Romanticism

Lilian R. Furst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351631228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

First published in 1969, this work traces the evolution of Romanticism and in doing so, demonstrates its novelty as an imaginative and emotional perception of the world in contrast to the rationalistic approach which was dominant in the seventeenth century. It identifies the fundamental similarities between Romantic writing in England, France and Germany as well as their differences brought about by divergent literary and social backgrounds. The book is concluded by a review of the problems that arise from a simple definition of Romanticism.

1

Definitions and usage

Post-Romantic usage

‘He who seeks to define Romanticism is entering a hazardous occupation which has claimed many victims.’ This timely warning was issued by E. B. Burgum in an article on Romanticism in the Kenyon Review of 1941, but it has not deterred critics in their ceaseless endeavours to arrive at some definition of this term. The definitions are, therefore, legion, numbering almost as many as those who have written on this subject. The difficulty in approaching Romanticism is thus less that of of finding a definition, than of finding one’s way through the maze of definitions that have already been put forward. The aim of this monograph is not to add one more to the list of definitions under the illusion that it may be the right one; but rather to explore the origins and manifestations of the literary movement of the early nineteenth century known as Romanticism in the hope of achieving some clearer picture of the kind of writing to which this term is applied.

The bewildering variety of definitions and meanings and the sense of dissatisfaction with them have long given rise to complaint. In 1923, for instance, Grierson wrote that Romantic, like Classical, was a term ‘no attempt to define which ever seems entirely convincing to oneself or to others’ (Background of English Literature, p. 256). Lovejoy, a year later, was far more emphatic: ‘The word “romantic” has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the functions of a verbal sign’ (Lovejoy, ‘On the Discriminations of Romanticisms’, English Romantic Poets, p. 6). Lovejoy’s contention is admirably illustrated by Barzun’s ‘sampling of modern usage’ in Chapter X of Classic, Romantic and Modern, where he cites examples of the word being used as a synonym for the following adjectives: ‘attractive’, ‘unselfish’, ‘exuberant’, ‘ornamental’, ‘unreal’, ‘realistic’, ‘irrational’, ‘materialistic’, ‘futile’, ‘heroic’, ‘mysterious and soulful’, ‘noteworthy’, ‘conservative’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘bombastic’, ‘picturesque’, ‘nordic’, ‘formless’, ‘formalistic’, ‘emotional’, ‘fanciful’, ‘stupid’. No wonder that the term has been dismissed as no more than an ‘approximate label’, a ‘serviceable make-shift’ (M. Praz, The Romantic Agony, p. 21) that we cannot do without, but cannot hope ever to pin down to a precise meaning.

This discouraging view would seem to be confirmed by the incongruous assortment of definitions that have been evolved in the last hundred and fifty years. A fair cross-section of these has been gathered by E. Bernbaum in Guide through the Romantic Movement, pp. 301–2, and it is worth quoting because it shows the extraordinary range of senses that have been attributed to this term:

Romanticism is disease, Classicism is health. GOETHE.

A movement to honour whatever Classicism rejected. Classicism is the regularity of good sense, – perfection in moderation; Romanticism is disorder in the imagination, – the rage of incorrectness. A blind wave of literary egotism. BRUNETIÈRE.

Classic art portrays the finite, romantic art also suggests the infinite. HEINE.

The illusion of beholding the infinite within the stream of nature itself, instead of apart from that stream. MORE.

A desire to find the infinite within the finite, to effect a synthesis of the real and the unreal. The expression in art of what in theology would be called pantheistic enthusiasm. FAIRCHILD.

The return to nature. ROUSSEAU.

In general a thing is romantic when, as Aristotle would say, it is wonderful rather than probable; in other words, when it violates the normal sequence of cause and effect in favour of adventure. The whole movement is filled with the praise of ignorance, and of those who still enjoy its inappreciable advantages, – the savage, the peasant, and above all the child. BABBITT.

The opposite, not of Classicism, but of Realism, – a withdrawal from outer experience to concentrate upon inner. ABERCROMBIE.

Liberalism in literature. Mingling the grotesque with the tragic or sublime (forbidden by classicism); the complete truth of life. VICTOR HUGO.

The re-awakening of the life and thought of the Middle Ages. HEINE.

The cult of the extinct. GEOFFREY SCOTT.

The classic temper studies the past, the romantic neglects it. SCHELLING.

An effort to escape from actuality. WATERHOUSE.

Sentimental melancholy. PHELPS.

Vague aspiration. PHELPS.

Subjectivity, the love of the picturesque, and a reactionary spirit [against whatever immediately preceded it]. PHELPS.

Romanticism is, at any time, the art of the day; Classicism, the art of the day before. STENDHAL.

Emotion rather than reason; the heart opposed to the head. GEORGE SAND.

A liberation of the less conscious levels of the mind; an intoxicating dreaming. Classicism is control by the conscious mind. LUCAS.

Imagination as contrasted with reason and the sense of fact. NEILSON.

Extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility. HERFORD.

An accentuated predominance of emotional life, provoked or directed by the exercise of imaginative vision, and in its turn stimulating or directing such exercise. CAZAMIAN.

The renascence of wonder. WATTS-DUNTON.

The addition of strangeness to beauty. PATER.

The fairy way of writing. KER.

The spirit counts for more than the form. GRIERSON.

Whereas in classical works the idea is represented directly and with as exact an adaptation of form as possible, in romantic the idea is left to the reader’s faculty of divination assisted only by suggestion and symbol. SAINTSBURY.

Moreover, new and increasingly sophisticated definitions could be added each year: in a series of recent talks on the sources of Romanticism Isaiah Berlin summarized its essence as ‘the tyranny of art over life’, while Wellek conceives it as compounded of a particular view of imagination, a particular attitude to nature and a particular use of symbols.

The confusion has become so great that a separate subspecies has arisen which seeks to review the existent definitions and as far as possible to categorize them: those that distinguish primarily between ‘romantic’ and ‘classical’, those that oppose ‘romantic’ to ‘realistic’, those that separate ‘intrinsic’ from ‘historic’ Romanticism, those formulated by the pro-Romantics and those of the anti-Romantics, etc. For practical purposes, however, it proves more helpful to recognize the difference between those definitions that are of an inclusive nature and those, on the contrary, that tend to the restrictive. The former type is exemplified in Bernbaum’s list by the phrases of Goethe, Stendhal, Babbitt, Heine, Fairchild or by the purely descriptive neutral approach of a sentence such as Thorlby’s: ‘The adjective “romantic” is commonly applied to various artistic styles and works, some philosophical writing, occasionally also manners and dress, which made their appearance in Europe between about 1770 and 1830,’ (The Romantic Movement, p. 1). These comprehensive definitions are in fact too wide to form a viable working basis. Used in this way, the word ‘romantic’ has as little or as much meaning as ‘conservative’ in politics and it can be so ingeniously and arbitrarily extended as to become virtually useless as a term of literary criticism. At the other extreme, the restrictive definitions, such as those of Geoffrey Scott, Pater and Phelps, certainly had the advantage of sharpness, but they are so narrow that they will in practice inevitably involve the critic in constant and agonizing debates as to whether poet X or novelist Y is, strictly speaking, a Romantic or not. There is also a more serious objection to this kind of definition, which has been pointed out by Babbitt:

A fruitful source of false definition is to take as primary in a more or less closely allied group of facts what is actually secondary – for example, to fix upon the return to the Middle Ages as the central fact in romanticism, whereas this return is only symptomatic; it is very far from being the original phenomenon. Confused and incomplete definitions of romanticism have indeed just that origin – they seek to put at the centre something that though romantic is not central but peripheral, and so the whole subject is thrown out of perspective.

(I. Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, pp. 2–3)

‘Confused and incomplete’, narrow and restrictive such definitions may well be, but to brand them ipso facto as ‘false’ is unwarranted. This indeed is one of the sources of difficulty: that none of the definitions offered, either the inclusive or the restrictive, seems absolutely wrong inasmuch as each could be justified by reference to certain works or views. Conversely, none seems totally right and finally satisfying in so far as there are always exceptions and problems, whichever one is accepted as the best – or the least bad.

The roots of this impasse lie not so much in any defects on the part of the aspiring definers as in the character of the Romantic movement itself. For this staggering array of possible definitions only reflects a salient quality of European Romanticism: its innate complexity and multiplicity. An artistic movement as deep, as many-faceted, and, incidentally, as long-lived as Romanticism had to manifest itself in any number of directions, and it is fundamentally this that confounds the task of definition. To try to seize Romanticism in its entirety in a neat catch-phrase is an endeavour as doomed to failure as it is futile. We must in this instance reverse the usual order by seeking to understand Romanticism as a phenomenon before attempting to catch it in the net of definition.

The Romantics’ own usage

These problems of definition and inconsistencies of usage are by no means confined solely to the twentieth century; many of those poets and thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries whom we generally regard as Romantics were themselves perplexed by this word. Some were also quite unscrupulous in the uses they made of the term ‘romantic’, which they interpreted very freely to suit their own purposes, as their statements reveal.

No one was more erratic in this than the brilliant but mercurial Friedrich Schlegel, who is usually held responsible for introducing the word into the literary context. In spite of his boast in 1797 that he had written some 125 pages in explanation of the term, he does not appear ever to have arrived at any single, let alone definitive meaning, and there can be no doubt that his writings are a fertile source of muddle and misunderstanding. Throughout his theoretical pronouncements the connotation of ‘romantisch’ fluctuates disconcertingly, not only from work to work, but even within the limits of one and the same work. While his brother August Wilhelm, of a more orderly turn of mind, used the word fairly consistently in both the Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst (Lectures on ‘belles-lettres’ and art) and the Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (Lectures on dramatic art and literature) to denote ‘den eigentümlichen Geist der modernen Kunst, im Gegensatz mit der antiken oder klassischen’ (‘the particular spirit of modern art, in contrast to ancient or classical art’) (Heidelberg: Mohr & Winter, 1817, p. 13). Friedrich, in his characteristically unsystematic manner, switched from meaning to meaning according to the needs of the moment. In his Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation about Poetry), though subscribing in broad outline to the antithesis between the ancient and the romantic, he promptly qualifies it by adding: ‘indessen bitte ich Sie doch, nur nicht sogleich anzunehmen, dass mir das Romantische und das Moderne völlig gleich gelte’ (‘I beg of you, however, not to jump to the conclusion that the romantic and the modern are entirely synonymous to me’) (Kritische Schriften, ed. W. Rasch, Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1956, p. 324). For him, at this point at least, the romantic is ‘nicht sowohl eine Gattung als ein Element der Poesie’ (‘not only a type but also an element of poetry’) (Kritische Schriften, p. 324), and in this sense all creative writing is to some extent romantic. Hence the epithet came to be applied to Shakespeare as well as to Dante and Cervantes. His nearest approach to real definition is in the often quoted phrase: (es) ‘ist eben das romantisch, was uns einen sentimentalen Stoff in einer phantastischen Form darstellt’ (‘that is romantic which depicts emotional matter in an imaginative form’) (Kritische Schriften, p. 322). However, in the Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (History of ancient and modern literature), written some twelve years later, after his conversion to Catholicism, Friedrich Schlegel has abandoned this criterion for he now equates ‘romantic’ and ‘Christian’ in such comments as ‘Calderon ist… unter allen anderen dramatischen Dichtern… der christlichste, und eben darum auch der am meisten romantische’ (‘among all other dramatists, Calderon is the most Christian, and for that reason also the most romantic’) (Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur, Munich: Schöningh, 1961, p. 284). Considering the inauspicious debut of the term in literary criticism under the aegis of Friedrich Schlegel, it is hardly surprising that we should encounter difficulties of definition.

In France too the word was given any number of different meanings during the great aesthetic debates of the early nineteenth century. For Mme de Staël ‘romantic’ was virtually synonymous with Northern, medieval and Christian, as opposed to the Southern, classical and pagan. But for Hugo and Stendhal, as for the majority of their generation, the primary antithesis was between ‘romantic’ and ‘classical’, though even in this context it was liable to variations of interpretation. To the rebellious author of Cromwell and Hernani it was tantamount to the free, the picturesque, the characteristic, which included also the grotesque. To Stendhal it signified quite simply ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ when he declared in Racine et Shakespeare (Paris: Le Divan, 1928, p. 106): ‘Tous les grands écrivains ont été romantiques de leur temps’ (‘All the great writers were romantic in their day’), a contention which he illustrates by reference to the Roman artists who were, according to him, romantic because they portrayed what was true in their day and, therefore, appealing to their public. From this curious standpoint Stendhal deduced his definition of Romanticism:

Le Romantisme est l’art de présenter aux peuples les oeuvres littéraires qui, dans l’état actuel de leurs habitudes et de leurs croyances, sont susceptibles de leur donner le plus de plaisir possible. Le classicisme, au contraire, leur présente la littérature qui donnait le plus grand plaisir possible à l...