Romanticism

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ROMANTICISM

"Romanticism" and "romantic" are protean words, the despair of a rigorous semanticist. They designate a generally accepted period, especially in literature and the arts, of Western cultural history, roughly from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. They embrace a cluster or syndrome of ideas about the true, the good, the beautiful, philosophical ideas both in the popular and in the technical sense, ideas endlessly debated in the last few centuries. Although the behavioral scientists groping to establish a rigorous classification of human personality generally eschew the word, romantic remains in common use to describe a temperament or personality often, perhaps usually, held to be a constitutional element of an individual and at least in part independent of cultural fashion. In all these senses "romanticism" and "romantic" cover a multitude of particulars that in a given combination can appear very different, if not mutually incompatible. Hence so good a historian of ideas as Arthur Lovejoy urges the use of the plural, romanticisms, and can write of the "Chinese origins of a romanticism"; and W. T. Jones insists that romanticism can only be understood as a very complex syndrome of "biases" in the direction of what he calls the dynamic, the disordered, the continuous, the soft-focused, the inner, the this-worldly.

The Romantic Temperament

Sensitive, emotional, preferring color to form, the exotic to the familiar, eager for novelty, for adventure, above all for the vicarious adventure of fantasy, reveling in disorder and uncertainty, insistent on the uniqueness of the individual to the point of making a virtue of eccentricity, the typical Romantic will hold that he cannot be typical, for the very concept of "typical" suggests the work of the pigeonholing intellect he scorns. Though his contempt for this world of reason and commonsense calculation may push him toward otherworldliness, the Romantic is too much a man of words and sensations to make a good mystic. He may admire the mystic, especially the exotic mystic from the East, but he himself is a good Westerner. In fact, the difficulties of reconciling the often contradictory particulars of romanticism in respectable generalization come out in any attempt to isolate a romantic personality. William Blake has most of the marks of the Romantic, from the positive one of extreme transcendental yearning to the almost universal romantic negative one of contempt for the "meddling intellect"; yet in his quite otherworldly drawings his symbolic, mystical figures are delineated with a draftsmanship of classical solidity and of firm this-worldliness. There is nothing fuzzy, nothing Turner-like, in Blake's art. William James has the full romantic love for the struggling, the unestablished, the untried; but he cannot be accused of what he himself called "tender-mindedness," of idealistic distrust of the instrument of thought. Friedrich Nietzsche, who used "romantic" as a term of reproach, who said of Richard Wagner's music that it sweats, and called Mme. de Staël "that prolific ink-yielding cow," shared all the romantic hatreds for the shopkeeper's world of grubbing common sense and above all had the Romantic's desire for etwas mehr, the something more of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "desire of the moth for the star."

However difficult the romantic personality may be to isolate in analysis, it can be recognized all through Western cultural history, and indeed in the active life of enterprise and politics. Euripides and Catullus were surely Romantics. The Odi et amo (I hate and I love) of Catullus is a classic assertion of romantic ambivalence; the rumoresque senum severiorum/omnes unius aestimemus assis (Let us regard all the gossip of censorious old men as not worth one penny) is a fine assertion of one of the minor marks of romanticism, contempt for the Philistine decencies of the old in spirit. François Villon and François Rabelais were Romantics, even though they were Frenchmen who, as Frenchmen, so nineteenth-century English and German romanticists thought, should have been incapable of transcending the petty ways of mesure and la raison raisonnante. In our own day, the romantic temperament crops up everywhere—in artists and poets of course, but also in philosophers. Henri Bergson was a Romantic. But so too, it may be argued, was A. N. Whitehead; and there are scientists not untouched by the desire of the moth for the star. In active life, Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte were Romantics; Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck were classicists.

There are then, in our Western civilization, presumably always born romanticists and born classicists—or born Dionysians and born Apollonians, to use an expressive dualism especially popular with the Germans from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing through Nietzsche to Oswald Spengler. (The Germans usually classify themselves as the great Dionysian force in the West.) We can but guess at the distribution of these two types in a general population. Probably the well-defined or extreme temperaments are limited in numbers always; most human beings can adapt to the fashion of their age. In one age, say Vergilian and Horatian Rome, or the France of Louis XIV, the Apollonian is dominant, the Dionysian subdued, even silent. Sometimes in Apollonian ages, however, the Dionysian is the rebel, the man out of tune with his times; Giambattista Vico, perhaps, should be so listed in the Apollonian early eighteenth century. In another age, and notably in the Romantic Age here considered, the Dionysian is dominant and the Apollonian repressed, sometimes tempted, as was the quite unecstatic J. S. Mill, to romantic depths of understanding.

Romanticism and the Enlightenment

One type can be dominant, but not in sole and exclusive possession. To the cultural historian, the early and mid-eighteenth century and the early nineteenth can stand for two great antithetical styles or fashions: the first, classical or enlightened; the second, romantic. The years from about 1770 to the first decade of the nineteenth century are obviously years of transition. In a graph, the rising lines of Romanticism cross the descending lines of classicism somewhere in the 1770s in Germany (with the heyday of "Sturm und Drang"), 1798 in England (with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads ), and 1820 in France (with the publication of Méditations by Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat de Lamartine). But even after the triumph of Romanticism as a cultural fashion, individuals and groups continued to display the tastes and attitudes associated with the classicism and rationalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment J. S. Mill tells us in his autobiography that he was influenced by the lyricism and even the transcendentalism of the Lake poets, notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge; but the influence seems not to have weaned him away from the fundamentals of Benthamite thought. In France the thought of such men as Comte de Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, Auguste Comte, though some of the externals of romantic fashion are visible among them, is, on the whole, along with that of the French Left generally, true to the traditions of the philosophes. Even in Germany, a philosopher such as Ludwig Feuerbach asserts the unromantic doctrines of materialism; and Marxism itself, though it shows romantic marks—the concept of the dialectic, derived of course from G. W. F. Hegel, is essentially romantic in its insistence on change as an overcoming of contradictions—is nonetheless committed to an optimistic and very eighteenth-century stand on the rational organization of man and society.

The romantic generation was indeed very conscious of breaking sharply with its parents and grandparents. Few breaks between cultural generations in the West have been more vigorously asserted than this one. The romantic youth absorbed in the depths of William Wordsworth's Prelude, or Vicomte Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme, or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust felt nothing but contempt for the abstract ideas and the confined tastes of his shallow Voltairean grandfather. To a surprising extent, the fashionable Romantic was—or claimed to be—in all things the opposite of the Enlightened. Yet our own generation can hardly avoid holding that the romantic rebellion against its parent was in itself a proof of the filial relation between Romanticism and Enlightenment. Not only were the ideas of men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Vico, Lessing, and even Denis Diderot, all of whom lived at the height of the Enlightenment, seminal to all later Romanticism, but both Enlightenment and Romanticism shared much—a belief in process, change, if not actually progress, a belief in the possibilities of manipulating the environment, indeed a fundamental and very modern relativism never really transcended in the search for eternal verities. Both, whatever their metaphysical position on the problem of determinism, in practice displayed a firm conviction that things not only change, but that they can be changed by human effort. Of many specific doctrines—primitivism, for instance, or individualism in ethics and politics—it is hard to decide whether they are more characteristic of enlightened or of romantic thought.

Some Specific Romanticisms: Art and Letters

The romantic touch is extremely visible in all the arts, from painting through architecture to interior decoration. Bright colors, or soft and fuzzy ones; exotic themes, Oriental scenes; crowded and action-filled historical paintings—concretely, almost any canvas by Eugène Delacroix—set romantic painting off from the sculptured Roman figures of David. And yet, to point up the coexistence of the romantic and the classical throughout the period, the sharp outlines, the measured realism—the Romantic would hold, the conventionality—of the portraits by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who survived until 1867, outdo David's in classical firmness. The great romantic style in architecture was the neo-Gothic, itself a manifestation of the romantic rehabilitation of everything medieval that had been held in contempt by the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Yet Neo-Gothic was never a dominant style, not even in the Nordic lands; moreover, it soon fell into a most unmedieval and unromantic regularity and repetitiveness of detail. But Romanticism did rescue from the neglect in which they had long been left the great medieval cathedrals. In the decorative arts romantic tastes were extremely eclectic, fond of the exotic, addicted to rich dark woods and, in the climax of the Victorian drawing room, to a clutter of display wholly dependent on the existence of inexpensive domestic labor. In music, the romantic at its extreme went in for program music, birdcalls and thunderstorms, vast orchestras, and appropriate dissonances. The difference between the music of Joseph Haydn or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and that of Hector Berlioz or Wagner, like that between the painting of David and that of Delacroix, is obvious to the most untutored.

Poetry, the novel, and history are the great romantic literary genres, and in all of them the romantic syndrome is readily recognized. Although Goethe was a complex personality who was frequently in conflict with contemporary representatives of the romantic movement, his Faust is in itself a masterly summary of romantic themes: revolt against the dullness, the narrowness of rationalism ("gray dear friend is all theory, green only life's eternal tree"), striving for etwas mehr, for the infinite (the essential theme of Faust's bargain with Mephistopheles); contempt for the Philistine, the literal-minded ordinary man (the walk with Wagner); primitivism (Gretchen's innocence); ambivalence ("Two souls, alas, live in my breast"); and much else, right on to the final chorus mysticus of Part II. Indeed, this last is a fine touchstone; anyone who finds it nonsense or at least unpalatable is definitely not Romantic:

Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche
Hier wird's Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche
Hier ist's getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.

The three English Lake Poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey, together pretty well cover the romantic range; and Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned" ("One impulse from a vernal wood," "We murder to dissect," "Enough of science and of art;/Close up those barren leaves") states the central position of the romantic Weltanschauung almost as neatly as Goethe's Gefühl ist alles. One more figure, one more complex of themes, is needed to round out our concept of romantic poetry: This is the unhappy, misunderstood, heroic Promethean figure, half Shelley and all Lord Byron. In terms of sheer educated fashion, Byron and his whole train of European congeners (imitators would be an unfair word here)—Alfred de Musset, Alfred-Victor de Vigny, Giacomo Leopardi, José de Espronceda, Mikhail Lermontov, and the rest—may stand for the romantic poet.

Forerunners of the romantic novel are clear in the eighteenth-century "Gothic" novel, such as those of Ann Radcliffe (so charmingly satirized by the nonromantic Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey ); in the sentimental novel, such as Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse ; and in the psychological novel of disturbed and disturbing love, such as Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos's Liaisons dangereuses and the novels of the Marquis de Sade. The psychological novel reaches its best in the work of Stendhal, whose heroes foreshadow a long line of adventurers of soul and body, a line by no means extinct today. Yet in terms of the wider public of romantic fashion, Walter Scott's Waverley novels were the great success of their day. They carried their audience back into a simpler, more varied, more interesting past than the present of the Industrial Revolution. They exemplified that other inheritance from the German side of the Enlightenment, the theme, best marked in Johann Gottfried Herder, of organic historic growth of a folk spirit, a folk character, a product of time, not a product of the planning, present-bound intellect. One lost one's self in Sir Walter's pages, became one with one's own best past. We are a long way from Henry St. John Bolingbroke's definition of history as "philosophy teaching by examples."

History and Political Thought

The writing of serious history received a great impetus from the romantic movement, and in particular from Scott's work. Augustin Thierry, Jules Michelet, the Heidelberg school in Germany; in England Henry Hallam, indeed T. Macaulay, by no means a Romantic in temperament; and in the United States the great New England school of W. H. Prescott, J. L. Motley, and Francis Parkman wrote history for a wide reading public, history with narrative force and movement, history with a message of patriotism, of identification with a folk, yet also history carefully reconstructed by painstaking research. The historian and the critic of art and literature insisted on one of the great romantic themes: continuity, the continuity of life and flow, growth, development; a process, to the Romantic, always denatured, indeed destroyed, by the dividing analytical mind ("We murder to dissect").

The complexities and difficulties of generalizing about Romanticism come out most clearly, perhaps, in the field of political thought. You can, of course, always construct a pair of Procrustean beds: a conservative bed for the Romantics; a liberal, progressive, or radical bed for the Enlightened. Edmund Burke and Scott can be squeezed into the first, Thomas Paine, W. Godwin, Thomas Jefferson into the second. But the trouble is that you can quite plausibly switch the beds, putting the Romantics into the liberal or progressive bed, the Enlightened into the conservative bed. Shelley, Byron, Benjamin Constant can go into the first; Voltaire (surely no democrat), John Adams, the idéologues who rallied to Napoleon can go into the second. But Victor Hugo would have to be divided, his younger self put into the conservative, his older self into the liberal bed.

Critics have indeed tried to fix Romanticism on one side or the other in politics, and—given their premises—not without some success. Probably in the balance Romanticism has worked toward the growth of modern democracy, toward a belief in progress and toward "liberty, equality, fraternity," toward the open society—toward much, in fact, that gets its start from the rationalists of the Enlightenment. Yet the Burkean belief in human fallibility, human blindness of passion, and in tradition-enshrined institutional dikes to restrain these anarchic thrusts (dikes not to be tampered with by the intellect), as well as belief in the folk, in an organic society not the product of planning, is surely also congruous with much of Romanticism. So too is the anti-intellectual strain that comes out much later in theories of racism, elitism, Blut und Boden, in Nazism and Fascism.

Philosophy

Romanticism is more than a fashion in arts and letters, more than an approach to political problems: It is a philosophy, or better, a set of philosophies loosely tied together if only by their common rejection of eighteenth-century rationalism, of refusal to line up, shall we say, on the Locke-Hume axis. Arthur Schopenhauer is the arch Romantic, the extreme Romantic, among formal philosophers. The world of phenomena, of sense perception, is to him unreal; the will that moves the universe is real enough, but certainly is not rationally knowable by those it moves; this will is blind, shapeless, evil; life, merely phenomenal though it is, is still for us all painful, wearisome, a long unhappy voyage (note the metaphors of movement); Schopenhauer seems at times to hold that a nirvana of surcease is perhaps attainable; at any rate, this life is hopeless.

Romantic pessimism is not, however, the central theme of philosophy in these years. Hegel, at bottom an optimist, is much more central. In a sense, the great romantic philosophers, most of them Germans, go back to Immanuel Kant, who always thought of himself as firmly enlightened, and whose brief Was ist Aufklärung? is one of the landmarks of the century of prose and reason. The romantic seedling in Kant, however, is his distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, and his resolution of the dualism by what amounts to intuition or faith. Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher and the rest developed this essentially romantic reliance on a "faculty" transcending common calculating logic. Hegel accepted, and gave his own turn to, this very old dualism of spirit-matter, real-unreal, and sought to bring them together by his famous and influential concept of the dialectic of thesis–antithesis–synthesis. The dialectic in all its forms displays a most nineteenth-century and romantic general bias toward historicism, process, development—but such a process seen teleologically as an end, a purpose. For Schopenhauer, there was no end save extinction. But for Hegel there was an end, a vague one, a Germanic eternal peace in which change somehow turns out to be, in the workings of the World-Spirit, the real form of permanence.

These philosophers, trained and subtle professionals whom we have no doubt traduced in this brief account, are less definitely to be associated with Romanticism as a broad cultural movement than the popularizers, the essayists, the preachers. To many devotees of Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Ruskin, and to those who listened to bumblers like Bronson Alcott, romantic philosophy became fashionable transcendentalism, an agreeable summary of the less difficult phases of romantic thought—contempt for the rationalist side of the eighteenth century (indeed, blindness to the existence of any other side of that century), exaltation of intuition, spirit, sensibility, imagination, faith, the unmeasurable, the infinite, the wordless—or at least, only the noblest sounding words. This sort of Romanticism was indeed a solace and an escape, an escape from the difficult and unlovely works that science, technology, and industry were building. But it is by no means the whole of Romanticism, which as a spiritual spur to precisely the kind of invention, adventure, and enterprise, to the preoccupation with change and growth, that was building the new world of the nineteenth century, must be seen as having played, and as continuing to play, an essential part, along with the rational and scientific inheritance from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in building our own world of today.

Bibliography

Romanticism is not only a complex cluster of ideas; it is one that arouses strong feelings among critics and historians, and that has had its ups and downs in the estimation of the various cultural generations since the late eighteenth century. The following should set the reader on his way through these thickets of critical and philosophical discussion of Romanticism.

Howard Hugo, ed., The Romantic Reader (New York: Viking Press, 1957), is an admirable anthology with a good bibliography of works in English and a useful prologue, "What the Romantics Said about Romanticism." W. T. Jones, The Romantic Syndrome (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961), presents a very suggestive analysis, helpful for all study of the history of ideas. Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic and Modern (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), contains the ablest defense of Romanticism; see the section "Romantic—A Sampling of Modern Usage" (pp. 155–168). G. A. Borgese, "Romanticism," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1934), Vol. XIII (VII), a remarkably rich brief account, with full bibliographies up to 1934 in all Western tongues, is sympathetic. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), is still the sharpest attack on Romanticism. A. O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), contains several pertinent essays, especially one titled "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms." Sir Maurice Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), is a graceful essay by a distinguished English scholar and critic. Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), is one of the best studies of the complex interweaving of classic and romantic in English literature. Ricarda Huch, Blüthezeit der Romantik, 12th ed. (Leipzig, 1922), and Ausbreitung und Verfall der Romantik, 10th ed. (Leipzig, 1922), are sympathetic and graceful accounts of the German Romantics. Pierre Lasserre, Le Romantisme français (Paris, 1907), is an unsympathetic account of the French Romantics.