their roughness but were to be treasured for their authenticity. They were the “archives of a nationality,” the “national soul” and “the living voice of the nationalities, even of humanity itself.”41 Wilhelm Grimm went even further: “Only folk poetry is perfect. God himself wrote it as he did the Ten Commandments; it was not pieced together like the mere work of man.”42

  Herder had been inspired not by direct experience of folk poetry, but by the example of the Englishman Thomas Percy, who in 1765 published three volumes titled Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our Earlier Poets (chiefly of the Lyric kind), together with some few of the later date. He had done so apologetically, stating in his preface that the “extreme simplicity” of the contents suggested that they had been “merely written for the people.” Only the importunity of his friends had eventually persuaded him to agree to publication, in the hope that the “artless graces” of the verses
would compensate for the want of “higher beauties.”43 Herder, on the other hand, was a man with a mission. Popular ballads were not “the dregs of fairy-tales, superstitions, songs, and crude speech” derided by the sophisticated. On the contrary, without the Volk and its culture, there would be “no public, no nation, no language and no poetry which is ours and lives and works in us.”44

  This populist view of culture was to prove immensely influential. As Goethe wrote: “Herder taught us to think of poetry as the common property of all mankind, not as the private possession of a few refined, cultured individuals.”45 He himself demonstrated what this could mean with, for example, his poem “Rose upon the Heath” (“Heindenröslein”) of 1771:

  There was a boy saw a little rose grow,

  A little rose on the heath.

  He saw it was so fresh and fair

  And stood still to look at it,

  And stood in sweet joy.

  Little rose, little rose, little rose red,

  Little rose on the heath.

  The boy said: I will pluck you,

  Little rose on the heath.

  The little rose said: I will pierce you,

  So you always think of me

  And remember that I will not allow it.

  Little rose, little rose, little rose red,

  Little rose on the heath.

  Nevertheless the rough boy plucked

  The little rose on the heath.

  The little rose resisted and pierced him.

  But afterwards in the pleasure

  He forgot the pain.

  Little rose, little rose, little rose red,

  Little rose on the heath.

  As his most recent biographer has observed, “Goethe could hardly have come closer to the impossible, to writing a true folk-song.”46 Herder published it in 1773, claiming it was from memory, enhancing its “folk” status by implying it had passed to him via oral transmission. The strophic structure and the repetition of the last two lines ensured that it would be set to music again and again, most famously by the eighteen-year-old Franz Schubert in 1815.

  Whether it was collecting folk songs or writing verse in the style of folk songs, populism became an integral part of romantic literature. Surprisingly precocious when it came to collecting was Russia, where as early as 1735 the court poet Vasily Trediakovsky had drawn attention to the importance of the “natural, ages-old poetry of the simple people”47 and Mikhail Chulkov had published several large collections of fairy tales and folk songs in the 1760s and 1770s.48 Russian folklore then found its way into the European mainstream through the influence it exerted on poets, especially Alexander Pushkin. In his first major work, Ruslan and Ludmila (1820), Pushkin drew on traditional linguistic sources ranging from church Slavic to vernacular Russian to create the perfect medium of his fantastic tale of the rescue of the Kievan princess Lyudmila from the evil dwarf-magician Chernomor.49

  In Germany, Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s collection The Boy’s Magic Horn [Des Knaben Wunderhorn], published between 1805 and 1808, quickly became a “cult book” for romantics.50 In a postscript the editors told their readers that the aim of their collection had been to conjure up “the fresh morning air of old-German times.” They also injected a political note by observing that the rage for novelty in France had led to the virtual extinction of folk songs even before the Revolution—and perhaps had even made that Revolution possible.51 That Achim von Arnim and Brentano engaged in what might be called “creative editing,” altering meter and spelling and even rewriting, did not detract from its colossal and enduring impact. Over the next century or so, hundreds of musical settings of its two-hundred-odd poems were composed by, among others, Brahms, Britten, Bruch, Eisler, Ives, Gounod, Humperdinck, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Reger, Reichardt, Schoenberg, Schreker, Schumann, (Richard) Strauss, Weber, Webern, and Zemlinsky, to mention only the more celebrated.52

  At least one of these demonstrated that populism could also be popular. This was Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), who steeped himself in German folk songs, singing them to his own guitar accompaniment.53 The most successful result was his romantic opera Der Freischütz, first performed at the new Playhouse (Schauspielhaus) at Berlin in 1821. In one number after another, Weber showed how to make art seem artless. Explaining his success, an anonymous contributor to a Berlin musical periodical wrote: “It was the innermost emotions (Gemüth) of the folk that created folk songs and so the folk sees them as its children and loves them with its whole heart.”54 In reality, none of the melodies with which the work abounds were taken from the Volk, but such was his command of the idiom that Weber managed to make them seem so. He succeeded so well, indeed, that the premiere was one of the greatest operatic triumphs of the nineteenth century and the work’s success was enduring. Thirty different productions had been staged by the end of 1822, while in London by 1824 three different productions were running simultaneously.55 Its populist appeal was very well captured by Richard Wagner in a review he wrote for a Leipzig newspaper of a performance in Paris in 1841:

  Oh, my magnificent German fatherland, how can I help loving you, how can I help adoring you, even if only because it was on your soil that Der Freischütz was written! How can I help loving the German people, the people that loves Der Freischütz, that even today still believes in the wonder of the most naive fairy-tale, that even today, when it has reached its maturity, continues to experience that sweet, mysterious trembling which made its heart throb when it was young! Oh, how wonderful is German dreaming, and its rapture over visions of forests, of the evening, of the stars, of the moon, of the clock on the village church striking seven! Happy is the man who can understand you, who can believe, feel, dream and share your rapture with you! How happy I am to be German!56

  Wagner went on to tell his readers that when the orchestra played the dance music at the end of scene 1, he had burst into tears as he felt his heart being pierced “like a thrust from a voluptuous dagger.” As the peasants danced their way into the inn to the strains of a folksy-sounding but in fact cunningly scored Walzer, they left the hero—and Wagner—alone with his problems.

  In the English-speaking world, the single most influential exercise in populism was probably the preface written by Wordsworth for the Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems he published together with Coleridge in 1798. It was their intention, announced Wordsworth, “to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men.” Subject matter from “humble and rustic life” had been chosen, he went on, “because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.” As the common people were “less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.”57 However, whether the two most celebrated poems of the collection, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” and Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” were composed using “language really used by men” may be doubted.

  THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE

  Much more authentic-sounding was the contemporary poetry of Robert Burns (1759–96), written in language that was unmistakably Scottish but comprehensible to the English. “Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn” is a good example, not least because it shows that a people has a history as well as a language:

  Scots, wha hé wi’ Wallace bled,

  Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

  Welcome té yer gory bed,

  Or té Victorie!

  Now’s the day, and now’s the hour:

  See the front o’ battle lour,

  See approach proud Edward’s power—

  Chains and Slaverie!

  Wha will be a traitor knave?

  Wha will fill a coward’s grave?

  Wha sé base as be a slave?

  Let
him turn and flee!

  Wha, for Scotland’s king and law,

  Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,

  Freeman stand, or Freeman fa’,

  Let him on wi’ me!

  By Oppression’s woes and pains!

  By your sons in servile chains!

  We will drain our dearest veins,

  But they shall be free!

  Lay the proud usurpers low!

  Tyrants fall in every foe!

  Liberty’s in every blow!—

  Let us do or dee!

  Better known by its opening lines—“Scots, wha hé”—the poem became the unofficial national anthem of Scotland when sung to the traditional tune “Hey Tuttie Tattie.” In August 1793 Burns wrote to his friend George Thomson that the thought that “Hey Tuttie Tattie” had been played at Bannockburn “warmed me to a pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of Liberty & Independence, which I threw into a kind of Scots Ode, fitted to the Air that one might suppose to be the gallant ROYAL SCOT’S address to his heroic followers on that eventful morning.”58 Although later displaced by the more melodious “Scotland the Brave” and more recently still by the rugby song “Flower of Scotland,” it retains quasi-official status by being the favored anthem of the Scottish National Party. In these six stanzas several of the main themes of romantic nationalism appear: “the other” in the shape of the invading English (“proud Edward’s power”); the nation as suffering martyr (“By Oppression’s woes and pains!”); the enemy within (“Wha will be a traitor knave?”); liberation (“Liberty’s in every blow!”); nihilism (“Let us do or dee!”); and history (“Scots, wha hé wi’ Wallace bled, / Scots, wham Bruce has aften led”). These historical references are to Sir William Wallace, executed by the English in 1305 and on whose life the film Braveheart was loosely—very loosely—based, and Robert the Bruce, who led the Scots to victory at Bannockburn in 1314 and thus secured Scottish independence.