The Romantic Revolution Read online

  The public provided not just a new source of income but also a new source of legitimacy. As the various media and institutions of the public sphere—newspapers, periodicals, coffeehouses, art exhibitions, concerts, literary societies, reading clubs, and the like—expanded, so did the awareness of a new cultural (and political) arbitrator. For this was very much a perceived change. In 1782 Louis Sébastien Mercier wrote in his periodical Tableau de Paris:

  During the past thirty years a great and significant revolution has occurred in the way we think. Today public opinion enjoys a power in Europe which is preponderant and irresistible.… It is men of letters who deserve the credit, for in the recent past it is they who have formed public opinion in a number of very important crises. Thanks to their efforts, public opinion has exercised a decisive influence on the course of events. And it also seems that they are creating a national spirit.107

  Unfortunately, the anonymous public could be just as demanding as any prince or prelate. Members of the public knew what they liked. And just like any Medici or Habsburg, when they paid the piper they expected to call the tune. For the artist, the trick was to take their money and adulation without having to compromise creative freedom. Not easy to do at the best of times, this balancing act became progressively more difficult as the public broadened in numbers without deepening in appreciation. A Haydn symphony was one thing, Beethoven’s Ninth was quite another. What the public wanted was easy listening: plenty of variety, good tunes, regular rhythms, not too long, and all preferably in easy keys so that it could be played at home on the piano that was increasingly becoming a feature of middle-class parlors.108 Ironically, this kind of “cultural retardation,” which affected all the other arts, too, came when technological changes such as lithography, the steam-driven printing press, and mass production that brought down prices were bringing more varied, higher-quality, but cheaper artifacts to market.109

  The way out of this dilemma, to avoid jumping from the frying pan of aristocratic tyranny into the fire of public vulgarity, was to liberate art from both the scum and the dregs of society and to place it on an altar in unsullied eminence (mixing the metaphor once more). So artists of all genres embraced with enthusiasm the sacralization preached by the aestheticians. From the rich range of examples available, the following three recommend themselves by their eloquence and relative brevity. First, Novalis:

  Whoever feels unhappy in this world, whoever fails to find what he seeks—then let him enter the world of books, art and nature, this eternal domain which is both ancient and modern simultaneously, and let him live there in this secret church of a better world. There he will surely find a lover and a friend, a fatherland and a God.110

  Second, Keats with the opening lines of Endymion:

  A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

  Its loveliness increases; it will never

  Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

  A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

  Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

  And, finally, Goethe:

  True poetry identifies itself as such by knowing how to liberate us from the earthly burdens that oppress us, by being a secular gospel, by creating inner cheerfulness and outward contentment. Like a hot-air balloon, it raises us into the higher regions and gives us a bird’s-eye view of the confused labyrinths of the world.111

  Goethe had parted company with revealed religion at a very early age, but it was not only unbelievers who were attracted by sacralized art. Novalis was a devout Christian, as was Franz Liszt, who even entered minor orders and was known as the “Abbé Liszt.” They did not see devotion to art as a substitute for faith, rather as part and parcel of the same exercise. As Liszt put it: “One should always and only speak of divine art; and if people are taught from their early years onwards that God has given them reason, free will and conscience, one should always add: and Art—for Art is the truly divine!”112

  Of all the creative artists, the musicians found this easiest, for their medium speaks directly to the psyche without any mediating word or image. This was put particularly well by Leonard Willoughby: “The romanticists [sic] hoped to reach ultimate reality through music because, through the quasi-identity of its form and content, it seemed to derive from the eternal primordial chaos without having passed first through the ordering faculty of the human mind. It was precisely this Dionysiac element in music which the romanticists loved and stressed.”113 It did not mean that they were obliged to retreat to some remote ivory tower, removed from the grubby tastes of the general public. It was rather that sacralization provided a self-protective detachment from the worst excesses of the marketplace.

  When Friedrich Schiller escaped from what he saw as the tyrannical regime of the Duke of Württemberg, he made a resounding declaration of independence:

  I write as a citizen of the world who serves no prince. From now on all my ties are dissolved. The public is now everything to me, my preoccupation, my sovereign and my friend. Henceforth I belong to it alone. I wish to place myself before this tribunal and no other. It is the only thing I fear and respect. A feeling of greatness comes over me with the idea that the only fetter I wear is the verdict of the world—and that the only throne I shall appeal to is the human soul.114

  That was in 1784. A decade later he had entered the service of the Duke of Saxony-Weimar, had turned decisively against his former “sovereign and friend,” and was developing a theory of sacralized aesthetics that was as elitist as could be. Beethoven, who was a great admirer of Schiller, shared his disdain, criticizing Rossini for giving the public what they wanted and exclaiming to Hummel, “It is said vox populi, vox dei—I never believed it.”115 His own disciple Berlioz agreed: “The stultification of the majority of the public, its lack of understanding in matters of imagination and the heart, its love of brilliant platitudes, the vulgarity of all its melodic and rhythmic instincts, have of necessity driven the performers along the road they now follow.”116 Now that it was the artist who mattered most, rather than what he created, the response of the audience was of no consequence. In his celebrated review of Johann Georg Sulzer’s classical aesthetic, first published in 1772, Goethe concluded: “The only thing that matters is the artist, that he should experience the joys of life only in his art and that he should live immersed in his medium with all his emotions and powers. Who cares about the gawping public and whether, once it has done its gawping, it can or cannot give an account of why it has gawped?”117

  This was an attitude shared by the English romantic poets, among whom Tom Moore complained about the “lowering of standards that must necessarily arise from the extending of the circle of judges.” Keats declared: “I have not the slightest feel of humility towards the Public,” and Shelley advised: “Accept no counsel from the simple-minded; time reverses the judgement of the foolish crowd.” Wordsworth castigated anyone “who can believe that there is anything of divine infallibility in the clamour of that small though loud portion of the community, ever governed by factitious influence, which, under the name of the public, passes itself upon the unthinking, for the people.”118

  In a word, the public was philistine. It was no coincidence that it was during this period that “philistine” acquired its modern meaning as “an uneducated or unenlightened person; one perceived to be indifferent or hostile to art or culture, or whose interests and tastes are commonplace or material; a person who is not a connoisseur,” defined by The Oxford English Dictionary. In this sense it was the invention of German students, who took it from the funeral oration delivered at Jena in 1668 following the death of one of their number at the hands of a local burgher. The preacher’s text was taken from the Old Testament: “The Philistines be upon thee, Samson” (Judges 16:9). Henceforth, the students identified themselves with Samson and the townspeople as the philistines. By c. 1800 the confrontation had expanded from town versus gown to intellectuals versus the rest of society, especially middle-class society.

 
Long before Mr. Gradgrind made his appearance in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times in 1854, his stereotype was established as the European intelligentsia’s bête noire. They chose to believe that everyone engaged in mundane business was motivated solely by considerations of utility while they themselves were inspired solely by devotion to art. In Ludwig Tieck’s novel Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings of 1798, the hero angrily rejects the observations made by a craftsman and a businessman that the arts are useless and artists silly idiots:

  And what do you mean by utility? Must absolutely everything come down to just eating, drinking and clothing? … I say it once again: everything that is truly elevated cannot and must not be judged by its utility; having to be useful is completely alien to art’s divine nature and to insist that it be so is to strip what should be sublime of its nobility and to debase it to the level of the basic needs of humanity. Of course man needs lots of different things, but his spirit must not be degraded to become the servant of his body—the servant of his servant in other words. Like any good head of a household, he must attend to material needs, but must not allow this concern to be his be-all and end-all. Art is the guarantee of our immortality.119

  Tieck was twenty-five years old when his book was published. Although romantic contempt for the mundane world of the money-grubbing philistines was not confined to angry young men and women, it was certainly expressed by them with special vehemence. A good example was provided by Clemens Brentano’s “Oration Against the Philistines,” delivered at Jena at the end of 1799 when he was twenty-one. The little Thuringian university town had become the center of German romanticism, for at the house of August Wilhelm Schlegel (age thirty-two) and his wife, Caroline (thirty-six), there gathered his brother Friedrich (twenty-seven), Fichte (thirty-seven), Schelling (twenty-four), Tieck, and Brentano. Another frequent visitor was the Saxon mining official Friedrich von Hardenberg (twenty-seven), better known as the poet Novalis. Brentano’s essential charge against the philistines was that they were boring and limited, looking for nothing in their lives beyond domesticity, security, peace, and order—“a philistine can never wish to become a tight-rope walker,” was his withering comment.120 This sort of attitude was not confined to the Germans. Théophile Gautier wrote in his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835): “Only what is useless is truly beautiful; everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and the needs of men are ignoble and disgusting, his nature being what it is, inferior and infirm.”121

  A more philosophical answer to the Gradgrinds of late-eighteenth-century Germany (and there were plenty of them about) was provided by Friedrich Schiller. Art was not a peripheral activity, he argued, but absolutely central to human existence: “Human beings only play when they are in the full sense of the word human and they are only fully human when they play.”122 Now that the French Revolution had shown the bankruptcy of political solutions by inflicting state terror, war, and imperialist conquest, the only way forward lay through aesthetics: “If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice, he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to freedom.”123 His friend Goethe mercilessly satirized the philistine in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96) in the person of Wilhelm’s brother-in-law Werner, who issues the following advice: “Here is my joyous credo: conduct your business, acquire money, enjoy yourself with your family, and don’t bother about anybody else unless you can use them to your advantage.”124 But Wilhelm wants to be an actor and is not listening. Goethe returned to the theme in Part One of Faust, through Wagner, Faust’s pedantic secretary, who believes in the utility of factual knowledge:

  Oh dear, what can one do,

  Sitting day after day among one’s books!

  The world’s so distant, and one never looks

  Even through a spyglass at it; so how can

  One learn to bring about the betterment of man?

  To which Faust replies:

  Give up pursuing eloquence, unless

  You can speak as you feel! One’s very heart

  Must pour it out, with primal power address

  One’s hearers and compel them with an art

  Deeper than words.

  But what can blend all hearts into a whole?

  Only the language of the soul.125

  Goethe had begun to write Faust in the 1770s. By the time the first part was published in 1808, he was feeling increasingly out of step with the younger generation of German writers. In the course of the 1780s he had turned away from his “Storm and Stress” days, moving to an aesthetic that was more classical than romantic. As he grew older, so did his distaste for the latter intensify. In a famous conversation with his friend Eckermann in 1829, he went so far as to apostrophize classicism as “health” and romanticism as “disease.”126 Shortly after Goethe died three years later, Part Two of Faust was published. The ending might suggest that Faust had succumbed to the utilitarian ethos of the philistines. For what prompts him to say, “Beautiful moment, do not pass away!” and thus to lose his wager with Mephistopheles, is the prospect of a successful land reclamation scheme.127 Yet this concern for the physical world is accompanied by that sense of individual struggle with which Faust (and Goethe, too, for the work is the most important single part of his “great confession”) began his quest. Immediately prior to his expression of satisfaction, Faust had proclaimed:

  Yes! To this vision I am wedded still,

  And this as wisdom’s final word I teach:

  Only that man earns freedom, merits life,

  Who must reconquer both in constant daily strife.

  In such a place, by danger still surrounded,

  Youth, manhood, age, their brave new world have founded.

  I long to see that multitude and stand

  With a free people on free land!

  Germans were especially sensitive to philistinism because there were no metropolitan centers anywhere in Germans peaking Europe. Even Vienna (with a population of about 225,000 in 1800) and Berlin (175,000) were dwarfed by London and Paris, which were four or five times larger. Preindustrial Germany was a land of small towns and small-town attitudes.128 For this paradoxical reason, it proved to be in the van of romantic developments. In France it was not until the 1830s that the word art came into general use to denote art per se. Previously, it had been used to denote a specific form and was accompanied by a descriptive adjective, as in “art musical” or “beaux-arts.” This was partly a reaction to the “industrialised literature” (the title of an article by Sainte-Beuve) that appeared to be debasing aesthetic standards. Particular exception was taken to the serialized novels that became enormously popular during the 1830s and the new emphasis on productivity. When criticized for his overelaborate style, Charles Nodier rejoindered that an eight-syllable word made up a line—and for each line he was paid a franc.129

  Against this, the romantics opposed the notion of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake.” There is some dispute as to who coined the phrase first, but the most likely candidate seems to have been Henry Crabb Robinson, an English nonconformist who spent many years in Germany consorting with leading intellectuals, including Goethe, Schiller, and the Schlegels. Early in 1804 he was visited at Weimar by Benjamin Constant, who recorded in his Journal intime on February 10: “I have a conversation with Robinson, a pupil of Schelling. His work on Kant’s Aesthetics contains some very energetic ideas. Art for art’s sake, without any purpose, for every kind of purpose distorts [dénature] art.”130 In other words, this was a German idea, turned into a slogan by an Englishman and recorded by a Frenchman.

  Perhaps because l’art pour l’art sounds so much more mellifluous than “art for art’s sake” or Kunst um der Kunst Willen, it turned out to have a special resonance in France. Victor Cousin used the phrase in a course of lectures delivered in 1818 shortly after a visit to Germany. Eventually he published them in book form as On the True, the Beautifu
l and the Good (1836), stating: “Art can no more serve religion or morality than what is pleasing or useful.… Religion must be for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake and art for art’s sake.… Let us absorb this idea, that art itself is a kind of religion. God manifests himself to us through the idea of the true, the good and the beautiful.”131 Following the July Revolution of 1830, Gautier emphatically rejected any idea that art should have a political role: “It is neither red nor white nor even tricolour; it is nothing and is only aware of revolutions when the bullets break the windows.” A poem served nothing but beauty, he added—how could it be otherwise, for “in general as soon as something becomes useful, it ceases to be beautiful.”132 As we shall see in chapter 3, not all romantics—and especially not French romantics—agreed that romanticism had no political complexion.

  This kind of aestheticism had a special appeal to musicians and those who wrote about music. Stendhal (the nom de plume of Henri Beyle) was too fond of irony to be included among the romantics, but he shared many of their attitudes. In his Life of Rossini (1823), he wrote: “Society itself, or at least nineteen parts out of twenty of that society, including everything that is vulgar and bourgeois, turns and turns again about one axis: vanity.” It was just the sort of cultural environment, he observed, in which a lightweight and meretricious talent such as Rossini could flourish: “Light, lively, amusing, never wearisome, but seldom exalted—Rossini would appear to have been brought into this world for the express purpose of conjuring up visions of ecstatic delight in the commonplace soul of the Average Man.” In particular, Rossini’s music appealed to “the philistine section of the audience … [which] demands primarily the ornamentation which it has grown to expect.” He concluded the book with the observation that Paris was not just the center of European civilization, but also the capital of philistinism: “If you promise to keep a secret, I might whisper in your ear that Rossini’s style is the musical embodiment, not so much of France as of Paris: it is not really merry, but it is supremely vain and excitable; it is never passionate, but always witty; and if it is never boring, it is very, very rarely sublime.”133