Romnanticism and the Present

In the 1820s the Romanticist Stendhal drew a helpful distinction. He saidthat a Romanticist work was "one meant to give pleasure to us living today,whereas a classicist one was designed to give pleasure to our grandfathers."This does not define Romanticism, but it points to the state of mind and feelingof three generations. Because the 18Cthe grandfathersput their faithin Reason, some have described this difference as "a revolt against reason," acaricature that has tended to vitiate scholarship and criticism ever since.

Theterm Reason is ambiguous and ought to be replaced by Intellect. Romanticismsaid: "Intellect is not enoughwhich does not exclude intelligence, reasoning.Reason was an 18C passion; the Romanticist passion was for the work ofmind-and-heart.As soon as it is seen that Romanticism was a phenomenon like theRenaissance, the need for a definition disappears. The two periods are alike intheir sweep and their wealth of talents, in their inner oppositions and theiroverarching unity. In that earlier age some were Platonists, others Aristotelians;some had faith, others did without or pretended to have it. Some thought"good letters" the superior art, others that painting was supreme. And a solidclerical phalanx still held to the ideas of the medieval Scholastics, whom thenew thought despised ( 479Mississippi on the lookout for birds to draw and paint, achieving his purposewith the completion in 1838 of his 435 plates of life-size depiction.These creations prove one neglected truth about the Romanticists in art:they were Realists. But "as everybody knows," Realism arose about 1850 inreaction against Romanticism. This critics' clich need cause no confusion ifthe works of the first half of the century are described accurately as above. Itis then seen that Romanticism contains in itself the practice characteristic ofthe three movements that followed it: Realism, Symbolism, and Naturalism.The difference between the later tendencies and Romanticism is that eachspecialized in one of the techniques developed by their common ancestor.That the descendents worked in a different mood for a different purpose hasblurred the relation.To put it another way, the arts after neo-classicism went through fourphases, the first comprehensive and the next three exclusive, each developingin full one tendency of the original movement. Consider again the LyricalBallads. Part of the work was characterized on the previous page: commonsubjects, common wordsthe realistic part. Next come lyrics about love ornature, still in simple language and true to life, but not re-creating the commonplaceatmosphere that came to be seen as the sign of the truly real. Thethird part is Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a narrative in whichstrange, "unreal" events symbolize the truths of the moral worldaSymbolist poem.

In the next generation and in France, not only Hugo and Musset andVigny but Grard de Nerval present the same inclusiveness. He translatesGoethe's Faustin its various styles ranging from vulgar to lofty; in Chimres hewrites "romantic" sonnets; he collects the folk poetry of his native province;and in Vers Dors (Golden Verses), he writes lines in which every noun is asymbol pointing to a hidden spiritual realm. He is so much a Symbolist poetthat the sonnet "El Desdichado" is still argued over for its possible meanings,and the prose poem Aurelia likewise.In Blake, setting the allegories aside, it is symbolism that gives significanceto most of the Songs of Innocence and Experience. In Hlderlin, in Novalis,in Kleist, descriptions of nature and feeling have the same purpose. The lastnamed, who was so deeply persuaded of the ambiguity of all experience, hasbeen regarded as a forerunner of Rilke and even of Kafka and Pirandello.Ambiguity, when used on purpose, is the device of symbol par excellence.Akin to ambiguity and symbol, the fantasy that pervades the work of Jean-Paul Richter (132>) seems a response to Ackermann's suggestion that poetryshould find some of its materials in dreams. It was Jean-Paul, so popular thathe was generally referred to in that shortened form (or else as Der Einige theUnique) that Carlyle chose to discuss him first when he introduced Germanliterature to the English. By contrast, Heine like Byron used his satirical bent480 FROM DAWN TO DECADENCEto make poetry out of little scenes of daily life in colloquial language, with anoccasional foray into legend and history.

As for the surcharged realism later called Naturalism (623 >), the germsof it may be found in certain poems by Gautier and by Hugo0 and in the workof Petrus Borei, who was not afraid of entitling some of his fiction ImmoralTales. That these ventures belong to the Romanticist years does not mean thatlater comers were imitators or exploiters of perfected styles. The meaning israther that when the ground is cleared as it was by revolution and rebuildingis called for, every kind of thing is attempted, but not everything is pursued;and much turns out wasted effort, all three outcomes being the usual result ofEMANCIPATION.

In the domain of Form, the Romanticist emancipation entailed no waste.The freedom enjoyed by the arts today was their achievement. When Hugoboasted that he had stuck the Jacobins' red cap on the dictionary,Wordsworth had already given the same signal: no words forbidden becausethey were not noble ( 481* *

With their searching imagination in literature and art, it could beexpected that the Romanticists' intellectual tastes would be anything butexclusive.

They found the Middle Ages a civilization worthy of respect; theyrelished folk art, music, and literature; they studied Oriental philosophy;

theywelcomed the diversity of national customs and character, even those outsidethe 18C cosmopolitan circuit;

they surveyed dialects and languages withenthusiasm.

This was a genuine multiculturalism, the wholehearted acceptanceof the remote, the exotic, the folkish, and the forgotten.

Victor Hugodelved into all the histories and literatures he could get access to and forgedout of their figures and incidents the panoramic Lgende des Sicles. When hecame across the Malay verse form called pantoum, he wrote one. Grard deNerval collected French regional songs in dialect and translated them. Liszt,who as a virtuosos pianist crisscrossed Europe repeatedly, noted down thelocal forms of popular music and composed pieces in the genre: his catalogueof songs reads like a gazetteer. He rehabilitated native Hungarian music andbrought out that of the Gypsies (properly Romani), hitherto unknown. It isfrom his efforts that all the Zigeuner art music of the Viennese composershas come.

These interests have persisted and some are now scholarly disciplines.But taking them together, critics of Romanticism have not hesitated to callthem "escapes." And as everybody knows, escapism is a federal crime.Perhaps a more sensible way of judging Romanticist curiosity along multiplelines is to see it as a release from parochialism. The preceding age aimed atreality only in the form of general truths and, worse, it limited civilization tofour periods in six countries. True, Voltaire in his large history of mannersand customs (