Romanticism in literature and the arts
The fundamental Romantic purpose was to grasp and render the many kinds of experience that Classicism had neglected or had stylized. Romanticism was the first upsurge of realism—exploratory and imaginative as to subject matter and inventive as to forms and techniques. The exploration of reality surveyed both the external world of peoples and places and the internal world of man. The Scottish and medieval novels of Sir Walter Scott, beginning with Waverley in 1814, illustrate the range of the new curiosity, for Scotland was a “wild” place, outside the centres of civilization, and the Middle Ages were similarly “barbarous” and distant in time. When Byron or Chateaubriand went to the Middle East or Goethe to Italy, it was not in the tradition of gentlemen’s tourism; it was in the spirit of the cultural explorer. Byron, for one, by using “the Isles of Greece” and the Mediterranean as settings for his wildly popular narrative poems, was developing in the Western mind a new interest, a new sense that the “exotic” was as real, as important, as Paris or London. In all these writers, factual detail is essential to the new sort of effect: the scenery is observably true, and so is the history, given through local colour. As Byron said when criticized: “I don’t care two lumps of sugar for my poetry, but my costume is correct.” Blake, 20 years earlier, had taken a stand against Sir Joshua Reynold’s academic doctrine that the highest form of painting depicted the broadest general truth. Said Blake: “To particularize is the only merit.”
Particulars, moreover, are all equally proper for the artist; the use he makes of them is what matters. When Wordsworth and Coleridge sought to revivify English poetry, they hit upon two divergent kinds of subject: Coleridge took superstition and the folk tale and wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in the form of an old ballad; Wordsworth took the modern street ballad—a kind of rhymed newspaper—and produced his versified incidents of common life in common speech. In France, where the division of the vocabulary into “noble” and “common” (i.e., unfit for poetry) had been made and recorded in dictionaries, the Romantics led by Hugo used the prohibited words whenever they saw fit. Hugo’s verse drama Hernani (1830) created a scandal in the audience when the heroine was heard to speak of her handkerchief and when a character did not use a roundabout phrase about “the march of the hours” to say: “It is midnight.”
The importance of such details can hardly be exaggerated and can perhaps be best understood by recalling what the rediscovery of Shakespeare meant to the Romantics. His rise from grudging esteem, even in England, to European idolatry by 1830 had a significance beyond the one already mentioned of serving to put down French classical tragedy and, with it, French cultural tyranny. The German scholar, critic, and playwright Lessing was among the first to use Shakespeare for that purpose, but the arguments in his theatre reviews, called Hamburgische Dramaturgie, sprang from critical genius and not mere national resentment. Shakespeare spelled freedom from narrow conventions—the set verse form in couplets, the lofty language and long declamations, the adherence to verse throughout, the exclusion of low characters, comic effects, and violent action—or, in a word, from royal and artistic etiquette.
What the rediscovery and idolization of Shakespeare meant (and not to poets and playwrights alone—witness his enormous influence on Berlioz) was the right of the artist to adapt or invent forms to suit contents, to use words formerly excluded from poetic diction, loosen the joints of grammar and metric (or the canons of any art), follow the promptings of his spirit (tragic or gay, vulgar or mysterious, but in any case venturesome), and see where this emancipation from artificial rules led the muse. There was danger in freedom, as always; the conventions ensure safety. The aim of the Romantic genius, however, was not to play safe or even to succeed; it was to explore and invent, multiply modes of feeling and truth, and thereby breathe new life into a dead or dying culture. The motto was not common sense but courage. This resolve explains why the men who came to worship Shakespeare also rediscovered Rabelais and Villon and revalued Spinoza, the lone dissenter who had revered a God pervading the cosmos; Benvenuto Cellini, the fearless artist at grips with the principalities and powers; and “Rameau’s Nephew,” the ambiguous hero of Diderot’s posthumous dialogue, a strange figure disturbingly in touch with the dark forces of the creative unconscious.
Drama
With so much feeling astir and so many novel ideas being agitated, it might seem logical to expect a flourishing school of Romantic drama. Yet only a few isolated works, more interesting than irreplaceable, compose the dramatic output of the Romanticists—Shelley’s Cenci, Byron’s Manfred, and Kleist’s brilliant pieces in several genres. Ironically, Shakespeare’s new role as emancipator had a curiously paralyzing effect on the theatre down to the middle of the century and beyond. In England, poet after poet tried his hand at poetic drama, only to fail from too anxious a desire to be Shakespearean. On the Continent, various misconceptions about him and old habits of Classical tragedy prevented a new drama from coming to life. Victor Hugo’s plays contained brilliant verse, and their form influenced grand opera (Wagner’s no less than Verdi’s), but the fact remained: the dramatic quality could be found everywhere in Romanticist art except on the stage.
Reflection on this point suggests that, quite apart from Shakespeare, the very concern of the Romantics with exploring the inner and outer worlds simultaneously hampered the playwright. Perhaps great drama requires that one or the other world be taken as settled so that conflict, which is the essence of drama, develops between a strong new force and a solid resistance. Be that as it may, the Romantics found themselves in an age when both inner and outer worlds were in flux and from that double uncertainty derived their creative impetus.
Painting
This generality holds for the painters as well; their “reality,” too, was by no means “given,” so that the notation of fresh detail and the study of new means to transmute the visible into art occupied all those who came after David. Goya led the way in Spain by depicting the vulgarity of court figures and the horrors of the Peninsular War. In England, Constable painted country scenes with a vividness at first unacceptable to connoisseurs. He had to argue with his patron, Sir George Beaumont, about the actual colour of grass. To prove that it was not of the conventional brownish tint used by academicians, he seized a violin, ran out of the room with it, and laid it on the lawn, forcing the unaccustomed eye to perceive the difference between chlorophyll and old varnish. At the same time, Géricault astonished the Parisians by painting, in harrowing detail, The Raft of the Medusa, not an antique and noble subject but a recent event: the survivors of a shipwreck adrift and starving on a raft.
The young Delacroix was emboldened by the example and, inspired also by the work of his English friend Bonington, began to paint contemporary scenes of vivid realism—e.g., the Turkish massacre of the Greek peasants at Chios. Later, Delacroix was to visit Morocco (exoticism again) and to discover there the secret of coloured shadows and other pre-Impressionist techniques. His English counterpart, J.M.W. Turner, was pursuing the same goal of realistic truth, though along a different path that nonetheless also led to Impressionism—and beyond. When asked one day why he had pasted a scrap of black paper on a portion of his canvas, he replied that ordinary pigment was not black enough. And he added: “If I could find something even blacker, I would use that.”
Sculpture and architecture
No similar transformations of the visual occurred in sculpture or architecture. Canova and Thorvaldsen continued to produce figures and busts on Neoclassical lines; and only Barye, the great sculptor of animals, and Rude, the creator of the Marseillaise panel on the Arc de Triomphe, showed any signs of the new passions. As for architecture, it may have been the love of history that prevented distinctive work. Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc did grasp the principles of what a new style should be, the former’s love of Gothic reinstating the merit of framework construction and the latter’s breadth of vision as a restorer leading him to predict that iron construction would one day pass from mere utility to high art.
It was actually in railway construction that the seeds of a new architecture were sown. Tunnels and bridges and terminals were needed as early as the mid-1830s, and unassuming engineers such as the Brunels and Robert Stephenson set to work to design them. All they had for solving the new and awkward problems of topography, speed, and cost were the ideas they drew from machinery and the vulgar materials, chiefly wood and iron, that they had learned how to handle in industry. The results were often remarkable, and they remained to inspire the makers of 20th-century steel and concrete architecture.
Music
It may seem as if the art of music by its nature would not lend itself to the exploration and expression of reality characteristic of Romanticism, but that is not so. True, music does not tell stories or paint pictures, but it stirs feelings and evokes moods, through both of which various kinds of reality can be suggested or expressed. It was in the rationalist 18th century that musicians rather mechanically attempted to reproduce stories and subjects in sound. These literal renderings naturally failed, and the Romanticists profited from the error. Their discovery of new realms of experience proved communicable in the first place because they were in touch with the spirit of renovation, particularly through poetry. What Goethe meant to Beethoven and Berlioz and what German folk tales and contemporary lyricists meant to Weber, Schumann, and Schubert are familiar to all who are acquainted with the music of these men.
There is, of course, no way to demonstrate that Beethoven’s Egmont music—or, indeed, its overture alone—corresponds to Goethe’s drama and thereby enlarges the hearer’s consciousness of it; but it cannot be an accident or an aberration that the greatest composers of the period employed the resources of their art for the creation of works expressly related to such lyrical and dramatic subjects. Similarly, the love of nature stirred Beethoven, Weber, and Berlioz, and here too the correspondence is felt and persuades the fit listener that his own experience is being expanded. The words of the creators themselves record this new comprehensiveness. Beethoven referred to his activity of mingled contemplation and composition as dichten, making a poem; and Berlioz tells in his Mémoires of the impetus given to his genius by the music of Beethoven and Weber, by the poetry of Goethe and Shakespeare, and not least by the spectacle of nature. Nor did the public that ultimately understood their works gainsay their claims.
It must be added that the Romantic musicians—including Chopin, Mendelssohn, Glinka, and Liszt—had at their disposal greatly improved instruments. The beginning of the 19th century produced the modern piano, of greater range and dynamics than theretofore, and made all wind instruments more exact and powerful by the use of keys and valves. The modern full orchestra was the result. Berlioz, whose classic treatise on instrumentation and orchestration helped to give it definitive form, was also the first to exploit its resources to the full, in the Symphonie fantastique of 1830. This work, besides its technical significance just mentioned, can also be regarded as uniting the characteristics of Romanticism in music: it is both lyrical and dramatic, and, although it makes use of a “story,” that use is not to describe the scenes but to connect them; its slow movement is a “nature poem” in the Beethovenian manner; the second, fourth, and fifth movements include “realistic” detail of the most vivid kind; and the opening one is an introspective reverie.
Self-analysis
In this Romantic investigation of the self, some critics have seen little more than excessive ego or, in modern terms, a tiresome narcissism. No doubt certain Romantic works arouse boredom or disgust with hairsplitting analysis. The boredom, however, is often due to the fact that after a hundred years the discoveries have staled. When fresh, they came as a revelation; in the works of the great poets and novelists, in Hazlitt’s essays and Jean Paul’s fictions, and the irony of Byron’s letters or Heine’s journalism, the truth has not grown dim or platitudinous.
It was in any case desirable that this extensive analysis of the self should be attempted then, for only an age in which individualism was both theoretical and passionate could see the logic of the undertaking and act upon it. The logic was this: given the autonomous and unique individual, a search by himself into his moods, motives, fears, and loves must bring forth data otherwise unobtainable. Add these results together, and one has a repertoire of clues to the inner life of mankind as a whole. For the uniqueness of each individual is bounded by traits he shares with his fellows, and this common element enables the psychologist to connect and organize the reports of the self-searchers. It is on this hypothesis, incidentally, that the demand for originality in art has continued unabated since the Romanticists. Forget the “model,” for there is no such thing; avoid conformity; discover your true self, the buried child; be authentic and sincere—these precepts, which still govern art and criticism, are the legacy of Romantic individualism.
Introspection naturally implies an inner life worth looking into, and most Romantic artists brought forth extraordinary findings. They form the groundwork of modern thought. One cannot easily imagine Freud or Joyce, much less the degree of self-consciousness shared by Westerners today, without the deliverances of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Leopardi, Stendhal, Constant, Sainte-Beuve, Heine, and innumerable other writers of the early 19th century. And towering above them as the creator of the prototype of Romantic introspection is Goethe with his Faust.
Faust was the figure in which a whole age recognized its mind and soul; and the adjective Faustian, as Spengler’s use of it makes clear, still describes tendencies at work in culture today. The principal one, already mentioned, self-consciousness—the identity crisis—remains. The belief, moreover, that movement, activity, is better than repose and that striving is better than achieving is clearly the great postulate of contemporary civilization. Faust himself ends by giving his life to practical works in behalf of his fellow man; however, he sets himself on that path only after a slow and deep analysis of his divided soul, which has been ruled in turn by despair, lust, superstition and the forces of the unconscious, the love of innocence, the conviction of sin and crime, the horrors of hypocrisy and conventional life, the temptations of wealth and power, the disgust with pedantry and established religion, and the yearning for infinite knowledge, in the hopes of attaining by it wisdom and peace. Faust, in short, traverses the whole cosmos, made up of the inner and outer worlds, to find in the act of self-dedication to humanity the justification of his existence.