The Romantic Revolution Read online

  What proved to be revolutionary was the rejection not of academies, or even rules, but of the whole classical aesthetic based on the imitation of la belle nature. As Rousseau demonstrated in La Nouvelle Héloïse and The Confessions, the truly radical departure was to move from a mimetic aesthetic centered on the work to an expressive aesthetic that put the creator at the center: “The true object of my confessions is to reveal my inner thoughts exactly in all the situations of my life. It is the history of my soul that I have promised to recount, and to write it faithfully I have need of no other memories; it is enough if I enter again into my inner self, as I have done till now.”33 This was the essence of the romantic revolution: from now on artistic creativity was to be from the inside out. In Hegel’s pithy formulation, romanticism was “absolute inwardness.” Explaining this insight, Hegel observed that romanticism had “dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself.”34 No longer does the artist carry around a mirror, to hold up to nature. A better metaphor for the creative process is the lamp, which shines from within.35

  NATURE AND NATURE’S LAWS

  The two most quoted lines of poetry about a natural scientist were written by Alexander Pope in 1730:

  Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night,

  God said “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

  They deftly summed up the Enlightenment’s view of Newton’s greatest achievement among many. By finally destroying the Greek assumption that the celestial and terrestrial worlds are fundamentally different and by demonstrating that both operate according to the same regular, immutable laws of motion, he had opened the way for the mechanization of heaven and earth. God might still have a place in a post-Newtonian universe, but only as the original creator of a mechanism that then ran according to its own laws. In Voltaire’s opinion: “Newton is the greatest man who has ever lived, the very greatest, the giants of antiquity are beside him children playing marbles.”36 It mattered not that Newton was a devout Christian who wrote extensively on theology and spent a good deal of time trying to unravel the secrets of the Book of Revelation. In the eyes of the philosophes, he had delivered the knockout blow to revealed religion. He had completed the project begun by another English sage, Francis Bacon. It was now clear that the only true form of knowledge is scientific knowledge, that is to say knowledge established by that combination of empiricism and mathematics that is the scientific method, and whatever could not be verified in this way is not knowledge at all.37 Moreover, science was also opening the way for boundless improvement through the control of nature. As Benjamin Franklin wrote to Joseph Priestley: “The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter.”38

  But Rousseau was not the only one to find that the light projected by the Enlightenment illuminated more than it warmed and was bright but not very penetrating. Voltaire himself is reported to have commented: “I am like a mountain stream: I run fast and bright but not very deep.”39 As the eighteenth century wore on, a growing number of intellectuals reacted against the elevation of reason to sole eminence. The fundamental charge that the scientific method could explain everything but understand nothing was advanced in many different ways. A universe in which God had been demoted to the role of primal clock maker seemed to be a chilly place. Johann Heinrich Merck, friend of Goethe and member of the “Storm and Stress” [Sturm und Drang] group, wrote:

  Now we have got the freedom of believing in public nothing but what can be rationally demonstrated. They have deprived religion of all its sensuous elements, that is, of all its relish. They have carved it up into its parts and reduced it to a skeleton without colour and light … and now it’s put in a jar and nobody wants to taste it.40

  Hamann was more forthright: “God is a poet, not a mathematician.… What is this much lauded reason with its universalist infallibility, certainty, and over-weening claims, but an ens rationis [object of thought], a stuffed dummy … endowed with divine attributes?”41 Heinrich von Kleist sneered that all Newton saw in a girl’s heart was its cubic capacity and in her breast just a curved line.42 August Wilhelm Schlegel thought that the limitations of the Enlightenment were best summed up in the question of the mathematician: “What can a poem prove?”43 Goethe spoke to God through Mephistopheles in the Prologue to Faust, which takes place in Heaven:

  The little earth-god still persists in his old ways,

  Ridiculous as ever, as in his first days.

  He’d have improved if you’d not given

  Him a mere glimmer of the light of heaven;

  He calls it Reason, and it only has increased

  His power to be beastlier than a beast.44

  The Germans were not of course alone in finding rationalism inadequate. The English romantic poets expressed their distaste just as eloquently. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads of 1800, William Wordsworth wrote: “The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion.” William Blake was more concise: Among the epigrams he attached to his engraving of the classical sculpture group Laocoön was: “Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death.”45

  He offered a lengthier denunciation in his narrative poem Milton:

  The negation is the Spectre, the reasoning power in man:

  This is a false body, an incrustation over my immortal

  Spirit, a selfhood which must be put off and annihilated away

  To cleanse the face of my spirit by self-examination

  To bathe in the waters of life, to wash off the not human

  I come in self-annihilation and the grandeur of inspiration

  To cast off rational demonstration by faith in the Saviour

  To cast off the rotten rags of memory by inspiration

  To cast off Bacon, Locke, and Newton from Albion’s covering,

  To take off his filthy garments and clothe him with imagination.

  Perhaps the most considered criticism of mechanistic natural science came from Coleridge in two letters to his friend Thomas Poole. In 1797 he wrote: “I have known some who have been rationally educated.… They were marked by a microscopic acuteness, but when they looked at great things, all became blank and they saw nothing.”46 Four years later he developed this view in a justly celebrated passage that deserves to be quoted in full:

  The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind, and therefore to you, that I believe the souls of five hundred Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton. But if it please the Almighty to grant me health, hope, and a steady mind …, before my thirtieth year I will thoroughly understand the whole of Newton’s works. At present I must content myself with endeavouring to make myself entire master of his easier work, that on Optics. I am exceedingly delighted with the beauty and neatness of his experiments, and with the accuracy of his immediate deductions from them; but the opinions founded on these deductions, and indeed his whole theory is, I am persuaded, so exceedingly superficial as without impropriety to be deemed false. Newton was a mere materialist. Mind, in his system, is always passive, a lazy Looker-on on an external world.47

  For Coleridge, Blake, and many more romantics, the archvillain was not, however, Newton but John Locke, for it was his sensationalist psychology that had expelled innate ideas and had thus become “proposition one of the whole philosophy of the Enlightenment.”48 At birth, Locke maintained, the human mind was “white paper, void of all characters, without
any ideas.” It acquired knowledge simply and solely through experience—“in that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.” This rejection of original sin meant a move from a theocentric to an anthropocentric view of life, from God to man. It also opened up boundless possibilities for social engineering. If man was the product of his environment acting on his sensations, then to change the nature of man one only had to change his environment. Coleridge found this epistemology completely unacceptable: The human mind was not passive—“a lazy Looker-on on an external world”—but active and creative. He prefaced his remarks on Newton in the letter to Poole quoted earlier with the observation “My opinion is this—that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation.” His friend Wordsworth, on the other hand, chose to reinvent Newton as a proto-romantic “voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone.” Indeed, as Richard Holmes has demonstrated, the natural sciences could be an inspiration to the romantics when approached in a suitably wondering frame of mind.49

  Coleridge also advanced another popular critique of empirical science when he referred to Locke as a “Little-ist.” By that he meant that the critical methodology favored by rationalist thinkers had dismantled the universe until it lay around them in a meaningless heap of little bits and pieces. As he told Poole: “They contemplate nothing but parts and all parts are necessarily little—and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things.”50 For his part, he explained, he had never lost the habit acquired in childhood through the reading of fairy stories of seeking knowledge through the imagination. In this way, “my mind has been habituated to the Vast & I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief.” He conceded that this ran the risk of promoting superstition but claimed it was greatly preferable to the alternative: “Are not the Experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favour?”

  Against the “the cold and lifeless Spitzbergen of armchair reason” (Novalis),51 the romantics opposed feeling. Again and again they stressed the need to escape from the arid factual world of appearances and enter the interior realm of the self. Caspar David Friedrich warned: “Beware of the superficial knowledge of cold facts, beware of sinful ratiocination, for it kills the heart and when heart and mind have died in a man, there art cannot dwell.”52 Blake’s version of the same thought was: “Mental Things alone are Real, what is call’d Corporeal Nobody knows of its Dwelling place; it is Fallacy and its Existence an Imposture.”53 Goethe’s eponymous hero in his bestselling novel The Sufferings of Young Werther responded to the “narrow bounds which confine man’s powers of action and investigation” by exclaiming: “I return into myself, and find a world!”54 What he found there was a tropical zone far more tempestuous than the icy cliffs of Spitzbergen. Albert, his decent but dull rival for the affections of Lotte, observes primly: “A person who is carried away by his passions loses all power of deliberation and is as good as drunk or mad.” Werther replies:

  Oh, you rationalists! Passion! Drunkenness! Madness! You stand there so calm, so unsympathetic, you moral men! chide the drinker, abhor the irrational, walk past like priests, and like the Pharisee thank God that he has not made you like one of these. I have been drunk more than once, my passions were never far from madness, and I repent of neither: for in my own measure I have learned to understand how it is that all extraordinary beings, who have accomplished something great, something seemingly impossible, have always and necessarily been defamed as drunk and mad.55

  Shelley made the same point more soberly when he wrote: “Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with the consciousness or will.”56

  Underlying these attacks on reason, logic, atomism, materialism, and the rest was a view of nature sharply opposed to that ascribed to Newton. Nothing roused the romantics to greater indignation than the notion that nature was inert matter, to be understood by dissection, experiment, and analysis. On the contrary, they proclaimed, all nature constituted a single living organism, a “Universal Nature or World Soul.” This last concept was central to the philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), succinctly summarized by the chiasm “Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature.” His own study of physics, medicine, and mathematics convinced him that matter consists of an equilibrium of active forces standing in polar opposition to one another, manifesting the “holy ever-creative, original energy of the World, which generates and busily evolves things out of itself.”57 The centrality assigned to aesthetic activity in his “transcendental idealism” made him immensely influential—and popular—with romantic artists, although not all of them imbibed that influence at first hand, preferring the more accessible versions provided by his many admirers. One such was Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810), whose knowledge of Schelling was probably mediated by the Norwegian scientist and poet Henrik Steffens, who wrote about the “inner life” of the earth.58 Runge was a painter of great intensity and originality who could also express himself eloquently in writing, as in the following letter to his brother Daniel of 1802:

  When above me the sky swarms with countless stars, the wind blusters through the wide space, the wave breaks roaring in the wide night, over the forest the atmosphere reddens, and the sun lights up the world; the valley steams and I throw myself on the grass sparkling with dewdrops. Every leaf and every blade of grass swarms with life, the earth is alive and stirs beneath me, everything rings in one chord, then the soul rejoices and flies in the immeasurable space around me. There is no up and down any more, no time, no beginning and no end. I hear and feel the living breath of God, who holds and carries the world, in whom everything lives and works; here is the highest that we feel—God.59

  In their different ways, both Turner and Caspar David Friedrich also “dematerialised nature” (Robert Rosenblum) to reveal its internal powers and mysteries.60 So nature was no longer Newton’s laboratory, but “Christ’s Bible,” as Friedrich put it.61 Like so many other romantics, Friedrich was a Christian pantheist. Commenting on his painting Swans in the Reeds, he wrote: “The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand; and here I have portrayed it in the reed.”62 Wordsworth returned to this theme again and again, as in the following lines from The Excursion:

  A Herdsman on the lonely mountain-tops,

  Such intercourse was his, and in this sort

  Was his existence oftentimes possessed.

  Oh then how beautiful, how bright, appeared

  The written promise! Early had he learned

  To reverence the volume that displays

  The mystery, the life which cannot die;

  But in the mountains did he feel his faith.

  All things, responsive to the writing, there

  Breathed immortality, revolving life,

  And greatness still revolving; infinite:

  There littleness was not; the least of things

  Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped

  Her prospects, nor did he believe,—he saw,

  What wonder if his being thus became

  Sublime and comprehensive!63

  THE CULT OF GENIUS

  An important direct influence on Runge was Ludwig Tieck’s novel Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings and its hero’s cri de cœur: “Not these trees, not these mountains do I wish to copy, but my soul, my mood, which governs me just at this moment.”64 The inner self was everything: If the light did not shine brightly from within, nothing worthwhile could be achieved. As another great painter of nature, Caspar David Friedrich, put it: “The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also omit to paint that which he sees before him. Otherwise his pictures will re
semble those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or even the dead.”65 And he practiced what he preached: In 1816 he recorded: “For some time I have been idle and felt myself incapable of doing anything. Nothing would flow from inside; the spring had run dry, I was empty; nothing spoke to me from the outside, I was apathetic, and so I concluded that the best thing to do was to do nothing. What is the point of working if it doesn’t lead to anything?”66 A dedicated hiker through the Saxon Riesengebirge, Friedrich spent a great deal of time out in the open air, but when he returned to the studio he excluded the outside world as much as possible. Contemporary pictures of him at work in his studio on the banks of the Elbe at Dresden show the lower half of the window shuttered and only the most essential tools present.67 His fellow painter Wilhelm von Kügelgen described it as follows: “Friedrich’s studio was so absolutely bare.… It held nothing but the easel, a chair and a table, above which hung the room’s only ornament, a T-square, although no one could understand how it came to be so honoured. Even the justifiable paintbox, phials of oil and paint rags were banished to the next room, for Friedrich was of the opinion that all external objects disturb the pictured world within.”68 Wordsworth made just the same point in “The Inner Vision”:

  If Thought and Love desert us, from that day

  Let us break off all commerce with the Muse:

  With Thought and Love companions of our way—

  Whate’er the senses take or may refuse,—

  The Mind’s internal heaven shall shed her dews