Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders (Comparative History of Literature in European Languages)

NONFICTIONAL ROMANTIC PROSE

A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES SPONSORED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES LITTÉRATURES DE LANGUES EUROPÉENNES SOUS LES AUSPICES DE L’ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL DE LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE IN THE SAME SERIES

I. Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon (Ed. Ulrich Weisstein) II. The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages (Ed. Anna Balakian) III. le tournant du siècle des lumières 1760–1820. les genres en vers des lumières au romantisme (Dir. György M. Vajda) IV. les avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Histoire (Dir. Jean Weisgerber) V. les avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Théorie (Dir. Jean Weisgerber) VI. European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ed. Albert Gérard) VII. L’époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600) I. l’avènement de l’esprit nouveau (1400–1480) (Dir. Tibor Klaniczay, Eva Kushner, André Stegmann) VIII. Romantic Irony (Ed. Frederick Garber) IX. Romantic Drama (Ed. Gerald Gillespie) X. A History of Literature in the Caribbean (Vol. 1) (Ed. A. James Arnold) XI. International Postmodernism (Eds. Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema) XII. A History of Literature in the Caribbean (Vol. 3) (Ed. A. James Arnold) XIII. L’Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600). IV: Crise et essors nouveaux (1560–1610) (Eds. Tibor Klaniczay, Eva Kushner and Paul Chavy) XIV. Die Wende von der Aufklärung zur Romantik 1760–1820. Epoche im Überblick (Ed. Horst Albert Glaser and György M. Vajda) XV. A History of Literature in the Caribbean (Vol. 2) (Ed. A. James Arnold) XVI. L'aube de la modernité. 1680–1760 (Eds. Peter-Eckhard Knabe, Roland Mortier and François Moureau) XVII. Romantic Poetry (Ed. Angela Esterhammer) XVIII. Nonfictional Romantic Prose. Expanding Borders. (Eds. Steven P. Sondrup and Virgil Nemoianu)

NONFICTIONAL ROMANTIC PROSE EXPANDING BORDERS

Edited by STEVEN P. SONDRUP VIRGIL NEMOIANU in collaboration with Gerald Gillespie

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

Coordinating Committee for A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Comité de Coordination de l’Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes 2001–2005 President/Président Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (Indiana University) Vice-President/Vice-Président Randolph Pope (University of Virginia) Secretary Treasurer/Secrétaire Trésorier Daniel F. Chamberlain (Queen’s University, Kingston) Committee Liaison Eugene Chen Eoyang (Lingnan University) Members/Membres assesseurs Richard Aczel, Jean Bessière, Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Eugene Chen Eoyang, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Eduardo de Faria Coutinho, Elrud Ibsch, Margaret Higonnet, Eva Kushner, John Neubauer, Luz Aurora Pimentel, Ann Rigney Past Presidents Mario J. Valdés (Toronto), Jacques Voisine (Paris), Henry H.H. Remak (Indiana), Jean Weisgerber (Bruxelles) Past Secretaries György M. Vajda† (Budapest), Milan V. Dimi´c (Edmonton) Published on the recommendation of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies with the financial assistance of UNESCO

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nonfictional romantic prose: Expanding borders / edited by Steven P. Sondrup, Virgil Nemoianu in collaboration with Gerald Gillespie. p. cm. -- (Comparative history of literatures in European languages = Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes, ISSN 0238-0668 ; v. 18) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Romanticism. 2. European prose literature--18th century--History and criticism. 3. European prose literature--19th century--History and criticism. I. Sondrup, Steven P. II. Nemoianu, Virgil. III. Gillespie, Gerald Ernest Paul, 1933- IV. Series. PN603.E98 2004 809.1’9145.--dc22 2003055679 ISBN 90 272 3451 5 (Eur.) / 1 58811 452 X (US) (alk. paper) CIP © 2004 - John Benjamins B.V./Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 36224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA



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Table of contents

Preface I. General Introduction Virgil Nemoianu

vii 1

II. Romantic Theoretical and Critical Writing

11

Theories of Romanticism: The First Two Hundred Years Monika Schmitz-Emans

13

Romantic Disavowals of Romanticism, 1800–1830 John Isbell

37

Hegel and Hegelianism in European Romanticism Gerhart Hoffmeister

57

The Aesthetics of German Idealism and Its Reception in European Romanticism Manfred Engel and Jürgen Lehmann

69

Romantic Theories of National Literature and Language in Germany, England, and France Mary Anne Perkins

97

Sir Walter Scott and the Beginnings of Ethnology Carolyn Buckley-Fletcher

107

III. Expansions in Time

115

Burke’s Conservatism and Its Echoes on the Continent and in the United States Michael Gassenmeier and Jens Martin Gurr

117

Distorted Echoes: The Mythologies of Nordic Nationalism Steven P. Sondrup

141

IV. Expansions in Space

163

Romantic Travel Narratives Mircea Anghelescu

165

Romanticism and Nonfictional Prose in Spanish America, 1780–1850 Joselyn M. Almeida

181

V. Expansions of the Self

195

Allegories of Address: The Poetics of the Romantic Diary Frederick Garber

197

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The Romantic Subject in Autobiography Eugene Stelzig

223

Educating for Women’s Future: Thinking New Forms Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos and Margaret R. Higonnet

241

VI. Generic Expansions

265

The Romantic Familiar Essay Frederick Garber

267

The Unending Conversation: The Role of Periodicals in England and on the Continent during the Romantic Age John Boening

285

Almanacs and Romantic Nonfictional Prose Madison U. Sowell

303

The Romantic Pamphlet: Stylistic and Thematic Impurity of a Double-Edged Genre Monica Spiridon

317

Costumbrismo in Spanish Literature and Its European Analogues José Manuel Losada

333

VII. Intersections: Scientific and Artistic Discourses in the Romantic Age

347

Romanticism, the Unconscious, and the Brain Alan Richardson

349

Literary Sources of Romantic Psychology Joel Black

365

Romantic Discourse on the Visual Arts Gerald Gillespie

377

Aspects of German Romantic Musical Discourse Steven P. Sondrup

403

VIII. Intimations of Transcendence

421

Sacrality as Aesthetic in the Early Nineteenth Century: A Network Approach Virgil Nemoianu

423

The Myth of the Fallen Angel: Its Theosophy in Scandinavian, English, and French Literature José Manuel Losada

433

IX. Conclusion: Romanticism as Explosion and Epidemic Virgil Nemoianu

459

Index

467



Preface

As part of the series devoted to romanticism within the framework of the International Comparative Literature Association’s history of literatures in European languages, this volume has profited from the pioneering work of colleagues who have seen previous volumes to press. Gerald Gillespie has been unstinting in generously sharing his broadly encompassing knowledge of romanticism and his experience with the practical demands of preparing this kind of volume for publication. The encouragement and guidance of Mario J. Valdés at important junctures proved most valuable. The two readers who vetted this volume for the Coordinating Committee offered insightful and critical comments that ultimately led to important improvements in both substance and style. Appreciation is offered to all. In more practical terms, the bibliographic assistance of several graduate students during the early phases of manuscript preparation was most beneficial. Maria Petrova Ilieva, James Rasmussen, and Jonathan Penny helped with various tasks, and thanks is expressed to them for their efforts. Jason R. Francis and Jennifer Webb made significant contributions toward seeing this volume to completion over an extended period, and my sincere appreciation goes to them for their imaginative help and gracious generosity. The College of Humanities and the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies at Brigham Young University provided logistic and financial support for which I am most grateful.

Steven P. Sondrup



I. General Introduction VIRGIL NEMOIANU Catholic University of America

The present volume is predicated, let me say openly and from the very beginning, upon some assumptions and prejudgments. It will be easier and more practical to read it if I enumerate these here. Obviously, one assumption is that the word romanticism sends us to a full and real referent, even when there is no comprehensive agreement as to the flawless definition of this signified. That, on the other hand, a tentative map of this referential level is both desirable and possible will come out, one hopes, at the end of the volume, and as a result of reading it. Romanticism, as used by most (not all) of the contributors to the volume, and certainly by its editors, is the prevailing discourse and mode of writing (or even thinking) in Europe and North America during the half-century 1780–1830. Later impacts can be recognized, wave after wave, until the end of the twentieth century, not only in literature proper, but also in adjoining fields of writing, in the arts and in music, in philosophy and religion, and above all perhaps in the popular levels of entertainment, instruction, and media communication, which reached the widest strata of population available in the nineteenth and (at least indirectly) the twentieth century. It seems to me that neither the broad and comprehensive concept of romanticism (as promoted by Lovejoy and numerous others) — one of repeated and pendular categories — nor the “holistic” one (Wellek’s might be a good example, though not by far the only one) are preferred by the participants in this volume. Personally, I regard both these approaches as credible and serious, but I hesitate to identify with either of them. In our volume the tentative definition of the phenomenon coincides with an attempt to disclose its causes. The romantic discourse and state of mind at the turn of the nineteenth century is based on a dramatic expansion of human consciousness and knowledge in the West, and this in turn is justified by the attempt, no, the need, to account for the beginning globalization of the human society and of human experiences then taking place. While it is true that random or deliberate engagements with cultural and ethnic otherness can be detected throughout human history and in all societies, it was not until around and after 1500 that such an engagement becomes a systematic, a planet-wide project radiating from multiple centers and procedures and pursued by one culture for gain (of wealth, of power, of knowledge, of Salvation) no less than for the earnest pursuit of the good and of progress. It should not be difficult to admit that by or just before 1800 this project reaches fruition and that indeed the first shape of globalization (still uncertain in outline and in foundations) was facing human consciousness, first in the case of a few wide-looking or lucid individuals, but soon spreading to a growing number of diverse people. Simultaneously we can speak about an awareness of globalization as process: that is to say of a recognition (or impression) of a modified dynamics of human history. Again, this awareness belonged perhaps to a relatively small number of individuals first, but these were followed

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quickly, almost immediately, by an amazingly large number of other persons, who acquired the impression that they witnessed an unheard-of acceleration of human affairs going hand-in-hand with the expansion of these affairs: urbanization, industrialization, alienation, informational explosions, tendencies toward egalitarian democracy, individualist emancipation, rationalism and empiricism, a contractual and negotiated relationship, and the gradual ending of organic or tribal interactions. Romanticism is, I would maintain, the attempt of human subjectivity to come to terms with these twin phenomena of the expansion of human scope and the quickening pace of historical dynamics. As might have been easily expected, the reactions of the human mind in adjusting to events that radically modify human behavior and the very existential foundations of the species had to be in turn very broad and highly diverse. It should not have been hard to predict (and it is even easier to demonstrate) that some of these reactions were violently hostile and/or fearfilled: the process and its pace were seen as categorically adverse to the human state of affairs until then. This adversarial attitude emerged quite naturally in zones of the planet that were often the passive object of modernization, but they can also be recognized in Europe and North America themselves which were supposed to be the motors of the process. Philosophers, poets, political leaders, and fairly large and diverse strata of the population responded with sullen or brutal enmity to all that was happening and tried more than once to stop and reverse the trends of history. In all fairness, it must be said that the events themselves had a harshness that encouraged such hostility. Counter-revolutionaries were not exclusively, and I would go so far as to say not even primarily, part of the upper and privileged classes, but more often and in larger numbers the members of poor peasant societies who felt threatened in their traditions and identities by the newly emerging order of things. Simultaneously, of course, we notice (and sometimes celebrate) all those who acted as carriers and energetic forces pushing the movement forward : revolutionaries, visionaries, inventors, and creators of all kinds. As with the revolutionaries, such individuals are not confined to a single continent: Simón Bolívar is a typical symbol of all those who deeply modified South America, the revolutionary Framers of the constitution of the United States did something similar in North America, and the beginnings of urbanization and technological advance can be observed early in sundry parts of Asia. In Europe the movers of the English technological revolution and the leaders of the French political revolution, along with their admirers throughout the Continent, provide even more obvious cases. In between these two strong extremes, a bewildering multitude of combinations, of intermediate solutions and proposals and explanations, and of attempts to mediate arose. The mediations were addressed to the extremes themselves, those of enthusiasm and of recoil, but equally so to the relationship between the older state of affairs of mankind and the newer one that seemed to arise now. These mediations aspired to smooth over the asperity of emancipatory change and to inject kindness or graduality into the pace of progress, while not actually denying its validity. As a matter of fact, for what statistics are worth in situations of this kind, it is striking to notice that the number of variegated mediators is considerably larger than that of the defenders of more extreme attitudes, at least among intellectuals. In any case, the consequence of this agitated and multifaceted universe of responses — the consequence of this state of ferment (anxiety, joy, rational judgments, and so forth) — was an

I. General Introduction

3

unusual productivity. The decades before and after 1800 brought a wealth of images, concepts, projects, and ingenious plans such as we have rarely seen at any time in history. Even today, over 150 years later, we still hark back to this world, we still use it as a reservoir to refresh our own ideas, to solve dilemmas, to draw analogies, to shape concepts, and so forth. Naturally, this reservoir, or, to switch metaphors, this arsenal, can be found in imaginative writing above all: in poems, in novels, in dramatic plays, in short stories. I say naturally, because such literary vehicles are admirably suited to enacting scenarios of possibility good or bad. And, of course, the above-mentioned agitation had to do in decisive ways with future possibilities. The literary vehicles and genres could provide the widest freedom for options and for experimenting with what might be or what might have been. In fact, a quick look suffices to classify the romantic age among the most experimental literary ages of the world. Nevertheless, more pedestrian prose could also be yoked to the common endeavor. As a matter of fact, different kinds of non-imaginative or nonliterary writing could be at least as useful as the traditional genres in coming to terms with the rapidly transforming world outside. The writing of history and geography, for instance, was supposed to be a more objective exercise than the writing of a Gothic novel. Undoubtedly this is true up to a point. Historical and geographical description, when honestly pursued, endeavor to provide us with accurate images of zones in space and in time, to present correct and abundant raw information. Yet it cannot be denied that in the process of writing history and geography, elements of narrative and rhetoric become necessary. A structuring and ordering of the information must be devised according to rules that have much in common with those of poetry and novelistic fiction. At this point paraliterary genres become of great interest to literature. Precisely because they are more immediately involved with levels and angles of the signified, nonfictional prose genres can in their turn play with a vast array of possibilities. At the same time these margins of the literary must deal with the threatening (or surprising, or hopeful) facts themselves; they cannot claim to relegate them to the world of the merely potential (but not actual). In a word, a very good part of the writing activity of the period that we have chosen for examination is itself an attempt to examine the state of affairs of mankind at the given period, much as poetry or imaginative prose are. From all that was said before, it follows that the area is simply huge, and one single volume would never be able to begin to do justice to this enormity. However, the project can try to set itself up as a kind of road-indicator — it can give us a general survey of what is, or was, going on during the decades in question. It can try to suggest the approximate directions for further research, no less than some of the ways in which this research was, is, or might be undertaken. Hence this introductory material, which aspires to explain some of the intentions in the volume and some of the gaps. I will now try to review the main sections and to indicate what their purpose is, as well as what else might be done in connection with them. The volume begins with a section on romantic theoretical and critical writings. Obviously, this is one of the most momentous contributions of the romantic age to the intellectual tradition. It is the kind of writing that most unabashedly tackles the issues of the age and tries to explain them, to justify them, to qualify them, to critique them. Romantic literature simply cannot be understood without romantic criticism. It could even plausibly be argued that “criticism” (as we understand it nowadays) emerges during and through

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romanticism. If we look closely at the criticism of earlier ages, we are sometimes inclined to regard it as a different kind of enterprise altogether. Classical and neoclassical criticism resembled rhetoric more than modern criticism. Often they were just exercises in comparing a piece of literature to a table of rules. Literary history was all but unknown. In England for instance, we have to wait until the middle of the eighteenth century (with Dr. Samuel Johnson, with Thomas Warton, with Richard Hurd) to witness at least the beginnings of literary history. In Germany, the romantics themselves began to sketch the outlines of a history of literature. In France, Germaine de Staël’s groundbreaking works influenced the whole of Europe. East European literatures tried their hand at the same thing well after 1800. It is also interesting to note that major works of “Romance comparatism” (such as those of Sismondi or Ampère) in fact preceded histories of national Spanish, Italian, even French literature. By contrast, the studies of Coleridge and Hazlitt on Shakespeare are immediately recognizable as literary criticism on the same level with late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century writing. Likewise, the studies of Coleridge or Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel are literary theory in the same sense as the writings of Bakhtin or Croce. What is more, literary criticism and history as reinvented by the romantics accompany faithfully and indispensably the writings of the romantic poets and novelists. Even before romanticism “proper” may be said to begin, Diderot freely mixed criticism and literature, while Dr. Johnson and Lessing equally freely mixed neoclassical and romantic tenets. The Biographia Literaria was supposed to be a kind of companion piece to Wordsworth’s Prelude; the fragments of the Athenaeum were justifications of the mode of writing chosen by the Schlegel brothers themselves and by their friends or allies. Victor Hugo’s preface to Cromwell was at least as important as the play itself and as challenging to the audiences. Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is a piece of satirical literature no less than a piece of criticism. Shelley did not write just a defense of poetry in general, but, implicitly, an explanation of what his own poetry (and that of his friends) was trying to do. The great Scottish and London journals and reviews (the Edinburgh, its adversary the Quarterly, the London Magazine, and the Westminster a little later) became literally indispensable, while the initiatives of the Schlegels, Goethe, and Schiller, as well as sundry French initiatives were equally important as the vehicles for information and judgment responding to the Zeitgeist, as well as expressing it. Chateaubriand wrote with great competence and erudition about English literature. The Hungarian János Földi vindicated the writings of his friend Mihály Csokonai. The Romanians Asachi and Eliade-Ra˘dulescu were simultaneously poets and critics. In Italy Muratori, Gravina, Beccaria, Berchet, and a host of others almost supersede numerically the poets and in any case precede them. In Portugal, as early as the middle of the eighteenth century Luís Verney and F. J. Freire theorized a pre-romantic mode of writing. Folklore, in the wake of Herder’s pioneering works was extolled as the foundation for canonical literary writing in Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Slovakia, Russia, and elsewhere. The common denominator of romantic criticism, if we dare make such a broad generalization, is precisely that the right and the duty of the literary creator is to engage in visions that might help solve the conundrums and the uncertainties of the surrounding world. The more phantasmagoric or outlandish these huge images, the better chances they have of being right and helpful. Even more direct was romantic philosophy. We are usually faced with a kind of writing that wanted to provide an explanation of the world in which the religious values of the past could be

I. General Introduction

5

preserved in secular translation. This écriture could thereafter stand as an example of the best way of mediating between past and (post-religious) future. Yes, certainly, many philosophers, including Hegel and Schelling, also wanted to compose a historical explanation of why things unfold as they do. Still, I would maintain that the more general (though more hidden) purpose was the writing of idealist philosophy itself, through whose very existence a smooth continuity in the historical existence could be re-established. The ominous rift between the “contractual” modes of alienated existence and the “organic” (or biological) ways of organizing human society (which had persisted in various shapes over several millennia, had been common to virtually all the planet’s cultures, and perhaps could be traced to the earliest forms of tribal organization of hominids) might, philosophers believed, be bridged by an appropriate theory. The search for a common denominator uniting God, nature, and humanity could easily lead to indeterminacy and skepticism, and even above these to irony which was early on seen (particularly by the German romantics) as the key to any kind of valid thinking. Perhaps this was the remote cause for the explosive spread of aesthetics, a branch of human speculation that was to maintain a high profile for well over 150 years. Let us remember that the very term “aesthetics” (not to speak of the recognition of aesthetics as an autonomous discipline) dates only from the middle of the eighteenth century, even though activities that can be retrospectively annexed to the aesthetic are considerably older. However, the central role assigned to the beautiful by people as different as Chateaubriand, Shelley, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Kant, Coleridge, and Schiller, to name just a very few, must give us pause. What these and others have in common is the pacifying power that they attribute to the Beautiful. According to this theory, in the realm of aesthetics, progress and tradition, creativity and stability can coexist and collaborate. The very education of mankind hinges on the cultivation of the Beautiful, and somehow the Good and the True can be seen as its consequences. This theory may sound odd at the end of the twentieth century, but it was passionately believed and defended in the period we are talking about. In fact it was seen by many as an excellent and judicious substitute for revolution, violence, and action. There are many authors in whose texts the aesthetic, the theoretical, and the theological are so closely connected as to be virtually inseparable: Schleiermacher, Coleridge, Schopenhauer, and perhaps Solger might be numbered among them. It is also the case that the major philosophers of the age felt that it was part of their systematic duty to write on aesthetics or even to elaborate a systematic aesthetics: Kant, Hegel, Schelling come immediately to mind. It is only fair to add here that the growth and the development of other sciences occurs during the very same decades: linguistics, sociology, psychology, child pedagogy, ethnology, zoology and botany, different branches of medicine, and others yet could be adduced as examples. From Buffon to Lamarck and Cuvier is a long distance. Carl von Linné, Stephen Hales, and Joseph Priestley preceded by very few years the decades of romanticism. Close contemporaries like Sir William Jones, the Grimm brothers, Franz Bopp, and Rasmus Rask effected a true revolution in philology. Görres, Creuzer, and Benjamin Constant were just a few among those who laid the foundation for a comparatist examination of religions, myths, and symbols. Why did this happen? There are probably several explanations. Some of them have to do simply with the momentum of accumulating information and the desire to structure it; they need not overly concern us here. Others, however, are related, more or less closely, to the advances

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in philosophy and in literary criticism. To be more specific, such developing sciences tried to give account either of social phenomena or of individual (subjective) ones and to present them in a rational way. Indeed, we can go even a step further and speak about a certain romantic stylistic or slant in well-established hard sciences. Thus the way in which magnetism and gravity were foregrounded as expressions of the law of universal love and attraction are highly significant (by Faraday, Ampère, Arago, and so many others). The transformation of geology into a system of symbols by Goethe, Novalis, Hoffmann, and others is equally interesting. The foundations of psychology by Oken, Carus, even Mesmer, and the innovations in physics by Volta and Galvani have often been studied in great detail. Ørsted, Berzelius, Liebig, Ohm, and Gay-Lussac are figures characteristic of the age as much as any poet or king. Together they indicate how a certain (Foucauldian? Spenglerian?) episteme pervaded the discourses of the world at the time in most sections of intellectual endeavor, or at least reverberated in a multiplicity of forms. Among these multiplicities one that ought not to be forgotten because it was much visited by writers and because it was placed almost exactly at the borderline between the fictional and the nonfictional was the familiar or conversational essay, revived from what had once been its glorious age in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This vehicle was extremely convenient for authors of the romantic age, because it was flexible, it did not oblige them to definitive and disciplined statements, and yet it opened up a field of speculation in which all kinds of values could be played out one against the other. England saw a veritable explosion: Lamb, De Quincey, Hunt, Hazlitt, Landor, and Cobbett; the Spanish costumbristas added their own stylistics, and the “physiognomies” of Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, and south Slavic authors are their close correspondent. Many of these authors, English and Continental, resorted to old-fashioned methodologies but often in an ironic way. The expansions of a consciousness that tended to merge with natural reality could be seen in numerous ways at the time (and later) and have been observed by many students of the age (M. H. Abrams, H. Grierson, Harold Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, G. Hartman, Marshall Brown, and others yet). Probably historicity can be singled out as the most typical aspect. This is not to say that history as such was ignored until then: interest in the values and events of the past had been strong and frequent since Herodotus and Plutarch in Greece, as well as others in virtually all cultures that we can think of. However, recognizing the validity of the past as an extension of and as a continuing impact on the present had been much less frequent. What the romantic age was able to bring was an awareness of the presentness of the past, of its equality of rights with the present, or even with the future. Imagination, of course, played a central role here. The historical novel, as inaugurated by Walter Scott and continued by Manzoni, Cooper, Pushkin, Balzac, Willibald Alexis, Arnim, and dozens of others, aspired to be closely related with historiography itself, indeed, perhaps to be one of its branches. In turn history, as written by Thierry, Michelet, Carlyle, the Czech Palacky, the Romanian Balcescu, the Lithuanian Daukantas, the Russians Karamzin and Solovyov, openly resorted to “artistic” devices in its efforts to “bring back” the past. Rhetorical techniques, psychological inroads, pictorial modes, and imaginative completions of information gaps all became part of historical writing. Even more important, a passionate love of different periods of the past conferred upon them a certain dignity well over the mere “precursor” role to which it had been usually confined.

I. General Introduction

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Among the most notable are naturally the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, the Elizabethan Age, or other such more or less familiar historical episodes. However, the circle gradually expanded to include less familiar ages and even categorical otherness in the form of cultures that could not be seen as directly related to or paving the way for the current world. Dealing with the northern antiquity (Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian) was one step in this direction. Placing Hebrew first, Sanskrit thereafter among the sacred and inspiring “originary” languages on the same level as Greek and Latin was another. Valuing Polynesian (Diderot), Mesoamerican (Southey), Chinese, Indian (Hölderlin, Southey), Arabic (Shelley), Persian (Goethe), and other cultures or even religions had to follow logically. Here expansion in time and space combined with each other. The otherwise strange fad of “Ossianism” can serve as the foremost example. However the Finnish Kalevala might also be enumerated here, along with quasi-historical works by Scott and Southey, or with the numerous Hungarian poets and prose writers speculating on the historical-geographical status of their nation. The image of man underwent significant changes. The eighteenth century, the Enlightenment opinion leaders, the neoclassical spokesmen looked toward the masculine shape, the adult age, the white race, and the socially active and useful individual as models of which other forms of human existence were merely variants or perhaps exceptions. The romantic writers found that it was at least equally fascinating to turn toward women, children, advanced old age, nonWestern races and cultures, socially atypical and marginal figures, occasionally the mentally deranged, or at least individualistic and eccentric specimens. In other words, we can observe a certain turn from the typical toward the extremes of human imagery. The sphere of what can be accepted as human expanded considerably. This procedure is not merely decorative. On the contrary, I postulate that the actual carriers of romantic transformations were these models of men and society, that is clusters of values, attitudes, and collective constructs — partly deliberate, partly spontaneous — functioning as transmissible macro images, responding to historical needs, and able to determine isomorphic areas ranging from politics and economics to literature and the arts. At the same time, the decades of romantic preoccupation witnessed a marked increase in the field of cultural activities in which two or more fields of endeavor went hand in hand. Some of these were not more than cross-generic activities. The sharp separation between genres (tragedy and comedy, prose and poetry, and so forth) on which the stricter neoclassicist critics used to insist became a pleasurable game of transgression. The novels of Scott and of the German romantics are, as we know, riddled with short lyrics. Tieck, Grabbe, Słowacki, and Büchner show a marked preference for the tragicomic. New genres (the historical novel, sciencefiction) emerged. The idyllic and the didactic were interwoven already in the eighteenth century in literatures as different as Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian, or Lithuanian (Donelaitis). In other cases whole fields (the arts, music, philosophy) are combined with literature. Delacroix, Géricault, Bryulov, and Haydon are among the many who took subjects from literature for painting; Berlioz, Weber, Schumann, Schubert, and (slightly later) Liszt, for music. In the same way, descriptive literature tried to approach painting, while music was for the first time in the history of aesthetics proclaimed as the model for and the target of all other creative arts. E. T. A. Hoffmann was not the only figure to exercise himself creatively in both music and literature. Such efforts had not been unknown until then (let us remember that in the Renaissance they had

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been quite frequent), but the practice of combination became much better established and, in a sense, represented itself as an expansionary activity in literature. The depiction and theoretical representation of God also changes. Thus, for instance, deism had been the common denominator for many of the leading the eighteenth-century figures: God was seen as a somewhat cold technical creator — the famous clockmaker of the universe — situated high above the ecclesiastical complications and conflicts of benighted earthlings. Not so the deity of the romantics. In a good majority of typical philosophical and literary writing, God became deeply involved with the universe itself, with His creation, and this involvement more than once goes all the way to identification. Perhaps under the influence of Shaftesbury and Rousseau, we can notice a renewal of neo-Platonism and pantheism. The God imagined by romantic poets is wet, wild, and wooly and speaks to us out of thunderstorms, cascades, and deep dark forests. The “enthusiastic” movements (Christian and Judaic) that emerged or started spreading as early as the middle of the eighteenth century seemed to gain the upper hand. They are helped by the widely shared conviction that in the Beautiful, rather than in the True and the Good, sacrality expresses itself. Chateaubriand preached this position with tremendous success, but Coleridge, Schelling, and Mörike, preceded by Hamann and Blake were equally committed to it. Let us not forget that some of the earliest spokesmen for aesthetic (romantic) religiosity were precisely figures such as Hamann, Klopstock, Wackenroder, and even Rousseau. The questions that emerge in the face of such ambitious growth and inflation are: When did it all begin? How did it all develop? Like all categories associated with literary or even historical periodization, romanticism has its own difficulties and unpleasantries. Sharp borders are impossible to trace; absolute command and control can never be demonstrated inside a literary historical narrative. Similarities occurring in remote earlier or later periods can be adduced all the time with relative ease. Nevertheless, it would be unjust to close one’s eyes in the face of obvious phenomena. I refer to the manner in which throughout the eighteenth century many things that had barely survived on the margins of social and intellectual life tended to grow and to become central. Moreover, such growing trends reach a point where they merge and seek alliances with each other; they find themselves ready to occupy the center of the scene from which they had been banned until very recently. The growth of historical interest (“expansion in time”) begins early on: taste for popular sagas and ballads and for alternative mythologies can be noted in the early eighteenth century. Not only Richard Hurd, but even Addison and Steele showed an interest in ballads and other forms of popular literature. Perrault (or, arguably, La Fontaine) provided examples of folk creation. Robert Burns was lionized in Enlightenment London as the genuine and spontaneous voice of nature. It was not difficult to graft authentically surviving kinds of literary narrative and forms of versification onto the millennia-old pastoral tradition of versification. Each nation tried to discover (and sometimes actually invent) its own national epics: the Nibelungenlied, The Song of Igor’s Host (much debated as to authorship and age), El Cantar del mio Cid, the imaginatively fabricated manuscript collections of Králóve Dvur and Zelená Hora, and the Ossianistic fad all had as their purpose the validation of the vernaculars and their elevation to the level of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Travel literature existed during the seventeenth century (and much earlier), albeit sometimes in standard or predictable forms. During the eighteenth century, it swelled significantly: travel

I. General Introduction

9

inside Europe, at the margins of Europe, outside Europe (“expansion in space”). Fictional studies of the paranormal do not have to await the romantic decades: the Gothic novel and the Schauerroman put in appearances (and gain fans) by the middle of the eighteenth century. The same can be said about the alterities of culture: if Rasselas, the Lettres Persanes, and sundry plays by Racine and Lessing still evoke non-Western cultures as mere moral, psychological, or political lessons, we also observe how decade after decade otherness gains more respect and interest in itself, not as mere masks or contrastive backgrounds for Western dilemmas. The literature of the feminine (written by men or women) similarly gains in maturity decade after decade: Jane Austen and Germaine de Staël represent a culmination. The pure preference for an urban environment was shaken by a growing preference for nature or by rejections of the rationalized, civilization-controlled technologies. At the very least we can speak about doubts, debates, and uncertainties with regard to the balance between the natural and the artificial. The romantic view of sacrality would not have been possible without prior preparation by other subterranean mystical trends (from Böhme to Swedenborg, but now renewed by Ballanche, Saint-Martin, Baader, and so many others, men and women alike) or by the horizontally egalitarian movements of piety and religious enthusiasm in both western as well as eastern Europe: Protestant (Methodism, Herrnhuter movement, Pietism), Catholicism (soon thereafter), Hassidism in terms of both organization and recognition, but also the emergence of conservative Judaism. Both of these oppositional modes of religiosity were fundamentally protest movements against the rationalist structures of religion; interestingly, they found eloquent and passionate supporters among women to at least the same extent as men. The flowering of utopian visions (conservative, radical, revolutionary, national, idyllic) can be fully understood only in its connection with shifts in the perception and definition of sacrality. Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte would be prime examples: their theories are “hungry” in as far as they “swallow,” “digest,” and thus modify religion (though keeping it still recognizable). Coleridge created the outlines of a whole political sociology based on the symbiosis of church and state. Mme. de Krudener, Ballanche, and others who were passionate mystical apologists do not entirely avoid socio-political matters. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, which is often described as a series of approaches to utopia, contains in its imaginative projects rather meticulous indications of religious behavior and practice. Virtually every east European literature contains one or several attempts at an originary national (pre-Christian) mythology. Revolutionary figures such as Robespierre and others felt the need to outline an alternative kind of religious ritual, once the traditional one was overthrown or forbidden. The popularity of movements such as that of the Free Masons (among the upper classes) is due largely to the fact that it provided a utopianreligious substitute to older forms of religious expression. Criticism threw in its weight by admitting theoretically a multitude of additional discourses that had not been seen as strictly literary until that time. Even more important, it created supplementary or adversarial canons that confronted the classical and neoclassical traditions. The romantics managed to establish for themselves an impressive pedigree (Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Calderón) that could be placed proudly in the face of the Greco-Roman tradition. The increasing emphasis on music as the central artistic mode was also much more revolutionary at the time than we think nowadays: in earlier centuries music was generally regarded as mere amusement.



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While it is true that all these developments — and others yet — cannot be coordinated mechanically, and while it is also true that they found expression most often as contradictions, we can say that a general figura can be distinguished at least as intention and desire. The central human model of romanticism emerged with explosive force in the 1780s and 1790s in England and Germany and, in a different way, in France also. Until then, all the tendencies listed above were somehow sectional and thereby had a limited impact. Only when enough of these separate changes connected and found kinship among themselves does an alternative model of great appeal and energy come to life. At least in its first phase (revolutionary, political, and visionary), romanticism was full of absolute claims and explosive in its purposes. Such a pattern, subsuming the different trends, suggests the hope of a certain regeneration of the human race as a whole, a renewed beginning, and a secular salvation. Yes, the progress of the Western world would and did remain central in this general outline, and there was no serious intention to abandon entirely the accumulations, gains, and accomplishments of the past. Nevertheless, there was enough doubt and anguish about future advancements in the same direction that the call for a renewed memorization of the roots — of the earliest origins of humanity — could find a sympathetic hearing. This, I believe, may be said to be accepted by most of the contributors to this volume. Some of them obviously prefer to concentrate upon the unifying elements of the age, others upon its contradictions, but this seems to me somewhat less important: both exist. What remains a fact is that romanticism as such showed itself incapable of sustained growth and to be basically unstable. It is its later phases that proved more fertile. I will explain how in my conclusions to this volume.



II. Romantic Theoretical and Critical Writing

Among the various periods literary historians have been traditionally wont to discuss, none has been more self-consciously theoretical, more prone to efface the boundaries between its theory and its praxis, and more hospitable to subsequent theoretical elaboration than romanticism. Its congeniality to theoretical and philosophical examination notwithstanding, it has been famously difficult to define and has given rise to a considerable body of scholarship dealing centrally with the question of whether any meaningful definition is even possible. It is thus appropriate that a volume devoted to romantic nonfictional prose should begin with a section dedicated to the theoretical and critical writing of the period. Monika Schmitz-Emans’s essay offers a historical survey of the contrasting and sometimes contradictory efforts to define romanticism with regard to the literary traditions of several European countries and against the background of similar efforts in other arts, most notably the visual arts and music. Whereas her principal concern has been the ways in which various writers, philosophers, and artists associated themselves with romanticism as they understood it, John Isbell by contrast explores the complementary trajectory of the largely heretofore neglected means whereby writers have sought to disassociate or distance themselves from romanticism in one or more of its many and varied manifestations. The essay lays the foundation for a conceptualization of romanticism that envisions construing many elements that have traditionally been understood as the dialectical contrast to romanticism — Enlightenment and Klassik, for example — in a more complex relationship of mutual support and interfluence. The proximity of romantic theory and practice is also indicative of the importance of philosophical inquiry for romantic literature. Not only were some writers and theorists on close personal terms with important philosophers, they were also addressing many of the same questions. Manfred Engel and Jürgen Lehmann offer a view of one strand of the complex relationship between literature and philosophy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in their survey of the aesthetics of German Idealism — as articulated in thinking of Kant, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, and Hegel — and some of the main features of its reception in Germany, France, Great Britain, and Russia. Taking a narrower and more focused view of romanticism’s relationship to philosophy, Gerhart Hoffmeister invites attention to the aspects of Hegel’s thinking that had an important bearing on literature and discusses the intricacies of the reception of Hegel’s thought throughout Europe with particular attention given to the complex dynamics of its dissemination and influence in Russia. One of the earliest as well as most pervasive aspects of romantic theory and cultural politics was the heady endorsement it gave to the need for cultural communities throughout Europe to build their sense of national or ethnic identity on indigenous social and aesthetic norms rather than assimilated foreign models or ostensibly universal practices. This call to ethnic authenticity was sounded early in the history of romantic thought, continued well into the nineteenth century, and impinged on various aspects of national identity in countries that had long since emerged as modern nation-states — France, Great Britain, and Spain, for example — as well as in areas where a sense of nationalism was just beginning to emerge — Germany, Italy, many parts of



12 eastern Europe, as well as the Nordic region. Mary Anne Perkins reviews the thinking of Hamann and Herder with regard to the necessity of fostering distinctly national linguistic and literary traditions and traces the ramifications of their thought into subsequent writers. Carolyn Buckley-Fletcher invites attention to the efforts of Sir Walter Scott to capture aspects of traditional Scotch culture as examples of early ethnological research. Born in Edinburgh, Scott grew up in an area in which ancient practices and time-honored loyalties persisted to a degree paralleled in few other places in Europe. The way in which Scott was successful in collecting and recording these distinctive local practices that found such colorful exposition in his novels contributed to the nascent disciplines of ethnology and archaeology. Ranging from the complex challenge of defining romanticism and accounting for the telling ways in which nineteenth-century writers endeavored to dissociate themselves from inadequately narrow definitions of the tradition through the clearly philosophical foundations and implications of romanticism to the endorsement of an authentic sense of the national soul by the retrieval and preservation of the rapidly vanishing vestiges of a cultural patrimony, these essays suggest the breadth of romanticism’s critical discourse and the richly varied means it used in constructing a critical framework within which it could be understood. S. P. S.



Theories of Romanticism The First Two Hundred Years MONIKA SCHMITZ-EMANS University of Bochum

1.

What are we actually talking about when we talk about theories of romanticism?

Varying approaches to literary history use period designations of different kinds, origins, and suggestive power. Although they should serve to orient the reader, their breadth and lack of precision often lead to precisely the opposite result. Of all customary period designations, romanticism is among the most common. Recent studies and monographs on romanticism have typically begun with the confession that this term occasions grave problems of definition. The present brief survey neither can nor desires to avoid this stock topos. A presentation of theories of romanticism certainly cannot take that most elusive term as a universally understood and accepted point of reference. In spite of the problems accompanying the use of the noun romanticism and the corresponding adjectives (e.g. romantic) in a scholarly context, both expressions are frequently unavoidable and indispensable. Rather than avoiding the offending term in specifically literary as well as more broadly historical contexts, contemporary usage on the contrary often manifests a tendency toward excessive use. Scarcely any other period designation — be it a largely fictive construct or a product of more or less reflective formulation — seems so imperiled. The definition of romanticism as a concept in its ever-changing contexts has long been among the major problems at the heart of research on the topic. One the one hand, its historical development has involved such a wide-ranging polyvalence that a precise and rigorous conceptual-semantic determination is scarcely imaginable. On the other hand, it also involves for many a programmatic sense expressing their own aesthetic position that must accordingly be taken seriously. The polyvalence and diffuseness of the concept are often taken as reasons for distinguishing different “romanticisms” and have in the end led to the emergence of a separate branch of research — a kind of meta-scholarship — concerned with concepts of romanticism. The term romanticism, thus, would be an entirely plausible topic for discussion in the on-going debate between the conceptual nominalists and the realists. Although the term is highly connotative and in many respects a question of value judgments, its denotative character can be discussed. Is there something, for example, like a fundamental notion or an area of considerable conceptual overlap encompassing the many varied manifestations of what is usually termed romantic — something that can be called romanticism or the romantic? Both scholarly as well as colloquial usage claim the semantic field surrounding romantic even though the former is just as lacking in precision and is as value laden as the latter. The wide-spread encumberment of

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what is often designated romantic with the connotation of irrational may, as Gerhard Schulz presumes, have led to a judgmental attitude toward the very essence of romanticism. Cannot indeed virtually anything be called “romantic” and if so, what a powerful denunciation the appellation “romantic” becomes. What cannot be systematically grounded, though, can be narratively described. In this regard, the pragmatic approach proves just as effective as the well known and often used strategy of tracing the history of the idea. Such a recounting, though, will necessarily have to follow a tortuous path, among which the etymological is but one. Romanticism and the romantic, moreover, do not have the same history, to say nothing of the German Romantizistische. To discuss theories of romanticism in this way implies that problematic preliminary decisions — which are clearly in need of grounding but just as plainly can never be vigorously delimited — must be made about what romanticism involves. Whatever romanticism is taken to be is a result of implicit or explicit theoretical orientations, not the other way around. In a kind of performative process, the theory creates itself out of its own subject. Among a variety of other concerns, it must also be borne in mind that theories of romanticism may well also designate literary, aesthetic, or theoretical constructs in which the word per se does not appear, but they nonetheless have the character of romantic, programmatic texts whether they have been read as such or not. Specific historical disciplines — in their own unique but nonetheless often comparable ways — have monopolized the term romanticism. It is customarily used in the scholarly study of literature, art, and music, even though its meaning in musicology and art history is, perhaps, even less precise. Although literary and music history use the term in roughly parallel ways, art historians are still debating the utility of the word to denote a stylistic concept even though it has long since established itself as a period designation. Difficulties analogous to those in literary history have arisen in music history as well, notably in conjunction with the corollary concepts of classical and romantic. In music history, moreover, the importance of attention to reception in examining the complementary concepts of Romantik and Klassik is particularly marked. According to general consensus, Hoffmann “romanticized” classical instrumental music by his interpretations. Analogous claims can be made with regard to Goethe, who throughout Europe — outside of Germany — is considered a romantic. Curiously it has become customary to associate the works of late French literary romanticism (those appearing after 1830) with the aspirations of Young Germany and to contrast them with German romanticism, but musical manifestos as well as individual works were categorized as romantic to the extent that they were allied with Young Germany. Even in recent music scholarship, the use of the term Romantik as the designation of a style has occasioned confusing attempts to establish consistent terminology. Just as in literary history, however, tendencies and characteristics of what is typically labeled romantisch can be distinguished. What in literary research can command a certain thematological interest in music is attributed to a taste for the popular, nationalistic, or the exotic, a fact that complicates the formulation of a clearly contoured conception of the Romantik. To label an individual composer a Romantiker (romantic) is correspondingly problematic since there was no movement or school that conceived of itself as romantic. Just as in literature, the idea of a romantic school is the invention of historians. For those who inquire about the literary-aesthetic meaning of the word Romantik, the vagueness of the musical

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concept is even more lamentable. Since precisely music has traditionally been accorded a central position in the discussion of the movements popularly labeled romantic — particularly with reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann — a more precise specification of the nature of the musical Romantik might have been expected to provide insight into what the literary Romantik is. Even though Hoffmann developed some engaging ideas, this expectation will inevitably meet with disappointment on several counts, not just in terms of its inherent polyvalence in a music-historical context, but also because — even if any circumstantial evidence existed — the term applies principally to instrumental music in which the comparison between musical and literary works is a fundamentally problematic undertaking: concepts like theme, content, and reference have emerged as possible tertium comparationis. Warnings against the careless use of the word romantisch as a collective designation embracing connotations of all manner of imprecise ideas are appropriate not only in the context of music history and aesthetics, but also in terms of the work of the literary historians. The initial consequence of this caveat is that the object of scholarly research — both in music as well as literary history — cannot actually be die Romantik, but rather must be the question of what this concept is understood to mean. In their seminal Theory of Literature, René Wellek and Austin Warren invoke romanticism as an illustration of the problematic nature of period designations. The suggestion they advance for using period designations is based on the Kantian concept of a “regulative idea,” which asserts on the one hand the need of consciously maintaining the character of such concepts as heuristic constructs but on the other of working with them even where access to the object of investigation is not possible either in terms of or beyond theoretical constructs. Thus, Romantik — however interpreted — is not just a period designation, but is also a stylistic concept or psychological description of a typology. It is precisely in this context that Fritz Strich — following in Wöfflin’s footsteps — juxtaposes classical and romantic on the one hand with completion and infinity. This superimposition of the historical on a (constructed) systematic paradigm, however, leads to further ambivalence.

2.

The History of the Concept of the Romantik

The idea might arise of systematically tracing the history of the word Romantik as a means of finding a path through the history of the concept. The history of a word and the history of its meanings, however, run parallel to one another only in certain segments of their individual trajectories. Moreover, broader parameters come into play with regard to the history of words: the history of the novel (Roman) as a genre is not by chance related etymologically to Romantik. Both derive from the name of the city, Rome. The lexical history of Romantik begins with the Old French root romanz, which designates the romance — i.e. vernacular — languages of the people as opposed to the scholarly language, Latin. As prime examples of literature in the language of the people, Provençal verse and prose narratives are called romances; their subject is for the most part knightly stories of adventure. The word Roman was later derived from romance. In 1650, Thomas Bailey used the adjective romantick for the first time in the sense of novel-like, fabulous, adventurous, fantastic, or unrealistic, and thus in a critical sense. The history of the concept of romantisch is hence linked to the history of the genre of the novel

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(Roman). Gradually stories about horror and love joined the chivalrous accounts — i.e. the gothic and sentimental genres — such that the concept of romantisch is charged with connotations of the uncanny, the horrible, the extraordinary, and the latently pathological. A strong connection also exists with the concept of sublime nature. In 1790, at the beginning of his epic poem, Oberon, Wieland challenges the muses to saddle the Hippogriff for his ride into the ancient romantic land, and therewith, he means a ride into the land of medieval knights. What is conjured up here in a programmatic way is the epoch of romances, the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. During the seventeenth century, the concept of the Romantische was used to embrace the typical characteristics of landscape painting — particularly the works of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa — in order to point out their emotive qualities. The Romantische and the painterly were to some extent synonyms. Romantisch meant near to nature and thus by simple extension turned away from the world of social constructs and reality. In distinction to its use in critical contexts, the term romantisch gradually established itself as a historical category, and therein begins the actual history of the word Romantik as a scholarly concept. In eighteenth-century literature, which contributed to the acceptance of the semantic field around this term, the adjective romantisch is used in the sense of novel-like, i.e. having the qualities of a narrative. Early on, the connotations were always of fairy tale-like, remarkable, old fashioned, ancient, popular, childlike, rare and exotic, knightly, chivalrous, and finally even nocturnally dark, ghostly, dreadful, and horrible. The content or general mood of a work, thus, could at that times be called romantisch without any recourse to historical considerations. In a letter to Goethe of June 28, 1796, for example, Schiller characterized Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as romantisch with reference to characters like Mignon and the harp player, i.e. with reference to the notable events of the novel. In yet another letter of June 26, 1797, Schiller called Goethe’s outline for an epic hunting poem romantisch but in this case with reference to the rare and surprising elements. The concept of the Romantische, which temporally preceded romanticism proper, is for the whole of the eighteenth century a rather vague and diffuse label for all manner of things. All of these diverse tendencies, however, share several common points of departure: first, Rousseau’s concept of nature and of natural manifestations themselves, i.e. that which in a Rousseauistic sense qualifies as primal, natural, or wild. The adjective, however, also acquired the secondary meaning of critical of civilization and even occasionally of society. Secondly, the career of the word romantisch is also closely associated with the development of late eighteenth-century historical consciousness. Authors like Herder voiced the demands of the succeeding generation to transform adjectives like romantic into historical-philosophical categories. The concept of the romantic functions during the romantic period — as Goethe’s Reflexionen show — primarily as a counterexample to the classical, particularly to classical antiquity. This perception does not, however, ultimately mean that the history of the concept of romantic literature, of a romantic genre, or of a romantic work is intimately and inextricably bound up with the historical consciousness of the declining eighteenth century and can only be understood in the context of that historical paradigm. In marked distinction to the longstanding and predominant orientation toward classical antiquity and classical literature, the second half of the eighteenth century formulated the concept of a specifically modern culture that is characterized by Christianity,

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significantly differentiated from antiquity, and integrated into all European Christian nations. Romantic art is, thus, justifiably understood as modern art. Modern art in this sense, thus, manifested itself most prominently in the genre of the novel whose designation in many languages is etymologically linked to the Romantische. The accelerating development of the semantic field can be easily demonstrated etymologically. The noun Romantik was used for the first time in a novel by Johann Gottwerth Müller where it refers to the work of the hero of the novel, who is a writer. Novalis used the word Romantiker in 1799 as a synonym for novelist, and Friedrich Schlegel understood romantische Kultur to mean the culture of a novel (circa 1800). In his “Gespräch über die Poesie” (Conversation on Poetry) Friedrich Schlegel defines the novel as a romantisches Buch (romantic book). During the declining eighteenth as well as the first half of the nineteenth century, the adjective romantisch enjoyed the status of an utterly fashionable word as just a few examples can well illustrate. A. W. Schreiber wrote a “Romantische Erzählung” (1795); C. A. Vulpius, “Rinaldo Rinaldini, eine romantische Geschichte” (1798); A. v. Tromlitz, “Das stille Thal: Ein romantisches Gemählde” (1799); and Caroline Lessing, “Die Mexicanerin: Historisch-romantisches Heldengedicht in sechs Gesängen” (1829). Schiller called the Jungfrau von Orleans a “romantische Tragödie.” Carl Maria von Weber labeled his Freischütz a “romantische Oper” (1820). Even with its inherent ambivalence as the designation of both a style and a period, the term Romantik was widely used by authors programmatically included within its conceptual perimeter. Friedrich Schlegel identified himself as a romantic author but used the concept of the Romantische primarily in terms of his well known literary agenda linking it with the concepts of universality and progress. Universal, however, means many things: a synthesis of individual literary genres, the inclusion of philosophy, and the study of nature within the literary process, as well as the opening up toward life. In this definition lie the seeds of the problems that have subsequently arisen — even in the context of today’s critical discourse — in attempting to arrive at a definition of the concept of romantisch. That which from the beginning is not built on consistent definitions — poetry that should always be in the process of becoming — cannot be accommodated within any conceptual framework. Although Friedrich Schlegel is certainly the most influential theoretician of the new romantic art, Novalis — who conceived of romanticizing as a comprehensive activity in the spirit of an ongoing exponential expansion — provided an important fleshing out of the romantic self-consciousness. Friedrich Schlegel’s brother, August Wilhelm, also made important contributions in stressing the historical aspects of the romantic. In a series of public lectures delivered between 1798 and 1808 in Jena, Berlin, and Vienna, August Wilhelm amplified what can be called romantic discourse or romantic culture. What is particularly notable in these literary-historical lectures is Schlegel’s turn toward the modern. He no longer draws his examples, as had been the case up to this juncture, from antiquity, but rather discusses Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Milton, Rousseau, Fielding, Klopstock, Lessing, and Goethe. Romanticism here achieved its most import role as a basis for contrastive analysis: A. W. Schlegel’s lectures in Berlin, Lectures on Beautiful Literature and Art (1801– 1804; Vorlesungen über schöne Litteratur und Kunst), consist of a history of classical literature as well as a contrasting history of romantic literature. In the latter, Schlegel includes the literary histories of major European countries since the Middle Ages and thereby ushers in the concept

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of a romantic literature and culture. Schlegel wanted to demonstrate the existence of a romantic — i.e. a characteristically modern — universal, unchanging, and immortal poetry not arising from the foundation of classical antiquity. These precepts were further developed in the Viennese Lecture on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808; Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur). As a result, romanticism emerged — mistakenly but in consequence of the need for a distinction from antiquity — in a completely undifferentiated way with its definition shortcircuited by the appeal to Christianity as a defining characteristic. A. W. Schlegel saw in Christianity a cohesive potential for uniting the particular romantic movements in the individual European countries. He was less concerned with the confessional content than with the foundational, conceptual structure, particularly with the tendency toward interiorizing and psychologizing religious experience. His thinking, thus, came to link the aesthetic with the psychological — a gesture fraught with serious consequences — and spiritual concepts assumed an aesthetic-theoretical sense. With this gesture, he opened the gate for romanticism to be understood as a manifestation of a psychic sensitivity, as a longing turned toward the infinite, a concept that even in the twenty-first century still plays an important role in the conception of romanticism. Among his contemporaries, A. W. Schlegel’s lectures had a long-lasting effect. They were translated into many different languages, and their central ideas were ultimately popularized by Mme de Staël. They also ultimately gave rise to arguments about particularly distinctive national forms of romanticism that persist to this day. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the development and articulation of the idea of a romantic art and literature occurred within a narrowly circumscribed yet complex context of social-historical changes. This elaboration of romantic thought contributed to the growing complexity of bourgeois culture that was itself oriented toward the future but notably was also obsessed with reconfiguring its past. Although it has long since become common practice to speak of romantic politics, philosophy, theology, natural science, and medicine, a clear conceptual link to a central and unifying ground of romantic thought in this context is not to be taken for granted. Analogous uncertainties arise in observing the richly varied manifestations of European romanticism. From the perspective of individual national literatures and consistent with a broad consensus in specialized specific disciplines, these varied manifestation have led to the development of specific differing strains of romanticism; precisely for the sake of surveys and comparisons, though, they invite (problematic) questions concerning a common romantic substratum. Although Blake’s ground breaking work certainly cannot be overlooked, Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798) written for the 1800 edition and expanded in 1802 is often regarded as the beginning of English romanticism. Here once again poetry became the central focus, just as it had been in the case of Friedrich Schlegel. Literary historians, however, still debate whether one can legitimately speak of a French romanticism at the beginning of the century. Instead French romanticism is viewed as having commenced belatedly, not with Chateaubriand’s René (1802) and Sénancour’s Oberman (1804), but rather in 1830 with the scandal surrounding Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830) or in other words with the “Préface à Cromwell” (1827). The crucial factor in this dating is the requirement of seeing an epoch begin with a sensational event, that is to say with a manifesto. It must also be borne in mind, moreover, that in France romanticism did not become a viable antagonist to

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classicism until it drew drama — which had been particularly associated with classicism — within its sphere of influence. In music history, the significance of Hernani corresponds to that of the Symphonie fantastique by Berlioz (1830). In his novel Oberman, Sénancour, for example, differentiates between the romanesque — which he discredits — and the romantic, which he explicitly admires. With “romanesque,” he meant what had previously been called romantic, i.e. works that were principally lawless, fantastic, even untruthful, and written in the vernacular. Sénancour contrasts the romanesque novel with drama’s adherence to prescribed norms. In elevating the romantic above the romanesque, he ennobles the former, which, consequently, became a serious competitor of the classical. The beginnings of a value-laden differentiation of romanticism are also repeatedly taken up during the early nineteenth century. Right from the beginning on into contemporary colloquial usage, romantic has functioned as a convenient concept to oppose to any other competing system of thought. The precise meaning of romanticism, thus, changes, according the counter-conception, which could and still can originate in the aesthetic as well as in the ethical-social sphere. The scale of implicit values linked to the concept of the romantic extends from sympathetic to repulsive, from sublime to laughable. Goethe’s various individual pronouncements critical of romanticism are both noteworthy and notorious. He for example remarked to Eckermann on April 2, 1829 with regard to contemporary French poets who wanted to be considered romantics: The classical I call healthy and the romantic, sick, and thus the Nibelungenlied is classical like Homer, because both are healthy and diligent. Most recent literature is not romantic because it is new, but it is rather weak and sickly, and the older literature is classical not because it is old, but rather it is strong, happy, and healthy.1 2 April 1829 (19:300)

Even while the concept of a romantic culture was emanating from Germany, it served in large measure as an aesthetic-poetological construct for legitimizing the new and novel as precisely that which the literature of the period understood itself to be. “Modern” art and literature were accordingly to be grounded in their historical and most characteristic national traditions. This diachronic interpretation of romanticism became more pervasive and encompassing as a result of its interpretation as a stylistic category. This categorization of romanticism as the contemporary is as a result of certain stylistic qualities and thematic preferences. Jean Paul’s Vorschule der Ästhetik, (Elementary School of Aesthetics) whose fifth section bearing the title “Über romantische Poesie” (On Romantic Poetry) offers an exposition of the romantic agenda, owes much to these central themes. The age-old conflict between the ancients and moderns is thematized as well as the viability of the Greeks’ serving as exemplary models. Jean Paul supports the historically unique: for him contemporary poetry is fundamentally different from that of the ancients because it emerges from a different consciousness and divergent feelings. In endeavoring to describe the stylistic hallmarks of romanticism’s new contributions, he explores above all the difference between the limited and the unlimited and in so doing notably interprets the unlimited as the infinite. He understands that the romantic tendency to transgress boundaries has reference not just to a spatial context but also to the temporally remote. Indeed, the defining characteristic of the romantic era is its orientation toward the future. In the programmatic and theoretical texts by romantic writers themselves as well as in the later historical assessments of the tradition, the relationship between romanticism and Christianity

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is always thematized, which clearly merits a carefully nuanced and discriminating assessment. The idea of romantic art and literature — indeed the idea of an entire romantic culture — is closely linked to a recollection of the “Christian” Middle Ages emerging from a post-classical and in that sense Christian self-consciousness. At the same time, this historicizing of consciousness led to the recognition of the Christian era as just one period among many, as a delimited span of history whose value and cultural manifestations must therefore and in this context be considered relative and contingent. It can, moreover, by no means be decided what the romantics and theoretician of romanticism imagined “Christianity” to be. The romantic dissatisfaction with the limited and finite is in Jean Paul’s case interpreted as a consequence of the Christian condemnation of the finite, sensory world. In Vorschule der Ästhetik, he succeeded in linking romanticism’s historical-philosophical background with its aesthetic implications. The aestheticstylistic characteristics of romantic literature that he presents were motivated by ideologicalhistorical circumstances and were at once thereby legitimized. It is, therefore, immediately obvious why the relatively backward orientation of romantic culture is at the same time an alignment with the future: the Christian Middle Ages taught the romantics to ignore the present and look toward the spatially as well as temporally remote. Jean Paul’s concept of the romantic is in a representative way progressive. In this regard, the semantic field around romantic has one particularly curious aspect. Given the romantic’s supposed and actual enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, it is particularly surprising that what is perhaps the essence of their thinking is articulated in terms of the struggle to legitimize the new, which in day to day terms implied a conservative orientation toward the past. (The recent history of the concept, however, is under the influence of more modern developments.) Notably in Germany, the homeland of romanticism as a broadly encompassing cultural legacy, the critical engagement with the increasingly vague use of the term began very early. Eichendorff lamented that the word romantic had ever been coined (erfunden in the denigrating sense of an arbitrary construction). By the middle of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Tieck had already turned his critical attention to the widely circulating notion of a romantic school and disputed that romantic poetry was per se a distinguishable genre. For him, there was no difference between poetic and romantic, and he rejected the position often attributed to him as the head of the romantic school. During the post-romantic period, romanticism experienced extremely divergent assessments. Not even the question of whether romanticism would be better served by examining it in terms of polarities and the establishment of conceptual dichotomies or of synthesizing and analogizing methods elicited any consensus. Although Fritz Strich, for example, understood and interpreted classicism and romanticism as complementary concepts, Benno von Wiese deems it inappropriate to break romanticism out of its overall integration into the Age of Goethe. In the history of the concept of romanticism, different phases can be readily distinguished. A very early and subjectively engaged critique with long-lasting consequences for what the nineteenth century ultimately grouped under the heading of romanticism was offered by Heinrich Heine. His essay, Die romantische Schule, written in 1836 is a witty polemic, which does not altogether avoid over simplification in its examination of the topic: Heine identifies romanticism with Christianity and a willingness to suffer, and in turn Christianity with Catholicism, and

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Catholicism with reactionary politics. He polemically denies any connection between the Enlightenment and romanticism, which he rather regarded as antagonistic movements. Fascinated by individual authors, he took into consideration most of the writers today typically associated with romanticism, but above all sought allies in the struggle against reactionary politics whom he readily found in Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean Paul although the Schlegel brothers and their circle remained suspicious. According to Heine, Mme de Staël paid tribute to the romantic school and promoted the various positions it espoused; according to her, the school was essentially a reawakening to the poetry of the Middle Ages as manifested in songs, paintings, poetry, and architecture — indeed in life — that arose out of Christianity like a blossom that sprang from the blood of Christ. While living in Paris, his highest priority was to correct this image — formulated and propagated by Mme de Staël — that the French had of the German romantics, and he hit upon the idea of a romantic school, which, though, had never existed. Heine the polemicist, however, was searching for his own distinctive literary identity at the time he was writing the Romantische Schule and was, thus, far from a disinterested observer with historical distance. During the first post-romantic generation, the initial progressive impulses of the romantic movement lapsed into indifference and were quickly forgotten. A few years later, romanticism was also sharply criticized by Theodor Echtermeyer and Arnold Ruge writing in the Hallische Jahrbücher (1839–40). Their manifesto entitled, “Der Protestantismus und die Romantik,” is most notable for its fundamental anti-reactionary attitude. During much of the nineteenth century, other representatives of the liberal historiography also retained this critical attitude toward romanticism and the sense of history that emerged from it. Among the most important is Georg Gottfried Gervinus, author of Geschichte der poetischen Nationallitteratur der Deutschen (1835–42) and Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts seit den Wiener Verträgen (1855–66), which equate romanticism with an alienation from reality and ultimately escapism. Gervinus portrays romanticism’s reactionary nature — a combination of anti-rationalism and an aversion to progress — as its central tenet supported and sustained by an anti-classical attitude derived from an antipathy toward the French. Among the other liberal nineteenth-century critics of romanticism who aligned themselves with this point of view, Hermann Hettner, Julian Schmidt, and August Koberstein deserve mention. With greater historical distance, however, the perspective again shifted. Rudolf Haym, for example, emerged as a liberal who wanted to evaluate romanticism more objectively and in 1870 warned of a severe lack of critical discrimination in the evaluations of romanticism’s intellectual content offered up to that point. But Haym’s own evaluations resembled his more descriptive presentations: he saw a mixture of scholasticism and mysticism as the fundamental characteristic of the romanticism. Haym had a significant impact on subsequent research on romanticism, and his contributions to developing a synthesizing vision and wide-ranging perspective are substantial. His comparison of romanticism with the Enlightenment was influential and has long served as a point of departure for Marxist literary criticism. Haym himself no longer saw the reactionary attitudes as menacing because he considered himself a part of a new era of national progress. Romanticism, thus, appears for the first time as a clearly historical phenomenon, which can be evaluated from a safe distance. This development signaled the beginning of the critical and scholarly investigation of romanticism. There can be, however, no thought here of an objective

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and disinterested assessment of romantic culture. The fundamentally conservative attitude that characterized Wilhelminian Germany prompted an interest in romanticism at the expense of liberalism and Enlightenment values. Wilhelm Scherer, an important positivist, concentrated on late romanticism and its turn to the life of the fatherland, which he took to be revolutionary. Scherer also contrasted romanticism with the Enlightenment and adopted a nationalistically tinged, partisan position that anticipated many of the attitudes prevalent in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s. During the declining nineteenth century, it was particularly appealing to commentators to play romanticism’s heightened sense of the value of the past off against the present. Even Wilhelm Dilthey, a liberal-minded conservative, supported this tendency in his view of poetry as an articulation of Erlebnisse (events) and his rejection of rationalism in which he in turn grounded his interest in romanticism. Oskar Walzel, Hermann August Korff, and Fritz Strich — indeed all of the literary the scholars oriented toward ideological history (Geistesgeschichte) — followed in Dilthey’s and at the same time in the early Hegel’s footsteps. The characteristic attempt of these scholars to localize romanticism within a dialectical system is fundamentally Hegelian. Working within this hermeneutic context, Hermann August Korff traced the course that in his opinion the spirit of the Age of Goethe had taken in progressing dialectically from the Enlightenment through Sturm und Drang to classicism, early romanticism, and ultimately high romanticism. The reception of romanticism around the turn of the century was also significantly influenced by Lebensphilosophie, and against this background, the neo-romantic movement established itself during the years around 1900. Neo-romanticism was accompanied by a tendentious re-evaluation of the past that to date has for the most part only been viewed in one-sided, politically conservative — that is to say reactionary — terms, but the neo-romantics’ progressive character has been recently rediscovered and is typically seen as pointing toward new avenues of inquiry. Ricarda Huch’s well-known monograph is extremely positive vis-à-vis the topics it investigates and, thus, manifests an attitude typical of the scholarship at the end of nineteenth century. Against the background of the neo-romantic movement, the first viable scholarly editions of the works of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Kleist were also published. Since the beginning, the study of romanticism has been undertaken within the context of intersecting dynamic tensions resulting from the competing Weltanschauungen of divergent movements, which is indicative of the changing efforts to monopolize the contrasting positions associated with progress and reaction. And thus it continued. After the defeat of Germany in the First World War, German research on romanticism more than ever conceived of itself as a Germanic contribution to the national polity, and romanticism, thus, displaced classicism at the pinnacle of German intellectual life. Numerous attestations of this nationalistic derailment could be cited, even from scholarly sources like Paul Kluckhohn and Julius Petersen. In any event, anti-intellectualism — the opposite of rationalism, mechanistic thinking, and materialism — as well as the religious and metaphysical striving for eternal values were positively appraised as fundamentally romantic attitudes that expressed the contemporary individual’s elective affinity with romanticism. This kind of German scholarship developed many features that eventually became points of contact for National Socialism, as would shortly become self-evident. Since the nineteenth century, the nationalists — like other Europeans, conservatives as

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well as liberals — have sought to follow in the footsteps of romanticism’s development by using opposing concepts and dialectical methods of investigation to interpret romanticism from the point of view of a subordinated other, i.e. to conceive of romanticism as emerging as the antagonist of another position. According to the widespread consensus favoring this nonetheless controversial assessment, romanticism arose out of a process of differentiation. Oscar Walzel, almost as a surrogate for others, drew a line between “German romanticism” and classicism, and Hermann August Korff proclaimed the essence of romanticism is its perfect antithesis to the Enlightenment. Aspects of Goethe’s criticism of romanticism were resurrected anew during the twentieth century. Korff identified the primacy of fantasy as the organizing principle of romanticism in that the fundamental dichotomy distinguishing poetry from science — i.e. distinguishing fantasy from understanding — demarcates the conceptual horizon. According to Korff, romanticism is sick as a result of its limitless exaggeration of fantasy; romanticism remains, thus, profoundly suspect. Romano Guardini interpreted romanticism as a fantasy culture, which, as such, should be regarded in opposition to rationality. The old Goethean topoi concerning the pathologic nature of romantic fantasy are by no means dated or obsolete. As recently as 1951, Morse Peckham distinguished between positive and negative romanticisms, a rather dubious beginning that cannot deny its origin in the metaphor of sickness and health. In contrast, other efforts at polarizing differentiation appear more promising, for example Marcuse’s attempt to draw a line between reactionary and progressive romanticism or his endeavors in this late essays to draw distinctions among feudalistic, liberal, and socialistic romantics. At this juncture, a remark about the reasons why up to this point predominantly German theoreticians — supporters as well as detractors — of romanticism have been repeatedly mentioned would be appropriate. Scholarly discussions of romanticism in German-speaking countries have been undertaken in an especially lively and intensive manner, just as the leading role within the European romantic tradition generally must be attributed to German literature and theory. Romanticism was first conceived by Germans, who naturally made consistent reference to the comprehensive context of Western cultural history. A. W. Schlegel’s explanation of romantic culture is a pioneering accomplishment, which not only described romanticism as the insignia of a new epoch, but also — performatively — simultaneously inaugurated it. Jean Paul, indeed not often discussed as a romantic, anchored central aspects of romanticism in poetics. Hegel’s “Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik” (1816; Lectures on Aesthetics) — which express the sovereignty of the spirit over the external world — provided the first philosophical analyses of romanticism indicating the direction of future research. With the dawning of the romantic era according to Hegel’s analysis, the realm of the externalities could no longer express inwardness, but music, he argued, the medium least bound to the external world, was the ideal medium for romantic expression. The characteristically Hegelian interpretation of romanticism as strikingly modern opened the door for those critical evaluations of romanticism, which were formulated in the course of the nineteenth century. In much of western Europe outside Germany, romanticism was for a long time perceived primarily as a German phenomenon. During the period of the restoration of the French monarchy, romanticism established itself in France. The situation in Italy, though, was quite different. There in the home of classical culture, no critical concept rivaling antiquity needed to be constructed for the sake of a contrast with romanticism. Thus a

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definition of romanticism based on an opposition to a contrasting critical construct did not appear in Italy. English romanticism, moreover, did not emerge in terms of any kind of oppositional framework; indeed, the boundary dividing the classicists from partisans or precursors of romanticism can scarcely be distinguished. In German-speaking countries, however, the need for conceptual constructs that limited, differentiated, and even polemically contrasted with romanticism predominated. Modifications and reevaluations of the concept resulting from experience with it can be more clearly illustrated in Germany than in the critical literature of other countries. Historically speaking, romanticism was primarily the domain of scholars interested in German literature and culture, and it is no coincidence that the history of research on romanticism is closely allied with the history of German studies. The formulation of subcategories and organizing principles, which were supposed to record the subordinate, inner nuances of romanticism, has invited considerable ingenuity. Terms like older and younger or even early, high, and late romanticism have been employed, and they are still commonplace today in literary histories and anthologies. Furthermore, different romanticisms — those associated with Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin — have often been distinguished. Occasionally a single romanticism — usually the late one — has been declared the one actual romanticism at the expense of the others. Despite good intentions, this procedure has not gone very far in the direction of eliminating confusion. Egon Friedell, who insists on a clear line of demarcation between earlier and later romanticism, portrays the former as being exactly as rational as the French Revolution; the later, in contrast, is presented as the authentic romanticism, a highly unified, broad-based, pan-European movement that can only be characterized in negative terms. Precisely by stressing the pan-European aspects of romanticism, Friedell has effectively distinguished himself from numerous other commentators. Literary histories outside of Germany have typically favored a broadly European conception of romanticism as opposed to defining it in contrast to classicism or rationalism. These presentations typically involve a sweeping and generally inclusive concept of romanticism and focus attention on overarching concerns like romantic fantasy, basic poetological positions and categories, the psychological dimensions of romantic literature, and the development of so-called black romanticism. German literature around 1800 is generally regarded outside of Germany — if here a generalization might be allowed — as part of a supra-national literary movement characterized by a changing self-consciousness searching for new expressive possibilities and above all as a tradition asserting its own autonomy. From a European comparative perspective, German literature between circa 1770 and 1800, thus, is typically perceived as romantic, and the development of new formal and stylistic possibilities appeared as a plausible consequence of this new self-understanding. Romanticism, thus, became the object of research within the broader context of comparative literature quite naturally on the basis of its interpretation as a European phenomenon.

Theories of Romanticism 3.

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Guiding Theses for Characterizing the Romantic

If one were to attempt to account in a systematic way for the efforts to define the concept of romanticism continuing after two hundred years, recurring or guiding theses may prove helpful. Thesis 1: Romanticism is the Modern. From the beginning, the term romantic circulated as a counterconcept, and it received its specific meaning primarily in the context of the discussion of a normative meaning of the so-called classical as the historical and canonical. Hegel concluded in his Ästhetik that the classical art of Greece was gone and could not simply be revived. According to Hegel, there can be nothing more beautiful than the art of ancient Greece, but something higher may emerge. By higher, he means romantic art and literature as the forms of expression of modern reality. Mme de Staël began her treatise written under the influence of A. W. Schlegel, De l’Allemagne, in an analogous manner. In France, the term classical is generally used in the sense of exemplary. Under Schlegel’s influence, Mme de Staël made recourse to the conceptual pair classicalromantic in that the past is attributed to the first, the present to the second. This attribution of meaning to classical and romantic in historical terms implies that even that which in German literary history is typically called (German) classicism is subsumed under the more general rubric of romanticism. From a French point of view, Goethe and Schiller are right down to today most likely considered romantics. Thesis 2: Romanticism Represents a Decline. G. G. Gervinus, the influential nineteenth-century German scholar and co-founder of German studies as a scholarly discipline, worked with the conceptual pair classicism-romanticism in a hierarchical and therefore contrasting sense, in which romanticism was privileged and, thus, critically elevated. In historical terms, German classicism in Weimar around 1800 could be regarded as the recovery of the classical perfection of antiquity after which, according to Gervinus, there followed a drastic decline. “Degeneration,” “vacuity,” and “romantic nihilism” defined the landscape. Since Gervinus such hierarchical contrasts of classicism and romanticism have often been repeated. It should be noted that the first thesis — romanticism as modern — and the second — romanticism as a decline — are by no means contradictory. On the contrary, in the course of the nineteenth century, a historical consciousness developed according to which history is a process of decline. The more modern, the more decadent: this basic conceptual configuration illustrates its effects temporally as well in the critical examination of romanticism. Thesis 3: The Romantic is as a Genuine Expression of a Fundamental Existential Attitude, a Valid Equivalent of the Classical. A new chapter in the history of literary periodization begins in the 1920s with the writing of literary histories oriented toward ideological history. The status of romanticism is enhanced and

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set equal to that of classicism even though, when juxtaposed, they are structurally completely different. Following Wöfflin’s lead, Fritz Strich’s work Deutsche Klassik und Romantik (1922; German Classicism and Romanticism) bears the subtitle Vollendung und Unendlichkeit (Completion and Infinity). His basic thesis is of a philosophical-anthropological nature: As a result of the fact that mortality is a continuing confrontation with temporality and death, the human being strives to overcome them and longs for eternity, immortality, and duration. Strich distinguished two fundamental and thus dichotomous possibilities for approaching this desire for immortality. He called them completion — by which he means a condition that implies eternal peace — and infinity — by which he means unending activity. In literature, this dichotomy is reflected in the dialectical relationship of classicism and romanticism. Classicism is the fully accomplished and completed work that reposes in itself; romanticism, on the other hand, is a poetry that can never come to an end but rather strives to approach the infinite in terms of an eternal progression. Romanticism is, thus, at least tendentiously speaking a trans-historical phenomenon that corresponds to a fundamental human attitude toward the world and the self. This brief interpretation of the dichotomous relation of classicism and romanticism is linked in Strich’s thinking immediately and directly to the German spirit, which in its depth and metaphysical orientation asserts an entitlement to a leading cultural role in Europe. The aesthetic discourse concerning romanticism is here clearly politicized. In terms of what Strich called the German genius, this unbounded romantic attitude is much more appropriate to Germany than classicism; he interprets the latter — as embodied by Goethe and Schiller — as the result of a synthesis of an unbounded romantic striving and the desire for form descending through Latinity into the Romance languages and cultures. This classical compromise according to Strich is interpreted in Western countries outside Germany as German romanticism. The authentic German romantics are too foreign, too German, and too un-European — and finally in Nietzschean terminology — too Dionysian to be understood at all by cultural institutions outside Germany. In Strich’s thinking, thus, a kind of national typology is linked to the concept of a classical-romantic period, in which the decisive line of demarcation is drawn between (west) European-rational attitudes and romantic inclinations toward the unbounded. German classicism appears as a kind of mediating phenomenon between the two. Approaches similar to Strich’s were developed by H. A. Korff, Karl Viëtor, and Herbert Cysarz. Here as well, the term romanticism is nationalized in what appears with hindsight to be very awkward. The elimination of limiting boundaries has remained a central aspect of efforts to define the concept of romanticism as a consequence of Strich’s theorizing, and it has had a significant impact on music history as well (Klemperer). The thematic interests of the romantic period in dark, melancholy moods as well as in the depths of the soul with their affinity to the pathological are included in the inclination to abolish boundaries.

4.

The Concept of Romanticism in a Historical Context

During the 1920s and ’30s, research on romanticism fell in general terms under the influence of politics. Mirroring the work of German researchers, scholars outside Germany began examining romanticism, and the affinities of German romanticism with National Socialism were laid out in

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stark relief. Arthur O. Lovejoy, an important representative of the American tradition of research on romanticism, took up the topic, “The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas” (1941), in an article in which the ideological-historical relationship between romanticism and National Socialism is investigated. In various works, English and French scholars sought to characterize the spirit of romanticism by means of comparisons and contrasts. Fernand Baldensperger voiced his view in “Pour une interprétation équitable du romantisme européen” (1938; Toward an Equitable Interpretation of European Romanticism), Wenwar Seillière thematized “L’Esprit prussien et le romantisme allemand” (1939; The Prussian Spirit and German Romanticism), and J. C. Blankenagel portrayed “The Dominant Characteristics of German Romanticism” (1940). Similarly in 1940, several articles on romanticism appeared in pmla under the title “Romanticism: A Symposium,” in which the perspective on the tradition was extended from Germany to Europe more generally. Indeed, while a tendency toward updating and widening the concept of romanticism can be observed generally, a gradual inclination toward a more comprehensive perspective extending beyond German national and linguistic boundaries can also occasionally be seen in German scholarship, even during and immediately after the period of National Socialism. Paul Merker, for example, penned an essay on “Deutsche and skandinavische Romantik” (1941; German and Scandinavian Romanticism); Emil Staiger published a study of “Deutsche Romantik in Dichtung und Musik” (1947; German Romanticism in Literature and Music); and Josef Matl authored an essay on “Slawische und deutsche Romantik” (1965: Slavic and German Romanticism). In a wide ranging essay, Paul Kluckhohn again sought to portray “Voraussetzungen und Verlauf der deutschen Romantik” (1948; The Presumpositions and Outcome of German Romanticism), and Romano Guardini meditated on the “Erscheinung und Wesen der Romantik” (Appearance and Essence of Romanticism). Although addressing different issues, both essays present themselves as attempts at a synthesis, and although under the influence of efforts to equate romanticism with irrationalism — in a positive sense — they both succeed in distinguishing scholarship from politics, albeit in a problematic way. This line of inquiry, though, had to come to terms with the challenge of situating itself with regard to prewar research on German literary history. This resumption of ideological-historical lines of inquiry, as critics have justifiably noted, lacks sound and scholarly examinations of romanticism in terms suggested by the most recent reception studies as well as a critical reflection on the political implications of writing literary history. Precisely this research whose subject was nationalistically politicized in the most reprehensible ways certainly requires at least this much. Research on romanticism also has been enlivened by new input from diverse perspectives and varied areas of inquiry: the modernity and currency of romantic literature, for example, were suggested by Werner Kohlschmidt in his analysis of the “Nihilismus der Romantik” (1953; Nihilism of Romanticism), an examination of the negative side of romanticism that simultaneously points out connections to the present. Critics associated with work-immanent interpretation have also been very interested in romantic authors like, for example, in Staiger’s reading of Brentano. Those associated with this often misleadingly labeled critical position espousing as well an anthropological or existentialontological orientation were also ultimately influenced by Heidegger. All of the important scholars working on romanticism during the 1950s and ’60s — among others Richard Alewyn, Paul Stöcklein, Oskar Seidlin, and Wilhelm Emrich — established their critical positions against

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this background. In additions to books and articles, a wide range of editorial projects undertaken during the years immediately following the war are widely recognized as seminal new contributions to the scholarly appraisal of romanticism, notably the critical edition of the works of Friedrich Schlegel edited by Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner among others as well as Hans Eichner’s edition of Friedrich Schlegel’s literary notebooks. The wide range of perspectives from which romanticism was interpreted both diachronically and synchronically continued to attest to the need for a comprehensive point of view for historical as well as critical studies. To this end, René Wellek published a valuable and highly relevant investigation of scholarly examinations of romanticism in “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History” (1949). Morse Peckham offered additional material for discussion in his essay, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism” (1951). In contrast, Klaus Doderer published a highly original presentation of the development of theories of romanticism in “Das englische und französische Bild von der deutschen Romantik” (1955; The English and French Image of German Romanticism). As in so many other areas of scholarly and literary research, the end of the Second World War constituted a decisive turning point in German research on romanticism, more decisive with regard to the study of romanticism than of other literary topics precisely because National Socialistic scholarship in Germany had shamelessly appropriated romanticism as its own unique inheritance. During the post-war period, the question of a connection between romanticism and a historical self-consciousness — whether highly or only marginally developed — became significantly more complex. Since National Socialistic German literary scholarship had been so intensely interested in romanticism, it became obsolete for a time. Ferdinand Lion’s book Romanik als Deutsches Schicksal (Romanticism as German Destiny) appeared in 1947. While the awareness of the National Socialist period remained fresh, the relationship between the fundamental essence of romanticism and the German mentality was diagnosed. The assertion of a intimate connection was not new: it had been proposed by German scholars during the Third Reich, as for example by Julius Petersen in his volume entitled Die Sehnsucht nach dem Dritten Reich in deutscher Sage and Dichtung (1934; The Longing for the Third Reich in German Sagas and Literature). Lion provided the then-current conception of the relationship between the German mentality and the romantic conception of reality with new nuances. In his opinion, romanticism had been allowed to proliferate too widely and had, thus, established itself too deeply in the political and cultural life of the Germans. His final summary argues for a rediscovery of the primal purity and intellectual dimension of romanticism, a suggestion that literary scholars have since taken very seriously. Other scholars, however, have turned away from the conception of an inner connection between the Germans and romanticism and stress rather the European character of romantic culture. In 1982, the American Gordon Craig published a widely read study, The Germans, in which the relationship of the fundamental German essence and the spirit of romanticism is taken up in a curious way. As signature traits of romanticism, he catalogues being out of touch with reality, wistful nostalgia, rapturous enthusiasm, obsession with death, a fundamental pessimism, and even apocalyptic tendencies; he moreover proffers a pointed paraphrase of Gerhard Schulz evoking special fondness for wonder, fantasy, power, instinct, conservatism, the apolitical, and the forest. Much of Craig’s presentation is oversimplified and distorted, not the least of which is a misrepresented quotation of Goethe

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based on the old thesis of morbidly pathological tendencies within romanticism, an illustrative though not particularly felicitous indication of the vitality of certain topoi. Few literary theoreticians stressed the necessity of understanding that the study of romantic authors and works was relevant for the current cultural and political situation as early and as explicitly as Theodor W. Adorno, who in a radio address, “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs” (1957; In Memory of Eichendorff), raised the seminal question of what tradition can possibly mean. In clearly critical tones, he observes that the relationship to the intellectual past is poisoned in the falsely reawakened culture. Adorno’s subtle analysis of Eichendorff stresses on the one hand his conservative inclination and his reactionary affinities and on the other hand, however, those elements in the poet’s work that can be read as an anticipation of modernity. Since the 1950s, romantic literature has seemed modern to precisely that extent that its central themes have been clearly identified, among which some of the more important are the preconscious and the unconscious, the pertinence dreams (which E. T. A. Hoffmann recognized well in advance of Freud), the dubious nature of identity, the centrality of language in human experience, and the problematic nature of individuality. Werner Vordtriede also inquired about the anticipatory character of romantic literature in his monograph Novalis und die französischen Symbolisten (1963; Novalis and the French Symbolists). Marianne Thalmann (Romantik und Manierismus [1963; Romanticism and Mannerism]), Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs (Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung [1960; Romantic Irony in Theory and Form]), and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Brentanos Poetik [Diss. 1955; Pub. 1961; Brentano’s Poetics]) pursue similar paths. At the heart of these projects lies the inscrutability of romantic literature, its ambiguity, its thematization of its own esoteric remoteness, its hidden, uncanny, incomprehensibility, and its subversive tendencies. The scholarly work on individual authors — like Tieck and Hoffmann — had already made significant strides. In his two-volume study of the poetic nihilism of romanticism in 1972, Dieter Arendt presented an impressive survey. The historical, political situation after the Second World War led, moreover, to a parting of the way for two scholarly traditions devoted to the study of German culture, that of the German Federal Republic and that of the German Democratic Republic. An unprejudiced and ideologically impartial examination of romanticism is in the west, as has long been the case in the east, scarcely possible. Naturally the interests of East German scholars have been of distinctive. The early Marxist literary histories were in their way just as much under the influence of a politicization of romanticism as those that were liberal and nationalistic. The conceptual dichotomy of classicism as opposed to romanticism was furnished with a value judgment wherein romanticism appeared decadent and subjective if not reactionary; classicism, an anticipation of socialist humanism or even realism. This view had a notable impact on the image of romanticism in East German literary studies. Marxist literary scholarship, though, had long assumed a critical attitude toward romanticism; it interprets romanticism as a conservative movement, which annihilated the accomplishments of the progressive Enlightenment. With reference to Heinrich Heine and Franz Mehring, Georg Lukács wrote an essay characteristic of this interpretive strategy under the title “Die Romantik als Wendung in der deutschen Literatur” (1945: Romanticism as a Turning Point in German Literature). He dismisses the efforts of literary historians to see a continuation of the heritage of Enlightenment in romanticism as a falsification of history. In 1980 — even before the reunification of Germany — Klaus Peter

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contrasted the relevance of romanticism on both sides of the border but stressed that the differences were not self-evident. In both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, romanticism was long stigmatized as a result above all of its uncanny affinity with National Socialism, German studies, and German research on romanticism during the Third Reich. A possible guiding principle for presenting the history of research on romanticism can — and in so far as Germany is concerned must — be a political, ideological, and ideologically-critical view of romanticism. This critical view, however, is by no means a homogeneous complex of cultural phenomena into which the mostly political and social aspects also flow, as the still customary differentiation between early and late romanticism illustrates. Until well into the 1970s, German romanticism was for the most part perceived by East German scholars as the negatively conceived antagonist to the Enlightenment and classicism. Individual authors like Eichendorff, however, enjoyed a positive assessment on the basis of a differentiation between the poet and homo politicus. E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose œuvre was generally perceived as critical of his society, also emerged with positive valuations as a result of what was understood from a Marxist point of view as his “progressiveness.” Around the middle of the 1970s, a change of course took place in East German literary scholarship, which prepared the way for a more nuanced assessments of romantic authors. Scholars like Claus Träger stressed the continuity of the Enlightenment and tended to regard romanticism as a European phenomenon. The 1960s in West Germany, however, experienced a politicization of literary scholarship. Especially those strains of scholarship devoted specifically to German literature began to examine their own past, and in this context, the conference of German scholars held in Munich in 1966 was an important event. Instead of the highly influential topics dealing with various metaphysical concerns that had been prominent in the research of the ’50s, issues pertaining to the history of the romantic period and an extremely sober conception of the historical-philological condition predominated. Not only the nationalistic dimensions of previous of German literary scholarship but also its liberal inclinations came into question. Ideological critiques were from that point on included in the curriculum, and research on romanticism oriented itself toward a new positivism. The results of this self-disciplinary effort are on the one hand popular study editions as well as philologically critical editions of important romantic authors, which together put research on romanticism on a more solid footing, and on the other hand arresting advancements in the appraisal of romantic literature associated with new kinds of contextualization of literary-cultural artifacts themselves. As an example, Hans-Joachim Mähl’s dissertation, Die Idee des golden Zeitalters im Werk des Novalis (1965; The Concept of a Golden Age in the Work of Novalis) can be mentioned. Mähl sees Novalis as standing in the tradition of utopian fantasies beginning in antiquity and extending to Arcadian pastorals and conceptions of the ideal political state. A few additional examples of the new tendency can also profitably be mentioned. Wilfried Malsch’s study of the poet’s conception of Europe (1965; “Europa”: Poetische Rede des Novalis: Deutung der französischen Revolution und Reflexion auf die Poesie in der Geschichte [“Europe”: Novalis’s Poetic Discourse: An Interpretation of the French Revolution and a Reflection on Poetry in History]) counts as a counterpoint to the conservative ways of reading the progressive Novalis. Helmut Schanze (1966; Romantik und Aufklärung: Untersuchung zu Friedrich Schlegel und Novalis [Romanticism and Enlightenment: An Investigation of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis]) clarifies the relationship of the two important early romantics to the Enlightenment, a

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further important contribution to the new conception of romanticism. What emerges as the cumulative impact of these various research initiatives is a new awareness of the romantics as politically engaged writers. Authors who had long been suspected of harboring Biedermeier inclinations suddenly gained a new currency as Jacobins, and their works were seen as embodying revolutionary tendencies. Jean Paul is certainly a prime example of this revaluation.

5.

Romanticism and Europe

Discussions concerning whether and in what ways romanticism is a trans-national phenomenon have been part of the research on the topic since the controversies of the 1920s. Max Deutschbein maintained in 1922 that romanticism in France was basically a foreign import. Viktor Klemperer by contrast argues that it is historically incorrect to call romanticism a foreign import in an area that nurtured one of its most prominent sources: without Rousseau the works of the romantics are scarcely conceivable. He notes as well that the French literary historians themselves manifest a tendency to evaluate romanticism as a foreign import and do so rather critically and skeptically. Carl Schmitt, who was primarily interested in the political implications of romanticism as early as the 1920s, emphatically rejected Josef Nadler’s nationalistic hypothesis of an inner connection between romanticism and Germanness by referring to the European character of the complex of phenomena associated with romanticism. Schmitt views the growing strength of the bourgeoisie, whose prominence first emerged during the eighteenth century, as a founder and promoter of the romantic movement and stresses the importance of the French Revolution. Fritz Strich considered “Die Romantik als europäische Bewegung” (Romanticism as a European Movement) in an essay published in 1924. He bases his analysis on representative works from English, French, Italian, Danish, and Scandinavian romanticism as well as the Russian and Polish manifestations. Instead of stressing one-sidedly the elements that link the various national romanticisms, Strich remains throughout concerned with drawing distinctions. He thus considers French romanticism to be the creator of the modern realistic novel in that he aligns Stendhal and Balzac with the romantic movement in France. The theme of disillusionment, which was so central to the French novel in the middle of the nineteenth century, he credits to romanticism in that the effects of the fully irrational drives and powers of life are shown. He further maintains that French romanticism in the form of realism had an impact on German literature and was particularly consequential in stimulating the development of prose fiction. This kind of comparative investigation of individual romanticisms has in the meantime proven itself to be an important if not the preeminent line of research on the complex phenomenon of romanticism. For example, two essays by the American, Henry H. H. Remak stand out: “West European Romanticism Definition and Scope” (1961) and “Ein Schlüssel zur westeuropäischen Romantik” (1968; A Key to West European Romanticism). On the basis of a parade of the most varied definitions of European romanticism during the nineteenth century — among which monistic, dualistic, three- and four-fold definitions are distinguished — followed by an inspection of what by general consensus counts as examples of romantic culture, and with a sigh but not without humor, Remak admits that the sum effect of the well established characteristics of romanticism from the perspective of national points of view constitutes a

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jungle of ideas and concepts. He nonetheless lists is series of characteristics and criteria, which can be attributed to the individual manifestations of romantic culture in Europe, though certainly not on an overall and universal basis. He concludes that it is, thus, valid to retain the concept of European romanticism and therewith oppose clichéed conceptions. His suggestion is to bring a handful of the elements of European romanticism together and then see if the different branches do not have a common origin. As a potential common denominator of the individual romantic movements, Remak mentions primitivism and introversion. Regardless of what the specific common denominators for romanticism in Europe may prove to be, it doubtlessly needs such an abstract construct to constitute European romanticism as an object of literary and broadly cultural scholarship. Fruitful points of departure for a synthesizing investigations of European romanticism are found in many different areas, among them the history of motifs, thematology, and ideological history as well as interdisciplinary research. How fruitful research into the history of motifs can be is shown in an exemplary way by Mario Praz’s volume, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (1930; The Flesh, Death, and the Devil in Romantic Literature). Illustrating recent developments in research on romanticism, Ernst Ribbat’s Romantik: Ein literaturwissenschaftliches Studienbuch (1979; Romanticism: A Critical Guide) pleads for interdisciplinary exchanges and methodological pluralism. But such methodological pluralism has its own inherent problems, above all the question of whether this path admits of the assumption of a unified object of research. Such an approach could amount to a continuing re-invention of romanticism, which at any rate approaches what Friedrich Schlegel meant by romanticism. Different research initiatives on romanticism are described and characterized in the survey by Klaus Peter: the historical-philological tendency, which emerged from — among others — the (re)discovery as a result of the student movements of progressive romanticism, the perspective associated with reception theory, as well as the interpretation influenced at the end of the 1970s by post-structural considerations. In this case, the question of authorship is problematized. If it proves possible to extrapolate a master plan from the complex array of phenomena associated with romanticism from the relative intellectual distance of this survey, the comparison of individual aspects of research dealing with a common, unified subject would certainly have a sobering effect. In 1955, Klaus Doderer observed that at no time during the last 150 years has the general west European view of romanticism fully accorded with that held by German scholars. Whether the validity of that conclusion has significantly changed is doubtful. In contrast to early interpretive models, the compatibility of romanticism with reason and intellectual analysis is presupposed. Romanticism now emerges not as the antagonist of the Enlightenment, but rather as its continuation, as an expression of interest in what eludes conceptualization and, thus, constitutes its counterpart as an articulation of the cognitive inclination that attempts reflectively to ascertain its own boundaries. In spite of all of the problems resulting from the polyvalence of the term romanticism, one eventuality remains resolutely untenable: the retirement from the terminological repertory of concepts available to the literary historian and critic on the basis of its being utterly unserviceable. This term, perhaps even more than other period designations, seems worth maintaining and honing. In “Epochen moderner Literatur” (Periods of Modern Literature), Gerhard Plumpe strives for a definition of the concept of romanticism as a period designation in a theoretically systematic context.

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Discussions about contemporary and anticipatory character of romantic literature continue. The modernity of romanticism is proclaimed from diverse points of view, in which the concept of modernity is scarcely in any less need of interpretation. The ways of emphasizing the modernity of romanticism, moreover, also diverge. In recent years, this modernity has been above all understood with regard to romanticism’s characteristic transformation of philosophy into literature, within which romanticism seems to be characterized by an anti-systematic inclination. If the contemporary continuation of the romantic literary transformation of philosophy is considered foundational for romanticism, it can be — although at the expense of the specificity of the particular concept — subsumed under various theoretical constructs: that of a broader phenomenon lying between scholarly and literary-poetic texts, for example, or of an extension of the theoretical notion of non-conceptual knowledge, of perceptions of a poetically articulatable truth, or of points of contact of all kinds between poetry and thought. Given this working hypothesis, the authoritative characteristic of romanticism might be the close connection of thought and language to the non-conceptual, even to the unspeakable, a particularly relevant area of investigation that will doubtless become important in future research on romanticism. The primary mode of expression of romanticism understood in this way is irony conceived as a striving to live between polarities and, thus, achieve its own freedom. Respected philosophers and literary scholars consider romanticism to be a period of shifting paradigms of what truth is, how it manifests itself, and how it can be mediated. In this regard, the work of Manfred Frank deserves particular mention. Frank stresses that this paradigm shift in the understanding of the essence of truth freed aesthetics from its role as a handmaiden and as an imitator of reality. He emphasizes the meaning that art achieved as a means of understanding in an early romantic context and underscores the suggestive character of this initiative with regard to the selfunderstanding of the subject. By way of conclusion, a curiosity that is not all too distant from a paradox may be noted. Precisely the presentation of the problems that result from dealing with the semantic field associated with romanticism leads to some understanding in spite of all the vagaries and diffuseness inherent in the term, not concerning what romanticism is from the point of view of the many poetic, poetological-aesthetic, and historical statements about romanticism, but rather in terms of the self-understanding of the writers and the organizing schema according to which the abundance of literary and cultural details is arranged and interpreted. Romanticism may be incomprehensible because it is unclassifiable, but those texts that express themselves about romanticism become more expressive when they are compared with one another. The time during which romanticism was primarily the domain of scholars specializing in German literature has without doubt passed. Comparative literature has recognized its competence and jurisdiction.

Translated from German by Steven P. Sondrup

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Notes 1. Das Classische nenne ich das Gesunde, und das Romantische das Kranke, und da sind die Nibelungen classisch wie der Homer, denn beyde sind gesund und tüchtig. Das meiste ist nicht romantisch, weil es neu sondern weil es schwach, kränklich und krank ist, und das Alte ist nicht classisch weil es alt, sondern weil es stark, frisch, froh und gesund ist. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. 2. April 1829. (19:300)

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1958. Noten zur Literatur I. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1997. “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs.” Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. 20 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 11:69–94. Arendt, Dieter. 1972. Der poetische Nihilismus in der Romantik. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Blankenagel, J. C. 1940. “The Dominant Characteristics of German Romanticism.” PMLA 60.1:1–10. Blanchot, Maurice. “Das Athenäum” in Bohn: 107–20. Bohn, Volker. 1987. Romantik: Literatur und Philosophie. Internationale Beiträge zur Poetik 1. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Blume, Friedrich, ed. 1949–86. “Romantik.” Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik. Kassel: Bärenreiter. 786–864. Craig, Gordon. 1982. The Germans. New York: Putnam. Cysarz, Herbert. 1942. Das Deutsche Schicksal im Deutschen Schrifttum, Leipzig: Reclam. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1988. Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik. Laaber: Laaber Verlag. Deutschbein, Max. 1921. Das Wesen des Romantischen. Cöthen: O. Schulze. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1965. Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung. 14th ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ———. 1922. Leben Schleiermachers. 2 ed. Ed. Hermann Mulert. Berlin: de Gruyter. Doderer, Klaus. 1955. “Das englische und französische Bild von der deutschen Romantk.” GermanischRomanische Monatshefte N. F. 5: 128–47. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. 1961. Brentanos Poetik. München: C. Hanser. Frank, Manfred. 1989. Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Friedell, Egon. 1965 (1927–31). Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit. München: Beck. Gervinus, Georg Gottfried. 1962. Schriften zur Literatur. Ed. Gotthard Erler. Berlin: Aufbau. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1985–98. Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens. Münchner Ausgabe. Ed. Karl Richter et al. 20 vols. München: Hanser. Geismeier, Willi. 1984. Die Malerei der deutschen Romantik. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Guardini, Romano. 1948. “Erscheinung und Wesen der Romantik” in Prang: 337–48. Haym, Rudolf. 1870. Die romantische Schule: Ein Beitrag zur Geschchte des deutschen Geistes. Berlin: Gaertner. Hegel, G. W. F. 1970. Theorie in Werkausgabe. Vol. 14. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Heine, Heinrich. 1976. Schriften in 12 Bänden. Ed. Klaus Briegleb. München: Hanser. Herzog, Reinhart and Reinhart Koselleck, eds. 1987. Epochenschwelle. Poetik und Hermeneutik 12. München: Fink. Hettner, Hermann. 1850. Die romantische Schule in ihrem inneren Zusammenhange mit Goethe und Schiller. Braunschweig: Vieweg. Huch, Ricarda. 1911–12. Die Romantik. 2 vols. Leipzig: H. Haessel. Jean Paul. 1959ff. Vorschule der Ästhetik. Vol. 5 of Werke. Ed. Norbert Miller. München: Hanser. Kohlschmidt, Werner. 1955. Form und Innerlichkeit. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Wirkung der deutschen Klassik und Romantik. Bern: Francke. ———.1955. “Nihilismus der Romantik.” Form und Innerlichkeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Wirkung der deutschen Klassik and Romantik. Bern: Francke. 157–76. Klemperer, Victor. 1922. “Romantik und französische Romnatik.” Idealistische Neuphilologie: Festschrift für Karl Vossler. Eds. Victor Klemperer and Eugen Lerch. Heidleberg: Winter. 10–32.

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Korff, H. A. 1923–47. Der Geist der Goethezeit: Versuch einer Ideellen Entwicklung der klassisch-romantischen Literaturgeschichte. 4 vols. Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang. ———. “Das Wesen der Romantik” in Prang: 195–215. Lion, Ferdinand. 1947. Romanik als Deutsches Schicksal. Stuttgart: Rowohlt. Lovejoy, Arthur. 1941. “The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 2: 257–78. Lukács, Georg. 1963. Schriften zur Literatursoziologie. Neuwied: Luchterhand. ———. 1945. “Die Romantik als Wendung in der deutschen Literatur.” Fortschritt und Reaktion in der deutschen Literatur. Berlin: Aufbau. 51–73. Mähl, Hans-Joachim. 1965. Die Idee des golden Zeitalters im Werk des Novalis. Studien zur Wesensbestimmung der frühromantischen Utopie und zu ihren ideengeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen. Heidelberg: Winter. Malsch, Wilfried. 1965. “Europa”: Poetische Rede des Novalis: Deutung der französischen Revolution und Reflexion auf die Poesie in der Geschichte. Stuttgart: Metzler. Matl, Josef. 1965. “Slawische und deutsche Romantik: Gemeinsamkeiten — Beziehungen — Verschiedenheiten” in Prang 413–26. Nadler, Josef. 1939. Literaturgeschichte des Deutschen Volkes: Dichtung und Schriftum der deutschen Stämme und Landschaften. 4 vols. Berlin: Propyläen Verlag. Nemoianu, Virgil. 1984. The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Peckham, Morse. 1951.“Toward a Theory of Romanticism.” PMLA 46.2: 5–23. Peter, Klaus. ed. 1980. Romantikforschung seit 1945. Königstein: Athenäum. Petersen, Julius. 1926. Die Wesensbestimmung der deutschen Romantik: Eine Einführung in die moderne Literaturwissenschaft. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer. ———. 1934. Die Sehnsucht nach dem Dritten Reich in deutscher Sage and Dichtung. Stuttgart: Metzler. Plumpe, Gerhard. 1995. Epochen moderner Literatur: Ein systemtheoretischer Entwurf. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Prang, Helmut, ed. 1968. Begriffsbestimmung der Romantik. Wege der Forschung 150. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Praz, Mario. 1976 (1930). La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. 5 ed. Firenze: Sansoni. Rasch, Wolfdietrich. “Zum Verhältnis der Romantik zur Aufklärung” in Ribbat: 7–22. Remak, Henry H. H. 1961. “West European Romanticism Definition and Scope” in Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective. Eds. Newton O. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP. 275–311. ———. 1968. “A Key to West European Romanticism?” Colloquia Germanica 2:1–2: 37–151. Ribbat, Ernst, ed. 1979. Romantik: Ein literaturwissenschaftliches Studienbuch. Königstein: Athenäum. Schanze, Helmut. 1966. Romantik und Aufklärung: Untersuchung zu Friedrich Schlegel und Novalis. Nürnberg: Carl. Scherer, Wilhelm. 1894. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur. 12th ed. Berlin: Weidmann. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1958. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel- Ausgabe. Ed. Ernst Behler. Paderborn: Schönigh. Schmidt. Julian. 1866. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur seit Lessings Tod. Vol. 2: Die Romantik (1797–1818). 5th ed. Leipzig: Grunow. Schmitt Carl. 1925. “Vorwort” to Politische Romantik, 2nd ed. München: Duncker & Humblot. Schulz, Gerhard. 1996. Romantik: Geschichte und Begriff. München: Beck. Seeber, Hans Ulrich, ed. 1991. Englische Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart: Metzler. Staiger, Emil. 1947. “Deutsche Romantik in Dichtung und Musik.” Musik und Dichtung. Zürich: Atlantis. 61–85. Stierle, Karl-Heinz. 1987. “Renaissance: Die Entstehung eines Epochenbegriffs aus dem Geist des 19. Jahrhunderts” in Herzog. 453–492. Strich, Fritz. 1962. Deutsche Klassik und Romantik. 5th ed. Bern: Francke. Strohschneider-Kohrs, Ingrid. 1960. Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Thalmann Marianne. 1963. Romantik und Manierismus. Sprache und Literatur 7. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Träger, Claus. 1984. Geschichte und Romantik. Frankfurt/M: Verlag Marxistische Blätter.



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Viëtor, Karl. 1949. Deutsches Dichten und Denken von der Aufklärung bis zum Realismus, deutsche LiteraturGeschichte von 1700 bis 1890. 2nd rev. ed. [by Gustav Erdmann]. Berlin: de Gruyter. Vordtriede, Werner. 1963. Novalis und die französischen Symbolisten: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des dichterischen Symbols. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Walzel, Oskar. 1929. “Wesensfragen deutscher Romantik.” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts 29. Frankfurt: Das freie deutsche Hochstift. 253–76. Wellek, René and Austin Warren. 1956. Theory of Literature. 3rd rev. ed. New York: Harcourt Brace. Wellek, René. 1963. “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History” Concepts in Criticism. Ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. New Haven: Yale UP. 128–98. Weimar, Klaus. 1989. Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. München: Fink. Wiese, Benno von. 1933. “Zur Kritik des geistesgeschichtlichen Epochenbegriffs.” DVjS 11: 130–44.



Romantic Disavowals of Romanticism 1800–1830 JOHN ISBELL Indiana University

The title Realist was imposed on me as the men of 1830 had the title Romantics imposed on them. In no time have titles given a just idea of things; if it were otherwise, works would be superfluous. Courbet in Barrère 1041 Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Shelley 56

To ask what romanticism is at the beginning of the twenty-first century may seem little different from asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. When I make words work harder, argues Humpty Dumpty to Alice, I pay them extra; a laudable solution, but one which describing realities will not allow us (Carroll 197). This, in essence, is Lovejoy’s famous position: defining the word romanticism, he writes, will either require assuming that the word has one accepted meaning, or will be a personal definition leading to “a vast amount of bad history”; “To call these new ideas of the 1780s and 1790s ‘romanticism’ … suggests that there was only one such idea, or, if many, that they were all implicates of one fundamental ‘romantic’ idea, or, at the least, that they were harmonious inter se and formed a sort of systematic unity. None of these things are true” (Lovejoy, “Meaning” 259–61). Eichner replies that “if we are not permitted to mean more than ‘organic dynamicism,’ it is much simpler to say ‘organic dynamicism’” (“Genesis” 214), and as Peckham writes, any theory of romanticism worth its salt “must show that Wordsworth and Byron, Goethe and Chateaubriand, were all part of a general European literary movement” (5). One, common solution to this dilemma is empirical: if it quacks like a romantic, then call the thing romantic. Eichner notes that in sixty years, “some seven hundred articles and treatises have been devoted to this quest” (“Romantic” 3). “The spirit of the age was romanticism,” states McFarland, adding a quote from Blake, “To Generalize is to be an Idiot” (1–3). This study prefers to examine some first-hand romantic positions on the “romantic movement” as such; taking Blake’s advice to heart, it hopes less to map a field than to open a window for debate and to raise more questions than answers. Three pressures complicate this global survey. First, “romanticism” is a civilization. Peyre thus contrasts it with other movements: “We could hardly speak of symbolist history or even of symbolist philosophy, of realist music or politics, of existentialist music, painting, criticism, and

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hardly more appropriately of existentialist poetry. Classicism … never reached, even in France, a fraction of the reading public” (333). Second, “romantic” works reflect a series of apparently irreconcilable antinomies: male/female; energy/ennui; form/chaos; art/science; public/private; group/individual; right-wing/left-wing; nation/exoticism; naive/ironic; antique/Christian; classic/romantic/realist (my The People’s Voice: A Romantic Civilization, 1776–1848 attempts to resolve these antinomies). Third, as Courbet notes, thing and label repeatedly blur. Behler remarks on “the amazing fact that most of the authors whom we today call Romantic poets did not consider themselves to be Romantics,” citing the Schlegels, Novalis and Brentano, Staël and Chateaubriand, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron (110). If none of these romantics use the term, then who did? McGann in particular has argued that we are here the unwitting prisoners of forgotten late nineteenth-century critics. Writing of “Romantic irony,” Fetzer notes that “the addition of the adjective Romantic was apparently the arbitrary decision of a later, influential critic writing in the mid-nineteenth century” (21); Greene observes that “neo-classicism … had an obscure birth in uninspired manuals of literary history around the end of the nineteenth century” (70), while Wellek remarks that “classicisme” has never entered the dictionary of the French Academy and dates Klassik in Germany from 1887 (Discriminations 68, 74). As Perkins notes, “The major Victorian critics … did not refer to an ‘English Romantic Movement,’ though they wrote abundantly about the poets” (137); Taine names the school “romantic” in 1863 echoing Anatole France, and Pater in 1889 calls it a French and German term. That story has many fascinating aspects, and several recur here: artists show the mellowing of age and personal feuds among classics and romantics alike; critics show ideology and the politics of canon formation. But this study’s main focus lies elsewhere, focused on a group of facts that throw our primary sources into a new light. It argues that a common thread does indeed link Europe’s major romantics despite religion, politics, and national boundaries: their disavowal of their own creation. Goethe, Tieck, or the Schlegels; Wordsworth or Byron; Manzoni, Leopardi, Pushkin, Chateaubriand, Hugo: their parallel remarks show more than personal feuds or late regrets, since it is their own works these romantics disown, and their doubts are there from their first manifesti.

Germany Historians may call them “Weimar classicists,” another term we owe to Wilhelmine scholarship, but Wieland and Herder, Goethe, and Schiller launched the adjective romantisch in Germany. Alert critics still struggle with “the common German view that Romanticism is the creation of the Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, and Wackenroder” (Wellek, “Concept” 147–8; see also Eichner, “Romantic” 60–5, 145–8, and Period 39–42, 48–53; and Wellek, History 1–2). Wellek argued in 1949 that since Goethe in particular shapes German romanticism, to sidestep Goethe as “Classic” is to read the Apocrypha without the Bible (“Concept” 147–8), and Eichner repeats this complaint decades later: “matters are not so simple as the reader of most German histories of literature is led to believe” (“Romantic” 10). Novalis in 1798 uses the noun die Romantik, describing a science of “romantics” akin to physics or numismatics (Das Allgemeine Brouillon). In 1804, Jean Paul Richter applies this noun to the art of Klopstock, Herder, Goethe, Schiller,

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and the Schlegels (see his Vorschule der Ästhetik). In Heidelberg, 1808, Voß and Baggesen use the agent noun Romantiker for living writers, as an insult (Der Karfunkel oder, Klingelklingelalmanach: Ein Taschenbuch für vollendete Romantiker und angehende Mystiker); Brentano and Arnim take the insult as a badge of honor, and romanticists are born (Zeitschrift für Einsiedler). Germany’s media debate runs 1801–08, in essence; Bouterwek’s monumental Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit already reviews German Romantiker in 1819. Here also are the first to disown the term: Goethe claims that he and Schiller invented the classic/romantic distinction (“Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde, und das Romantische das Kranke” in Gespräche March 21 and April 2, 1830); Pushkin and Heine call Goethe “the giant of Romantic poetry” (Pushkin 465; ctd. Eichner, “Romantic” 151) . His place in German romantic lyric is fundamental; his Märchen launched the romantic literary fairy tale; Wilhelm Meister prompted the romantic Bildungsroman (Trainer 98) from Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which Novalis wrote in reply, to Tieck’s Sternbald (Eichner, “Romantic” 98) — not to mention Faust or Werther’s impact, and this is a short list (Goethe, Gedenkausgabe 1: 585). Yet Goethe’s rejection of romanticism is explicit. In an unpublished Römische Elegie, Goethe says that if Werther had been his brother, he would have killed him; on his Weimar stage, he classicizes Kleist (Menhennet 122; see also Staël, Allemagne 3: 247–8) and refuses Brentano’s Ponce de Leon, an 1801 competition entry, preferring Kotzebue and even Terence (Buckhardt; also Balayé 80); he talks of his “horror and loathing” at each contact with Kleist (“Schauder und Abscheu”; see Schriften 3: 141). As early as 1808, he despairs of Germany’s spoiled talents, listing Werner, Oehlenschläger, Jean Paul and Görres, Arnim and Brentano whom he had praised in 1806; his attacks on “Charakterlose” romantic art continue through the 1820s (Briefe 3:92). Expanding on his famous observation that the classic is healthy while the romantic is sick, Goethe notes that “they encounter one another in the emptiness.”2 A tiresome aspect of much work on romanticism is the new set of criteria used to form each canon. Germany’s “romantics” have since Bouterwek and Heine been rather a fluid list with many common absentees: Herder, Bürger, Klopstock, Schiller, Goethe; Hölderlin, Richter, Kleist. What purpose is served, we may ask, by a history of romantic lyric where Goethe, Bürger, and Hölderlin are unmentioned? It will be half a story. Yet the Schlegels at least remain romantic shibboleths for a fastidious post-Wilhelmine tradition making their own resistance to the term all the more surprising. Friedrich Schlegel, the modernist, stops calling modern art charakterlos after 1796: he looks now to combine Europe’s old split between ancient and medieval, classical and romantic ages, to create the Indifferenzpunkt of new art, an equilibrium of the universal in the local. Goethe is his model. By 1797 (Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie), his definition of romantisch is “125 sheets long” (“Bogen lang”; Schlegel in Baldensperger 93–5), and in 1800, Friedrich famously suggests that romantic art is not dead: “the romantic type of poetry is still becoming.” Yet his preceding remark in this same passage goes uncited, on “the prospect of a boundlessly growing classicism.” What impulse makes us suppress half of Friedrich Schlegel’s message? Wellek claims that “the Schlegels were obviously strongly anticlassicist at the time,” and even Eichner deletes just that remark in his meticulous study’s page-long Schlegel extract (“Concept” 7; both Eichner [“Romantic” 112] and Immerwahr [50–4] cite the 116 Athenäum Fragment’s “die romantische Dichtart ist noch im Werden,” not its talk

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of “grenzenlos wachsende Klassizität”). Berlin’s Athenaeum writers use romantisch in art, like its partner klassisch, almost wholly for the past, not the future or even the present; and after Paris in 1802, Friedrich drops his “highly idiosyncratic” usage, consigning the term romantisch to history (in Baldensperger 91). He calls Jean Paul’s novels “the only romantic products of our unromantic age,” as he had said of Tieck’s Sternbald in 1799 (Kritische 2: 330).3 Even for Friedrich at his peak, romantic and classical art are just two old parents for a new artistic future. As Behler writes, Friedrich’s aesthetic theory tries to unite “two antagonistic aesthetics, to find a synthesis of … the antique and the modern, the classical and the romantic”; a third epoch will bring “the harmony of the Classical and the Romantic,” which the 1800 Gespräch über die Poesie calls the ultimate goal of all literature (Behler, “Origins” 117–9). Moreover, Schlegel distrusts not only his own romantic label, but also the new art that took his name: he writes around 1800 that “Tieck has no sense at all of art … he is absolutely unclassic and unprogressive” (Fragmente 65).4 In 1806, he complains to his brother Wilhelm of Goethe’s “indecent and scandalous praise” for Brentano’s “rabble songs,” Des Knaben Wunderhorn: “German scholars have become a band of gypsies; thank God we are out of that!” (Krisenjahre 1: 292).5 He calls all he dislikes brentanisch (1: 246) and remarks at Kleist’s suicide in 1812 that Kleist had mistaken madness for genius (2: 239; Wilhelm repeats this to Staël six days later [see Pange’s Auguste-Guillaume Schlegel et Madame de Staël], and Staël then quotes it in her Réflexions sur le suicide).6 Friedrich and his brother Wilhelm have turned toward the East. One key to Schlegel’s thought may be the mistranslated term Roman itself. Eichner stresses three points: “The Roman is the dominant form both of the earliest and the most recent postclassical poetry; the central position in the history of the Roman is occupied by Shakespeare, … the Roman is characterized by the vast variety of forms it can assume” (“Theory” 1021). For Schlegel, Shakespeare mixes classical Tragödie with Roman (1030), as does Schiller in Die Jungfrau von Orleans: Eine romantische Tragödie (1032–3); the Gespräch suggests that “Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Cervantes should all be discussed in a Theorie des Romans.” These facts may illustrate the absurdity in translating Roman as novel, when the term romance exists — romance will subsume Eichner’s dispute with Lovejoy, where both are right, and force a fruitful rethinking for us of the links between novel and verse romance throughout European romanticism from Byron and Pushkin to Grossi, Mickiewicz, and Hugo (1040–1). Eichner notes that the word Roman had a wider range “than the English ‘novel’ and ‘romance’ combined”: yes indeed! Schlegel’s antipathy is precisely the “sogenannte Roman” or novel of Fielding and Richardson. Schlegel later replaces the problem term romantisch by romanartig or “romancy,” stressing his etymology and locating its pastness (“Romantic” 110). Jean Paul for his part prefers Kames to the Schlegels and attacks their new Fichtean idealism as pernicious solipsism and egoism (Wellek, History 100–1); in 1792, a friend persuades him to delete the word romantisch in a title (Tieck 98) since it had been “used too often and … had acquired a bad reputation” (ctd. Eichner, “Romantic” 101).7 Uhland similarly condemns “what seemed to him the selfish poetry of those blinded by introspection to their nation’s agony” (Rodger 148). For here is a central paradox: if romantic art talks of people and nation, how can it ignore its public and national role? The 1803 Reichsdeputationshauptschluß and then Napoleon’s crushing of Prussia in 1806 had left all these writers in defeated and occupied territory, and

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that burning concern drives many German disavowals. The disavowals also show a series of avant-garde artists finding in succession that their message is being distorted by rivals and imitators: Tieck finds the Brentanos histrionic and insincere and calls Hoffmann a scribbler of grotesques; Heine’s Die romantische Schule, 1832–5, is no encomium (Matenko 437 on “AffenIncest” and “Generationen wie die Brentanos”); Eichendorff talks of “faded romanticism” and “juvenile reawakening,” while Brentano himself uses Romantismus to Arnim as a synonym of bad rhyming and empty lyricism (Eichendorff 6: 1073–4; Brentano 1: 220).8 “Classic-romantic-realist” runs the old chronology, and its simplicity has a certain schematic appeal, like Ptolemy’s cosmogony. Yet when we read that Tieck repudiates the later romantic dramatists, this neat timeline has distorted Tieck’s actual views (Paulin, “Drama” 184). As Tieck tells Friedrich Schlegel in 1813, he finds no pleasure “in all the things we have instigated” (in Lüdeke 169)9 and resents being considered the “head of the so-called romantic school” (Köpke 2: 173); Friedrich Schlegel himself talks of the “so-called New School” in 1812 (“sogennante Neue Schule”; Eichner, “Romantic” 141). Trivial-, Schauer-, Afterromantik: critics have coined many labels to keep true and false romanticism apart. Goethezeit polemic is vastly complex, due in part to geography and to endless personal feuds; but when Tieck, Goethe, and the Schlegels reject their own creations, something more is at issue. A German scholar, told in 1993 of a conference on Europe’s romantics, asked if it ran 1800–1804. In this narrow inner sanctum, our high priests will be apostates.

Switzerland German romanticism as such reached the world in translation after 1813 (see Körner and Isbell “Groupe”) from three writers under one Swiss roof — Wilhelm Schlegel, Staël, and Sismondi — Coppet’s Confédération romantique (a phrase coined by the Bonapartist Nain jaune). These creators of the genre are again profoundly ambivalent about their romantic dawn. Wellek claims that Wilhelm Schlegel’s “scales are heavily weighted in favor of the Romantic” (History 60) — true only if romantic means the dead past, medieval, and renaissance. As early as 1797, Wilhelm deplores modern taste: “From Vehmic courts, mysterious compacts, and ghosts there is now absolutely no escape” (Werke 11: 26).10 Körner calls Wilhelm’s 1808 Vienna lectures German Romanticism’s Message to Europe, and their message is that romanticism is over. To Wilhelm Schlegel, Spain’s siglo de oro is “the last summit of romantic poetry”; after 600 pages on the past, he ends with just two on the future of German theater, lamenting the word romantic as “a word profaned in a hundred posters” (Vorlesungen 2: 266, 290).11 Wilhelm “gradually lost sympathy,” writes Wellek, “with the group of which he was supposed to be a leader” (History 72) — telling Staël’s son in 1822, “je me moque de la littérature” (F. Schlegel, Krisenjahre 2: 394), calling Görres in 1840 an “ultramontane buffoon” — yet his disavowal of romanticism came years earlier in the very works that defined the term (in Solovieff 50 n65). Staël’s De l’Allemagne was decisive in bringing romanticism to the Latin world, Britain, and America. Hugo dates the concept from that “femme de génie” (in the preface of Odes et Ballades); the Quarterly Review says that Staël “has made the British public familiar” with the classical/romantic distinction (October 1814; 113). Eggli prints 500 pages of polemic Staël

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caused in France in three years, 1813–16; Pushkin, Emerson, and Leopardi cite her in founding their national literatures (Isbell, Birth 2–3). Yet her manifesto is also famous for its silences: Wackenroder, Hölderlin; Kleist, Hoffmann, Fouqué; the Brentanos, Görres; Runge, Friedrich, Beethoven; and her friends Arnim, Adam Müller, Chamisso. Arnim had refused to visit the author; the space in her manuscript for Görres was deleted (Staël, De l’Allemagne 3: 364a), while Friedrich Schlegel was indignant at his small place in her text (Isbell, Birth 56). Niebuhr and Hegel were unknown, like Chamisso; the Schlegels’ feuds, and political expediency, also play some part here, but Staël’s resistance runs deeper. Though Staël likes Faust, she writes that such productions should “not be repeated,” rejecting the “singular system” of “the new German school” (De l’Allemagne 3: 127, 257).12 She finds in Germany, as Moreau remarks, “the elements of a new Classicism” (118)13; actual romantics she then puts elsewhere in ancillary texts. Thus, Staël’s Corinne reworks La Motte-Fouqué’s Saalnixe (Corinne 11); Sainte Geneviève de Brabant answers Tieck’s seminal Genoveva, as Le Mannequin parallels Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (these parallels have been unnoticed); and in 1812, her Réflexions sur le suicide speak out against Germany’s “Romantic ideology.” Seeing Kleist’s double suicide as an insult to a suffering nation, Staël here strongly condemns the “New School” and its effects: “genius is, in many regards, popular … those who torment themselves to draw the public’s attention … imagine that what revolts the sentiments of the greater number is of a higher order than what touches them…. Gigantic vanity!” (Œuvres 1: 190–1).14 This verdict is unjust, given Kleist’s passionate nationalism (Die Hermannsschlacht); and Staël had appeared alongside Kleist in Phöbus. But her mind is fixed on liberating Europe, and romantic egotism is to her mind a dangerous poison: in the Phöbus she argued that when one can be reborn as a nation and thus revive Europe’s heart paralyzed by slavery, there must be no more talk of sickly sentimentality, of literary suicides. Finally, Sismondi’s impact has long been neglected outside Italy, where Dalla in 1819 translated chapter 30 of Sismondi’s Littérature du Midi de l’Europe without his permission, and called it Vera — or “True” — definizione del Romanticismo (Pellegrini). But Sismondi himself never uses that noun, and Italy’s living romantics are as strangely missing from his history as are Germany’s romantics from Staël’s and Schlegel’s “romantic” surveys. His friend Foscolo appears in the third edition, as a translator (Gennari 208). Sismondi’s own reaction to Dalla’s romantic label was to rewrite the entire offending chapter, cutting five paragraphs and adding eighteen (he deletes 461–3 and 470–4 from the 1813 edition, and adds 293–302 in the 1826 edition; the rest remains untouched). We lose both his “three romantic unities” and his attack on those kept by “the narrow prejudices of a fatal ignorance” (from 1813, 461–3). We gain his insistence that his “desire for impartiality has not been recognized”; adding, “we will persist in not aligning ourselves beneath any banner” (from 1826, 293–4).15 Enemy of popes and dictators, Sismondi does not mention his antipathy to Schlegel (Isbell, “Confédérations” 309), but a letter to the Comtesse d’Albany (20 June 1816) was discreetly explicit: “Chateaubriand in France, Goethe, Novalis, and Werner in Germany, Lord Byron and Walter Scott in England do not imagine they belong to the same school; and yet it is in the same point that all sin against truth” (Epistolario).16

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Britain In Britain, the word romantique dates at least from Pepys (Diary 10 march 1667), the media debate from 1811–31, and the Lyrical Ballads from 1798–1800, precisely the dates of the Athenaeum. Scholars are unanimous in calling this the romantic period. Yet as critics repeat, “none of the English poets of the time … recognized himself as a romanticist or admitted the relevance of the debate” (Wellek, History 110–11, 123). Wordsworth uses the word romantic ten times in poetry (Whalley, “England” 164, 178); Coleridge, five (178); Keats, four times in all his writings, once after the word werry, and even Byron just fifteen times in his verse (194–5). Shelley “used [the word] thrice in his prefaces” (233n). Tennyson did not use the word in his poems at all; Browning does twice, Arnold once; Hopkins never does (237). Examining each instance, Whalley suggests that Britain’s “romantics” avoided the term as a tiresome and vulgar nonce-word which can only cause trouble, concluding that “the poets themselves never applied the term to themselves, nor did their enemies apply it to them” (159). Our use of the term romantic, he argues, “has done widespread (but probably not irreversible) damage to the precise appreciation of early nineteenth-century poets and their work” (256–7); quite apart from its impact on the rest of the canon. Britain’s “romantics” all knew the term, and chose not to use it. So why do we? Let us consider some authors in sequence. Whalley notes that Wordsworth “never regarded himself as a romantic at all, but took the word to mean barbaric, gothical, grotesque” (“Literary” 242). He protests Jeffrey’s Lake School (Perkins, “Construction” 131) in 1804: “As to the School about which so much noise (I am told) has been made, … I do not know what is meant by it nor of whom it consists”; Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria also mentions, like Tieck or Schlegel, “this fiction of a new school in poetry” (ctd. Whalley, “England” 235). Lockhart’s Cockney School, Southey’s Satanic School were modeled on Jeffrey’s term. This may seem a label war, and the Lakers did settle with age — Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth — yet even in 1798, the Lyrical Ballads’ landmark preface is a curious romantic revolution: “The invaluable works of our elder writers … are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” (Wordsworth 735). Byron, famously labeled one of the dangerous fifth column romantici by an Austrian spy in Venice, seems another likely British romantic (Byron 4: 463). “We are,” he writes in 1817, “upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system — or systems — not worth a damn in itself — & from which none but Rogers and Crabbe are free” (4: 169); intriguing, since Shelley for his part remarks in 1821 that Byron in Marino Falieri is following a false system, the “pernicious effects” of which will “cramp and limit his future efforts” if unchecked (Works 10: 297). In 1821, Byron attacks Bowles, Pope’s detractor, saying like Goethe that “I have been amongst the builders of this Babel,” and “I am ashamed of it” (5: 559). To Moore, he writes: “As to Pope, I have always regarded him as the greatest name in our poetry. Depend on it, the rest are barbarians” (5: 559). It seems possible to talk of Britain’s failed classical-romantic debate. Weisinger remarks that discussion of the debate “occurs in the work of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Scott, Robinson, and De Quincey … it is hard to understand why the idea was not treated more extensively” (479). Coleridge borrows this German usage in 1811; by the 1813–14 lectures, he is reworking

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Wilhelm Schlegel’s terms (Wellek, History 152; compare with his “Concept” 15). Hazlitt and the others briefly discuss Staël and the Germans, though De Quincey, who found Endymion vaguer “than the reveries of an oyster” (Lucas 39), claims with less support than Coleridge that the Germans deserve no credit. As De Quincey hints, this seemed a silly European quarrel, alien to Britain: “nobody thought them worth making a sect of,” says Byron (Weisinger 486). For indeed, the terms arrived late: romantic as either a label for the modern as opposed to its picturesque sense or Warton’s historical usage with regard to Coleridge, Staël, and Schlegel (though the OED also cites Byron’s usage of the term in his rejected epistle to Goethe about Marino Falieri [not published until 1896; Classical.6.a]); romanticism in 1831, when Carlyle remarks that “we are troubled with no controversies on Romanticism and Classicism, — the Bowles controversy on Pope having long since evaporated without result” (Works 14: 149). In France, the term was common and used in analogy with Protestantism (see Goblot’s “Les mots protestants et protestantisme sous la Restauration” in Beauchesne’s Civilisation chrétienne). Artists, media, and public intersect in canon formation. Britain’s “romantic movement” we owe, as we have seen, to late Victorian scholarship: Mrs. Oliphant’s 1882 Literary History of England ignores the term. Perkins cites Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant Garde in arguing that the cultural meaning of works of art — specifically those associated with romanticism — “is determined by the sociological character of the public and by the ‘institution of art’ within which they are received” (“Construction” 142); or, as Shelley puts it in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, “Poets … are , in one sense, the creators, and in another, the creations, of their age. From this subjection the loftiest do not escape” (2:174). Canons shift, and in 1985, the third edition of The English Romantic Poets brought startling news: “the inclusion of Blake.” Expanding that male canon from five to six is one thing, but calling Blake romantic only renews the dilemma. As Massey remarks, Blake despises chiaroscuro (402) and insists on absolute clarity of line — like Ingrès the classicist, not like Turner or Delacroix: “the mere passage of time does not give us the right to simplify their lives in retrospect” (409). Mellor argues that an entire female romantic tradition, including ten of the day’s twelve most popular writers, disavowed basic male romantic tenets; “Mary Shelley,” she notes, “was profoundly disturbed by what she saw to be a powerful egotism at the core of the Romantic ideology” (“Women” 284). Austen wrote Northanger Abbey for a reason; and Scott, “with whom, more than with anyone else, the adjective ‘Romantic’ was associated during his lifetime,” shares Austen’s ironic distance from romantic excess (Pierce 293). As David Simpson remarks of Raymond Williams, “Goldsmith, Crabbe, Cobbett and Clare are more important to his narrative than Wordsworth or Keats or Shelley. This has surely had the effect of making Williams’s work more ignorable than it deserves to be” (in Curran 13). The fine poet Crabbe, “Pope in worsted stockings,” still suffers from our feeling that history led elsewhere, as do Moore and Rogers, despite immense popular success. If we want to see what the romantic age read with pleasure, Blake, Keats and Shelley should not head our list.

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Italy, Russia, Sweden Milan was, after Heidelberg, the second city in Europe to have an explicitly “romantic” group, with a media debate 1816–27 (Wilkins 400, 411–13): Italy and Germany as such were geographical concepts. Critics date Italian romantic debate from Staël’s 1816 article on internationalism, which had four replies within the year: in support, di Breme, Borsieri, and Berchet’s Semi-serious Letter; vehemently against, Leopardi. Berchet wants “popular” art; to Leopardi, the romantics do not see that poetry needs “myth” or illusion (see Moget, Pange, Isbell “Italian”). In Milan, media debate was skewed by Austrian occupation, as elsewhere by other local circumstances: in the Conciliatore, Visconti argues that “romanticism does not consist in the lugubrious and the melancholic” (ctd. Ragusa 317);17 the age’s two great poets, Leopardi and then Foscolo in Della scuola nuova drammatica in Italia, attack “romanticism” though they fit its European profile (Wellek, History 264–65; see also Martegiani). Curiously, Leopardi finds in Staël a firm ally against “the romantic system” and a bellissima, solennissima “condemnation of the horrors and excess of terror so dear to the romantics” (2: 50, 46).18 Foscolo for his part ignores the romantics in his survey of recent Italian literature appended to Byron’s Childe Harold (Edizione 11.2: 490). After 1821, Breme was dead, and as active patriots, many Italian romanticists were in prison like Pellico or Borsieri or in exile like Foscolo, Berchet, and Gabriele Rossetti, thus, prematurely ending the movement: “It seems hardly surprising that a modern student could argue that there really was no Italian romanticism” (Wellek, History 264). Though Milanese, Manzoni stands apart, thanks in part to his five years in Paris, 1805–10: Shakespeare, Schlegel, Schiller, and Scott helped to shape his plays Carmagnola and Adelchi, and his novel I promessi sposi (1827). Wellek calls Manzoni “the one great Italian who expressly proclaimed himself a romanticist” (History 261) although begging the definition; asked if romanticism would last, Manzoni “replied that the name was already being forgotten, but that the influence of the movement would continue” (McKenzie 33). Three treatises explain the views of this self-proclaimed “bon et loyal partisan du classique” (Manzoni, Opere 1683): there are people, he says, who by the term Romanticismo understand “a hodgepodge of witches, of specters, a systematic disorder, a striving for the extravagant, a forswearing of common sense” (1726);19 if such were indeed its character, he argues, it would deserve oblivion. As Wellek deduces from his vast reading, “one important argument for the coherence and unity of the European romantic movement emerges from an investigation of the minor literatures — the ‘predictability’ of their general character” (History 170); van Tieghem’s equally global survey supports this view (Romantisme). This study is not short, but let us linger a moment on two exemplary cases, Russia and Sweden. Pushkin in Boris Godunov lists himself in the romantic camp and calls the work a “truly romantic tragedy” (ctd. Saprynkina in So˝tér 106); yet in 1830, he praises the poet Glinka for “not professing either ancient or French Classicism and not following either Gothic or modern Romanticism” (in Wellek, Discriminations 69). His 1831 review of Joseph Delorme talks once more of “the so-called Romantic school of French writers”; Mersereau adds that “among his contemporaries only Goethe categorically qualified as a Romantic” (38–40). Gogol’s 1847 history of Russian poetry simply avoids the term. In 1836, he calls the romantics “desperately audacious people like those who foment social rebellions” (qtd. Proffer 121–22). Tegnér, “traditionally the foremost romantic in Swedish literature,” states

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similar views over two decades — writing in his Om det Romantiska i Grekiska Poesien (1822–24) that “romanticism degenerates into the fantastic and marvelous through the misuse of freedom,” and condemning French taste in 1841 for “the cannibalistic style they seem to view as the principal constituent of Romanticism” (qtd. Mitchell 381, 394).20 In both these countries, the curious stress on France and revolution is worth noting; other countries stress Germany and reaction, while talk of Britain focuses on Byron, Scott, and the Edinburgh Review.

France French media debate runs largely 1813–30, but the English borrowing romantique as an alternative to romanesque — “romancy,” perhaps — reached France in 1776, in passages on gardening by Rousseau and Girardin: romantique describes not only the scene, but also “the touching impression we receive from it,” an epochal distinction which empowers the consumer. Chateaubriand’s Essai sur les Révolutions borrows the term early from d’Agincourt (Baldensperger 76); he later massages chronology to call Staël and Byron ingrate imitators (Chateaubriand, Mémoires 1: 418) though, in fact, he launched his career attacking Staël, and the Byron letter he alleges dates from 1802, when Byron was fourteen. His famous “critique de beautés” is also silently borrowed from Staël and the Germans (235). “The Romantics — my sons,” Chateaubriand proclaims, yet the rest of his judgments are “full of the clichés of classicism” (see esp. Lettres 363: “O mes fils! Combien vous êtes dégénérés!”): revising his Génie du Christianisme to replace mélancolique with sérieux, to prefer Homer now to Milton, to praise Sophocles, and to add a peut-être to his praise of Dante (Moreau 88–90). His aim, he says, echoing Chénier’s cliché, is to “put … the classic tongue in the mouth of my romantic characters.” But we cannot ignore his public impact. Chateaubriand deplores the consequences of his early writings, like Goethe, Tieck, or Byron: “A family of poet Renés and prose-writing Renés has pullulated,” he writes, dreaming of destroying René, which “has infested the spirit of part of our youth” (Mémoires 452, 462, 1095). “If in the past we fell too short of the romantic,” he argues, “now we have overshot the mark” (Œuvres 11: 579).21 “Je suis un romantique furieux,” writes Stendhal in 1818, “I am a furious romantic” (Correspondance 1: 909). Wellek says of Stendhal that he is “the first Frenchman who called himself a romantic” (“Concept” 10). Van Tieghem prefers, as many do, to group him among writers “still” — rather tellingly — classic by taste or temperament, who toyed with aspects of romanticism while belonging in another box (or “restes classiques” as he calls them [461]; in 1840 he claims that the new generation’s “réaction contre l’ère romantique est systématique” — more false teleology [463]); but is there not some sleight of hand involved in refusing the term to those who claim it, while forcing it on those who resist? The term after all is theirs, not ours. By 1823, Stendhal sharply divides his liberal Italianate romanticisme, a hapax legomenon in France, from émigré reaction and “the German gibberish many people today call romantic” (Racine 75).22 He despises Chateaubriand and Schlegel and rejects Vigny, Lamartine, and Hugo, whose Han d’Islande disgusts him (Wellek, History 245–51). Stendhal seems Italian much as Coleridge the critic seems German, standing apart from his national contemporaries. What then of the great romantics, Hugo, Vigny, Musset, and Lamartine? In 1824, Lamartine

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remarks, “I am neither classic as you understand it, nor romantic as they understand it”; “the two rival absurdities, in tumbling, will make way for truth in literature” (Correspondance 2: 276, 266).23 The ever-subtle Musset, often presented as naïve, detests “writing three words when two will do” (ctd. Moreau 317)24; he parodies his much-quoted Confession d’un enfant du siècle in his less-quoted Histoire d’un merle blanc, proud to be white among blackbirds. Flaubert the ironist took Bouvard et Pécuchet, as it happens, from Musset’s Dupuis et Cotonet, dogged provincial catalogers of romantic’s bizarre semantics in the 1830s: “From 1833 to 1834, we thought romanticism consisted in not shaving, and in wearing large-breasted starched waistcoats” (Musset 876).25 The arch-romantic Hugo later suppressed his 1820 remark about having never “understood this difference between the Classic genre and the romantic genre” (Conservateur 25 March 1820)26; why then in 1834, at the height of the textbook romantic period, is he talking again of the death of those terms, which he “has always refused to pronounce seriously”? Barrère notes that Hugo “stood himself in 1824 outside the two camps among the ‘conciliators’ and repudiated ‘all these conventional terms that the two parties toss about reciprocally like empty balloons’” (94–5).27 Hugo uses the term with caution after 1824 — qualified by dit or ‘so-called’ in 1826, for instance — and almost never after 1830 (his revised Littérature et Philosophies mêlées would instead talk of terms that he “always refused to pronounce seriously” [“s’est toujours refusé à prononcer sérieusement”; 1: 19]); in 1864, he claims that “he who writes these lines never used the words romanticism or romantic” (Œuvres 2: 208).28 In 1827, his famous preface to Cromwell seeks to change tradition safely, unlike “some unenlightened partisans of romanticism” and calls precisely like Deschamps for “powerful dikes against the irruption of the common” (Préface 260, 267):29 “War in peace-time” in La Muse française of 1824 demands a “potent barrier” against modern “adventurous innovation” (Deschamps, Œuvres 4: 13).30 Moreau has brilliantly shown echoes of Molière and fragments of Corneille in Cromwell’s verse, as indeed in Constant’s Wallstein. Again our touchstone romantic manifestoes are ambivalent; or rather, they simply refuse the pat all-or-nothing teleology encouraged by literary history (see Moreau’s 175–6 and Wallstein 109). Moreau talks of Nodier’s “duplicité souriante,” his “smiling duplicity” (Classicisme 166–7). Despite his romantic cénacle, Nodier in his turn rejects the label, talking of “this often ridiculous and sometimes revolting genre” (Nodier, Bertram 70),31 and adding: “the romantic genre is a false invention” (in Moreau 166–7).32 (Nodier’s 1822 preface to Trilby calls the romantique “un fort mauvais genre” [Contes 97].) Saintine remarks that in 1820 the romantics included Guiraud, Lebrun, and Soumet, author of the Scrupules littéraires de Mme de Staël; Guiraud and Soumet co-founded La Muse française in 1823 (169). By 1830, they were Classics, changed by the excess around them. Gautier’s Grotesques mock the “barbouilleurs,” or “daubers of local color” (Moreau 332); his Les Jeunes France mocks the young who no longer find Chateaubriand romantic enough, as does Sand’s Histoire de ma vie, which also smiles at Hugo’s dealings with these “marmots,” or “brats from his own school” (2: 159).33 Perhaps most frustrating, as Sismondi found, is to see discretion ignored by our readers; Bizet makes Carmen romantic by simply discarding Mérimée’s ironic frame, while Mérimée’s Colomba says of couleur locale: “Let whoever wishes explain the sense of these words which I understood very well some years ago” (759).34 In short, this first-generation romantisme mitigé is not some “pre-romantic” failure

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of nerve or vision: romanticism since Schlegel invented the term was never more than half a pole, except to fools and historians. When Barante talks of classic and romantic genius meeting, that is not neoclassical reaction, but an echo of Berlin (2: 139); when the Globe praises the end of 1820-style “romantisme hypocondriaque,” it sees therein, as Moreau observes, “the triumph of true romanticism” (196–7). Compare Guizot to Fauriel in 1820, on the “mania of chopping truth in two and only wanting half” (in Glachant 22).35 Compare Jouffroy: the romantics “thought that people were tired of the beautiful. They therefore made the ugly” (48).36 Staël, Constant, Fauriel, like Ladvocat’s theater collaborators, rework their romantic translations to find this new Berlin synthesis of classic and romantic art (see Isbell, Birth 2 and “Présence”; see also Moreau 216). Or compare Berlioz, who for Gautier belongs with Hugo and Delacroix in the “Romantic trinity” (in Barzun 243),37 on a scene he stole from Shakespeare for Les Troyens: “et je l’ai virgilianisée” — “and I virgilified it” (in Legouvé 2: 189). Beethoven, who seems to Delacroix “romantic to a supreme degree” (Journal 1: 201), comments in later years that he can learn only from Bach, while Delacroix, observing his own growing distaste for Schubert, remarks: “I have been enrolled willy nilly in the romantic coterie” (Véron 1: 273; see also Delacroix, Journal 1: 340).38 Sand notes that “the romantics, having found in him their highest expression, believed that he belonged exclusively to their school” (in Moreau 248).39 His resistance to this hijacking emerges when asked if he was happy at the romantics’ triumph: “Sir, replied Delacroix,” to a librarian of the Chambre des députées, “I am classic” (Andrieux 61).40

Conclusion This study asks a question sidelined by history with disturbing ease: how to explain romanticism’s repeated disavowals by the very thinkers who had been its pioneers, indeed its theoreticians, throughout Europe. Where traditional narratives talk of this term being tainted in the decades which follow the “romantic period” and attacked from outside by a classical old guard, it seems surprisingly clear on reflection that the term never attained a position of acceptance from which to fall, even among its coiners. The durability of our traditional narratives looks increasingly like a simple tribute to the power of myth. As Marilyn Butler argues, “Going out to look for ‘romanticism’ means selecting in advance one kind of answer,” and the price of these preconceptions is the way they “interfere with so much good reading” (186–7). Was it not limiting to reduce Britain’s “romantic age” to six male poets; to discuss the Germans with Goethe absent; to date French romanticism from 1830, while Italy cites two French authors in 1816? A new reading can perhaps resituate the pressures on which our systematic disavowals depend. Hesitations glibly read as proof of “pre-romantic” insipidity here emerge, with some support from context as the result of many factors: the persistence of a classical taste born of old-regime education and reading; the return to norms thought more solid and durable after a period of experimentation; and the understandable distaste of pioneers who see their terms being hijacked by alleged followers with quite different agendas. Ironically, a whole group of “pre-romantic” writers like Staël and Sismondi were subsequently condemned by their successors, precisely for not sharing their successors’ own concerns. Here meet the different

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generational roles of avant-garde and grand public in shaping historical movements and the difficult relationship between romantic desires for a truly popular, national art on the one hand and the realities of vulgarization on the other. The later shape of the nineteenth century will reflect these problematics. Clearly, also, one might expect ample evidence in praxis to support this study’s conclusions; but to strike at the core of certain persistent myths, the label itself is splendidly explicit. What then is our new narrative to be? As we survey post-Revolutionary Europe, certain key themes recur. First, Friedrich Schlegel’s call for a new art, to replace the antithesis between Europe’s older “classical” and “romantic” ages — painfully misread by imitators, media and public as a call for “romantic” war on the past. Butler refers to the younger British romantics as neoclassicists; della Chiesa calls romantic and neoclassical art “two interdependent aspects of a single phenomenon” (31)41; as Jordan remarks, “Artz’s idea that neoclassicism and romanticism are parallel movements may strike literary scholars as peculiar, though art and music historians are quite familiar with it” (Romantic Poets 88). As So˝tér notes, “the parallel existence of romanticism and classicism matters so much that … certain phenomena of both can only be explained from their parallel nature” (European 52), adding in answer to facile teleology that “the classical period of both Goethe and Schiller was as much ‘modern’ as the poetry of Novalis” (72). Remak calls romanticism “the desire … to have synthesis follow antithesis”; he later stresses our new attention to the romantic fusion of classic and romantic art, emotion and Enlightenment, realism and fantasy, which later ages forgot, concluding: “In this sense romanticism had better equilibrium than they did” (“Key” 44; and in Hoffmeister 340–2). Lubich points out the crucial place of parody in this narrative citing Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura, Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Like Byron’s Don Juan. Kreuzgang, and Onegin both ridicule the whole storehouse of romantic cliché: “Pushkin uses Onegin … to deal an ironic coup de grâce against his former poetic self” (qtd. Hoffmeister 321). Peacock’s Scythrop is modeled on Shelley; Byron sent Peacock a rosebud in thanks, and Shelley wrote back: “I am delighted with Nightmare Abbey. I think Scythrop a character admirably conceived and executed.” As Lubich remarks, Shelley “actually named his own rooftop study ‘Scythrop’s tower’ “(316). Eichner observes that in the media debate, adversaries added to the semantic confusion and ridicule providing romantic artists “with a further reason for not applying the term to themselves”; if we ignore these subtleties, “the writings of the romantics will inevitably be misinterpreted.” Immerwahr adds that the term could not be cleaned of all its negative implications contributing to the emergence of “romantic irony.” Europe’s romantics thus connived with their adversaries to wink at their own enthusiasm from Walpole’s Castle of Otranto onward. Butler argues in consequence against “the received view that … a Romantic Revolution occurred, which worked a permanent change in literature and in the other arts…. In reality there would seem to have been no one battle and no complete victory. It is not even clear that there were defeats” (Butler 183). From this new and wider field, a long series of critical antinomies may lose their sense of urgency: the classic/romantic/realist series for one, along with the amputations and falsehoods it entails. How was this elegant new synthesis lost? Brown is incisive: “Far from being a repudiation of the Enlightenment, romanticism was its fulfilling summation…. Repudiation and triumph are its most visible gestures, which have led to conventional accounts of the war of Romanticism

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against Enlightenment reason” (in Curran 38–42). Perkins also points to the sense that the age was new, brought on by the French Revolution: “the ‘spirit of the age’ was always described as impatient of authority or limits”; ironically, he adds, this periodization cast Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Scott as revolutionaries, though all were solidly conservative by the 1810s (“Construction” 134–36). Our new narrative’s second theme is thus the ensuing tug of war between artists who witness this hijacking of their conciliatory agenda and a public drift they cannot control: as Whalley argues, “the specific symptoms of the emerging category seem always to be most pronounced in the minor figures” (“Literary” 236). Our third and final theme is the Faustian bargain this media bandwagon represents for artists deeply concerned with a public and national art. What happens to art, when it speaks to and for the nation? Must artists compromise their program in order to be heard? The radical Shelley’s late works went unpublished, as the legislator in him yielded to the romantic nightingale; Blake’s verse prologue to Milton became a hymn of the establishment, still sung during my own childhood in Britain’s boarding schools; even Byron, so much the master of his myth, lost his very name from Don Juan’s title page. We speak, and the public hears what it chooses: these radical thinkers saw their politics disallowed. They stood their terms, their books, and careful manifesti on Europe’s vast and confusing post-Revolutionary stage, and saw them hijacked by forces beyond their control. Ironically, this world of contingency is nowhere more evident than in crossing the new national frontiers these artists helped to create: as Simpson remarks, “there has never been a single entity called ‘Romanticism,’ and … this very knowledge may be read out of the Romantic writings themselves” (in Curran 20). Heine opens Die romantische Schule by stressing that French and German romantics are different animals; Stendhal and Leopardi show Italy’s distinctness; Britain’s artists and media see “romantic” as a foreign term (Heine 1169).42 The label “romantic” is a political coin in Napoleonic Europe, whose local value depends on our knowledge of local politics: what van Tieghem calls critics’ “esprit exclusivement national” (“exclusively national spirit”) can therefore lead to a dangerous blindness (Romantisme 15). And here lies another reason for the term’s almost immediate distortion; as Wellek says of France, “just as in Italy, a broadly typological and historical term, introduced by Mme de Staël, had become the battle cry of a group of writers who found it a convenient label” (“Concept” 12). That danger is for us to judge, not to ignore. At the root of this old misreading, finally, is another fiction, born by a further irony of the deep if ambivalent romantic desire to speak to and for the people, in unmediated speech: the fiction that artist and consumer are one being. For romanticism is perhaps above all a change of audience, the shared fruit of artistic, industrial, and political revolution: stereotype printing, romantic art, and a vast consumer market are born in symbiosis. In that romantic triangle of artist, product, and consumer, the new bourgeois publics were disturbing bedfellows. Contemporary readers’ letters naively reveal their appropriation of the artist: “I recognized myself in it…. I said to myself: This is me,” writes one (A. Julien in Moreau 267); “this is not you … it is me,” writes another to Hugo (Ulback in Simon 293).43 Seeing this shift with his usual flair, Hugo uses it the same year in a preface to his romantic readers: “madman, to think I am not you!” (Les Contemplations).44 Yet text and romantic label, as Sismondi’s hapless fate makes clear, remain forever separate events; they are as divorced as thing and word, artist and

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consumer, despite romantic myth and generations of historians. (Lovejoy suggests that the term Romantic “has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign” [253]. I would argue that this was true, on a European scale, by 1820.) Look at the case of Britain. No artists can govern the myth they launch, that much is the contract of Promethean creation; yet this, after all, is a strange fate for the great to suffer, to be colonized by their own epithet while they yet lived and protested. Goethe, Tieck, the Schlegels, Sismondi, Manzoni, Leopardi, Pushkin, Byron, Stendhal, Hugo, Delacroix: when Europe’s romantics line up to reject the “so-called romantic school,” how can we so easily have backgrounded their resistance to the label? Every public will impose a persona on its artists, a fictive Doppelgänger they only half control. But which, after all, are we here to judge, that romantic myth, or its creators?

Notes 1. “Le titre de réaliste m’a été imposé comme on a imposé aux hommes de 1830 celui de romantiques. Les titres n’ont donné en aucun temps une idée juste des choses; s’il en était autrement, les œuvres seraient superflues” (Courbet in Barrère 104). 2. “wodurch sie sich denn beide im Nichtigen begegnen” (Goethe’s Moderne Guelfen und Ghibellinen, in Über Kunst und Alterthum). 3. “die einzigen romantischen Erzeugnisse unseres unromantischen Zeitalters” (Schlegel, Kritische 2: 330). 4. “Tieck hat gar keinen Sinn für Kunst sondern nur … [für] Fantasmus und Sentimentalität…. Es fehlt ihm an Stoff, an Realismus, an Philosophie…. Er ist absolut unclassisch und unprogressiv” (Schlegel, Fragmente 65). 5. “Goethe hat … ein ausschweifendes und scandalöses Lob auf Brentano wegen der Pöbellieder in seinem Freimüthigen aufgestellt; die Deutschen Gelehrten … sind jetzt ein wahres Zigeunergesindel. Gott sei Dank daß wir heraus sind!” (Schlegel, Krisenjahre 1: 292). 6. Kleist “hat also nicht bloß in Werken sondern auch im Leben Tollheit für Genie genommen” (Schlegel, Krisenjahre 2: 239). 7. “weil es zu verbraucht und … schon in zu schlechten Ruf gekommen ist” (Eichner, “Romantic” 101). 8. “die verblichene Romantik”; “juvenile Wiedererweckung der Romantik”; “eine der Schule entwachsene Romantik” (Eichendorff 1073–4); “ein solch Gesinge und ein solcher Romantismus … daß man sich schämt” (Brentano 1: 220). 9. “Ich habe überhaupt keine Freude an allen den Sachen, die wir veranlasst haben” (Lüdecke 169). 10. “Von den Fehmgerichten, den geheimen Bündnissen und den Geistern ist vollends gar keine Rettung mehr” (A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen 11: 26). 11. “Der letzte Gipfel der romantischen Poesie”; “auf hundert Komödienzetteln wird der Name romantisch an rohe und verfehlte Erzeugnisse verschwendet und entweiht” (A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen 2: 266, 290). 12. “il est à désirer que de telles productions ne se renouvellent pas”; Meister and the “système singulier” of the “nouvelle école allemande” (Staël, l’Allemagne 3: 127, 257). 13. “les éléments d’un classicisme nouveau” (Moreau 118). 14. “Le génie est, à plusieurs égards, populaire … ceux qui se tourmentent pour attirer l’attention du public … vont jusqu’à s’imaginer que ce qui révolte les sentiments de la plupart des hommes est d’un ordre plus relevé que ce qui les touche … Gigantesque vanité!” (Staël, Œuvres 1: 190–1). 15. “trois unités romantiques”; “des préjugés étroits dans une ignorance fatale” (Sismondi [1813] 461–3); “mon désir d’impartialité n’a point été reconnu”; “nous persisterons à ne nous ranger sous aucune bannière” (Sismondi [1826] 293–4). 16. “Chateaubriand en France, Goethe et Novalis et Werner en Allemagne, lord Byron et W. Scott en Angleterre ne

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John Isbell se figurent point être de la même école; cependant, c’est par le même point que tous pêchent contre la vérité” (Sismondi 20 June 1816).

17. “Il romanticismo non consiste nel lugubre e nel malinconico” (Visconti ctd. Ragusa 317). 18. “Bellissima condanna del sistema romantico”; “una solennissima condanna degli orrori e dell’eccessivo terribile tanto caro ai romantici” (Leopardi 50, 46). 19. “non so qual guazzabuglio di streghe, di spettri, un disordine sistematico, una ricerca stravagante, una abiura in termini del senso comune” (Manzoni 1726). 20. “urartar äfven det romantiska genom frihetens missbruk till det phantastiska och vidunderliga”; “Det … kannibaliska tyckas de anse [Fransoserna] för Romantikens hufvudelement” (Tegnér ctd. Mitchell 381, 394). 21. “mettre … la langue classique dans la bouche de mes personnages romantiques” (Chateaubriand, Mémoires 452; he has “une famille de René poètes et de René prosateurs a pullulé” destroying René (462), and the variant, “infesté l’esprit d’une partie de la jeunesse” (1095). “Si jadis on resta trop en deçà du romantique, maintenant on a passé le but” (Chateaubriand, Œuvres 11: 579). 22. “Le galimatias allemand, que beaucoup de gens appellent romantique aujourd’hui” (Stendhal, Racine 75). 23. “Je ne suis ni classique comme vous l’entendez, ni romantique comme ils l’entendent”; “les deux absurdités rivales, en s’écroulant, feront place à la vérité en littérature” (Lamartine 2: 276, 266). 24. “Trois mots quand il n’en faut que deux” (Lamartine in Moreau, Classicisme 317). 25. “De 1833 à 1834 nous crûmes que le romantisme consistait à ne pas se raser, et à porter des gilets à larges revers, très empesés” (de Musset 876). 26. “Nous n’avons jamais compris cette différence entre le genre classique et le genre romantique” (Hugo, Conservateur 25.III.1820). 27. “se rangeait en 1824 en dehors des deux ‘camps’ parmi les ‘conciliateurs’ et répudiait ‘tous ces termes de convention que les deux partis se rejettent réciproquement comme des ballons vides’“ (Barrère 94–5). 28. “Celui qui écrit ces lignes n’a jamais employé les mots romantisme ou romantique” (Hugo, Œuvres 2: 208). 29. “quelques partisans peu avancés du romantisme”; “des digues les plus puissantes contre l’irruption du commun” (Hugo, Préface 260, 267). 30. “La Guerre en temps de paix” in La Muse française, 1824, demands a “digue puissante” against modern “innovation aventureuse” (Deschamps 4: 13). 31. “le genre souvent ridicule et quelquefois révoltant qu’on appelle en France romantique” (Nodier, Bertram 70). 32. “Le genre romantique est une invention fausse” (Moreau 166–7). 33. “On ne trouvait plus Chateaubriand assez romantique” (Sand 2: 159). 34. “Explique qui pourra le sens de ces mots, que je comprenais fort bien il y a quelques années, et que je n’entends plus aujourd’hui” (Mérimée 759). 35. “la manie de couper en deux la vérité et de n’en vouloir prendre que la moitié” (Guizot in Glachant 22). 36. “ont pensé qu’on était las du beau. Ils ont donc fait du laid” (Jouffroy 48). 37. “Hector Berlioz paraît former avec Hugo et Eugène Delacroix la trinité romantique” (Gautier in Barzun 243). 38. “on m’a enrégimenté, bon gré mal gré, dans la coterie romantique” (Véron 1: 273); “Je commence à prendre furieusement en grippe les Schubert, les rêveurs, les Chateaubriand” (Delacroix 1: 340). 39. “les romantiques, ayant trouvé en lui leur plus haute expression, ont cru qu’il appartenait exclusivement à leur école” (Sand in Moreau 248). 40. “Monsieur, répondit Delacroix, je suis classique” (Andrieux 61). 41. “due aspetti interdipendente di uno stesso fenomeno” (della Chiesa 31). 42. “diese [Schule] in Deutschland ganz anderes war, als was man in Frankreich mit diesem Namen bezeichnet” (Heine 1169). 43. “Je m’y suis reconnu … je me suis dit: C’est moi” (A. Julien in Moreau 267); “Ce n’est pas vous … c’est moi” (Ulbach in Simon 293). 44. “Ah! insensé, qui crois que je ne suis pas toi” (from Hugo’s 1856 preface to Les Contemplations).

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References Andrieux, Louis. 1927. Alphonse Rabbe. Paris: Lahure. Balayé, Simone. 1971. Les Carnets de voyage de Madame de Staël. Genève: Droz. Baldensperger, Fernand. 1937. “‘ Romantique’, ses analogues et ses équivalents: tableau synoptique de 1650 à 1810.” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 19: 93–5. Barante, Prosper de. 1859. Études littéraires et historiques. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Paris: Didier. Barrère, J.-B. 1951. “Sur quelques définitions du romantisme.” Revue des sciences humanines. Barzun, Jacques. 1982. Berlioz and His Century. Chicago: U Chicago P. Behler, Ernst. 1968. “The Origins of the Romantic Literary Theory.” Colloquia Germanica 2: 109–26. Bottasso, Enzo. 1984. “La rottura fra Breme e Foscolo: L’imprevista conseguenza d’un giudizio troppo sbrigativo sulla polemica romantica.” Ludovico di Breme e il programma dei romantici italiani. Torino: Centro Studi Piemontesi. 83–104. Brentano, Clemens. 1951. Briefe. 2 vols. Ed. F. Seebaß. Nüremberg: Hans Carl. Burckhardt, C. A. H. 1891. Das Repertoire des Weimarischen Hoftheaters unter Goethes Leitung 1791–1817. Hamburg: Voß. Butler, Marilyn. 1981. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries. Oxford: Oxford UP. Byron, Lord. 1898–1901. Letters and Journals. Ed. Lord Prothero. 6 vols. London: Murray. Carlyle, Thomas. 1884. Carlyle’s Works. 20 vols. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. Carroll, Lewis. n.d. Through the Looking-Glass. The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. Ed. A. Woolcott. London: Nonesuch. Chateaubriand, François-René. 1951. Lettres à Mme Récamier. Ed. M. Levaillant. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 1946. Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Ed. M. Levaillant and G. Moulinier. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1859–61. Œuvres complètes de Chateaubriand. 12 vols. Paris: Garnier. Courbet, Gustave. 1930. Courbet raconté par lui-même. Genève: Cailler. Curran, Stuart, ed. 1993. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Delacroix, Eugène. 1932. Journal de Eugène Delacroix. Ed. A. Joubin. 3 vols. Paris: Plon. Chiesa, Angela Ottino della . 1965. “Neoclassico e Romantico in Europa.” Il Veltro 9: 23–32. Deschamps, Emile. 1872–4. Œuvres d’Emile Deschamps. 6 vols. Paris: Lemerre. Eggli, Edmond and Pierre Martino. 1933. Le Débat romantique en France, 1813–16. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Eichendorff, Joseph von. 1987–90. Werke. Ed. H. Schultz. 6 vols. Frankfurt: Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker. Eichner, Hans, ed. 1972. “Romantic” and its Cognates: The European History of a Word. Toronto: U Toronto P. Eichner, Hans. 1965. “The Genesis of German Romanticism.” Queen’s Quarterly 72.2: 213–31. ———. 1956. “Friedrich Schlegel’s Theory of Romantic Poetry.” PMLA 71: 1018–41. ———. 1970. “The Novel.” In Prawer 64–96. Fetzer, John. 1990. “Romantic Irony.” In Hoffmeister 19–36. Foscolo, Ugo. 1952-. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo. 22 vols. Firenze: Le Monnier. Gautier, Théophile. 1974. Les Jeunes France: Romans goguenards. Ed. R. Jasinski. Paris: Flammarion. Gennari, Geneviève. 1947. Le Premier voyage de Mme de Staël en Italie. Paris: Boivin. Glachant, Paul and Victor Glachant, eds. 1902. Lettres à Fauriel conservées à la bibliothèque de l’Institut. Paris: Nouvelle Revue. Goblot, J. 1975. “Les mots protestants et protestantisme sous la Restauration.” Civilisation chrétienne: Approche historique d’une idéologie. Ed. Jean-René Derré. Paris: Beauchesne. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1948–60. Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche. Ed. E. Beutler. 24 vols. Zürich: Artemis. ———. 1970–3. Goethe. Schriften zur Literatur. Ed. E. Nahler. 7 vols. Berlin: Akademie. Greene, Donald. 1970. “What Indeed Was Neo-Classicism: A Reply to James William Johnson’s ‘What Was Neo-Classicism’?” Journal of British Studies 10.1:69–79. Heine, Heinrich. 1954. Heinrich Heines Werke. Die Bergland-Buch-Klassiker. Salzburg: Bergland.

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Nahler, E. ed. 1970–3. Goethe. Schriften zur Literatur. 7 vols. Berlin: Akademie. Nodier, Charles. 1961. Contes. Ed. P-G. Castex. Paris: Garnier. ———. 1956. Preface to Charles Marturin’s Bertram, ou Le Château de Saint-Aldobrand. Ed. M. Ruff. Paris: Corti. Pange, Comtesse de. 1967. “Quelques remarques sur l’article de Mme de Staël intitulé: De l’esprit des traductions.” La Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate [RLMC] 20 (December): 215–25. Paulin, Roger. 1985. Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1970. “The Drama.” In Prawer 173–203. Peckham, Morse. 1951. “Toward a Theory of Romanticism.” PMLA 66:5–23. Pellegrini, Carlo. 1926. Il Sismondi e la storia delle letterature dell’Europa meridionale. Genève: Olschki. Perkins, David. 1990. “The Construction of ‘The Romantic Movement’ as a Literary Classification.” NineteenthCentury Literature 45. Peyre, Henri. 1969. “The Originality of French Romanticism.” Symposium 23. 3–4: 333–45. Pierce, Frederick A. 1918. Currents and Eddies in the English Romantic Generation. New Haven: Yale UP. Prawer, Siegbert, ed. 1970. The Romantic Period in Germany. London: Weidenfield and Nicholson. Proffer, Carl R. 1966–7. “Gogol’s Definition of Romanticism.” Studies in Romanticism 6: 120–7. Pushkin. 1986. Pushkin on Literature. Tr. ed. T. Wolff. London: Athlone. Ragusa, Olga. 1972. “Italy/Romantico — Romanticismo.” In Eicher, “Romantic” 293–340. Remak, Henry H. H. 1968. “A Key to West European Romanticism?” Colloquia Germanica 2: 37–46. ———. “New Harmony: The Quest for Synthesis in West European Romanticism.” In Hoffmeister: 333–51. Rodger, Gillian. 1970. “The Lyric.” In Prawer 147–72. Sand, George. 1970. Œuvres autobiographiques. Ed. G. Lubin. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. 1846–48. Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. E. Böcking. 16 vols. 3rd ed. Liepzig: Weidmann. ———. 1967. Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur. Ed. E. Lohner. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1957. Fragmente zur Litteratur und Poesie I: Literary Notebooks, 1797–1801. Ed. Hans Eichner. London: Athlone. ———. 1936, 1969. Krisenjahre der Frühromantik. Ed. J. Körner. 3 vols. Brno: Rohrer. ———. 1967–79. Kritische Friedrich Schlegel-Ausgabe. Ed. E. Behler. 14 vols. München: Schöningh. Shelley, Mary. 1983. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. New York: New American Library. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1926–30. Complete Works. Ed. R. Ingpen and W. E. Peck. 10 vols. London: Benn. Simon, G. 1922. “Victor Hugo et les critiques.” Revue de Paris (July). Sismondi. 1933–75. Epistolario. Ed. Carlo Pellegrini. 5 vols. Firenze: Nuova Italia. Solovieff, George. 1990. L’Allemagne et Madame de Staël. Paris: Klinsieck. So˝tér, I. and I. Neupokoyeva, eds. 1977. European Romanticism. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Staël, Madame de. 1985. Corinne ou l’Italie. Ed. S. Balayé. Paris: Folio. ———. 1958–60. De l’Allemagne. Ed. Pange-Balayé. 5 vols. Paris: Hachette. ———. 1834. Œuvres complètes. 3 vols. Paris: Treuttel & Würtz. Stendhal, Henri Beyle. 1962. Correspondance. Ed. H. Martineau and V. del Litto. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1970. Racine et Shakespeare. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Trainer, James. 1970. “The Märchen” in Prawer 97–120. Tieghem, Paul van. 1969. Le Romantisme dans la littérature européene. Paris: Albin Michel. Véron, Louis. 1853–5. Mémoires d’un bourgeois de Paris. 6 vols. Paris: Gonet. Weisinger, Herbert. 1946. “English treatment of the Classical-Romantic Problem.” Modern Language Quarterly 7.4:477–88. Wellek, René. 1949. “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History.” Comparative Literature 1: 1–23, 147–72. ———. 1970. Discriminations. Hew Haven: Yale UP. ———. 1955–1992. A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950. 6 vols. New Haven: Yale UP. Whalley, George. 1965. “Literary Romanticism.” Queen’s Quarterly 72.2: 232–52 ———. 1972. “England/Romantic — Romanticism.” In Eichner, “Romantic” 157–262. Wilkins, Ernest. 1954. A History of Italian Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Wordsworth, William. 1964. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. T. Hutchinson. Rev. ed. de Selincourt. London: Oxford UP.



Hegel and Hegelianism in European Romanticism GERHART HOFFMEISTER University of California, Santa Barbara

“Hegel, we now recognize, is one of the most influential figures in the history of mankind” (Wellek 2, 318). This assessment is based on the impact of Hegel’s philosophy, which was an attempt to combine all available knowledge in a coherent system. Even if critics of the romantic age disagreed with Hegel’s conclusions, they could not bypass him because “the philosophy of Hegel embraced all the questions of the universal life…. Hegel has made philosophy a science, and the greatest service of this greatest of thinkers of the modern world consists in his method of speculative thought”1 (Belinsky 287). What made Hegel’s philosophy so attractive was both its message and its method. The task of the philosopher is to know everything, not only the objective world around us, but to recognize God’s Spirit (reason) in it, to show how it reveals itself among men and to help it to come into its own and thus become free. This way Hegel tried to unify spirit and nature, mind and matter, ideal and real and to arrive at a systematic synthesis in which each part is viewed as a mirror of the whole. To be sure, Hegel’s system is based on several optimistic assumptions: first, that the philosopher is able to know all; second, that he can trace the development of God’s Providence in history; third, that divine reason rules the world; and fourth, that he can overcome the alienation between matter and mind, being and thinking through his dialectic method applied to both. As opposed to the Enlightenment’s view of the universe as a static mechanism, Hegel saw everything in motion in nature, history, mind, and God; dialectic thinking overcomes oppositions and reintegrates them in its conclusions. Thus the final synthesis amounts to a compromise that contains both the positive and the negative positions on a higher level before the dialectic process starts anew. Scholarly opinions differ as to which work provides the key to Hegel’s system. The most comprehensive exposition takes place in Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences; 1817); other titles rival its importance: Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of the Mind; 1807), Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (The Philosophy of Right; 1821), Philosophie der Geschichte (Philosophy of History; 1837), and Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik (Lectures on Aesthetics; 1835). Whereas the first two works contain Hegel’s speculative ideas, the latter apply his theories to concrete examples. Basic to all is Hegel’s belief in God and reason. Not a transcendent personality, God as absolute Spirit manifests Himself in this world in history, art, religion, and the state. His spirit comes into His own by contrast with nature and through individual self-expression as objectivized in people’s histories and institutions. Only in man’s consciousness does nature become spiritual, whereas man gets to know himself as spirit in philosophy, art, and religion. Through the dialectic process, man, after his fall, gradually regains his state of grace with God, who in turn gains more and more consciousness of Himself in man.

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In his Philosophie der Geschichte, Hegel portrays history in dialectic terms in step with God’s trinity. “God is dialectics”2 (Heer 25), since through His son He unfolds Himself in history. God’s providence rules the world (Hegel, Werke 11:39, 67). Accordingly, Hegel’s view of history turns into a theodicy (Hegel, Werke 11:42, 569) in which suffering and death have a place, but not injustice because of the general purpose of world history and the progress of spirit toward freedom (Hegel, Werke 11:46). This conclusion makes sense only in the context of Hegel’s belief that history does not care for individual happiness (Hegel, Werke 11:56), on the contrary, it uses great men such as Caesar (Hegel, Werke 11:59) or Napoleon as unconscious tools in its drive toward greater self-knowledge as well as in the service of mankind’s progress (Hegel, Werke 11:63, 64). The ultimate goal of history is constant progress toward the selfrealization of spirit whose highest determination is freedom (Hegel, Werke 11:44). “What happens on earth and in heaven, happens but to reach this goal”3 (Hegel, Einleitung 110). God rules the world, everything must have some useful purpose and fit His plan of salvation. Spirit progresses from one culture to the next, from one state of cultural achievement to the next level of the evolution of spirit. Thus world history moves through stages (Hegel, Werke 11:92), the first phase being the Orient, characterized by a total lack of freedom in a masterslave society; this earliest phase is followed by the Graeco-Roman empire marked by the dawning of the idea of freedom and the plasticity of its arts; the Germanic Middle Ages with its focus on Christian spirituality synthesizes the two previous positions in an orderly monarchy guaranteeing the highest degree of freedom (Hegel, Werke 11:45); in its last section, history stretches from the Reformation until 1820, when the spirit’s mission seems to be completed: it has become free and the rights of man have been acknowledged (Hegel, Werke 11:567). This observation leads directly to Hegel’s “philosophy of right,” i.e. his conception of the state and the individual. As a manifestation of the divine spirit’s march through the world, states developed from slavery toward freedom. A mature modern state is founded on reason as expressed in good laws that are in keeping with reason. God’s progress through the world manifests itself in the state as divine will and spirit that has become tangible in the “organization of a world”4 (Hegel, Grundlinien 222). From this perspective, the task of each individual is to become a citizen, to objectify himself in order to be congruent with the “objective spirit”of the state. Thus the usual contrast between arbitrariness and freedom vanishes with each individual’s submission to the law as an expression of the general will: “the general will and the particular will must ultimately coincide in the realization of freedom” (Harris 167). This way the individual obeys itself and becomes free, a constituent element in organized civil society. Did Hegel, a professor in Berlin (1818), turn into a reactionary, servile philosopher of the Prussian state when he proclaimed: “Whatever is reasonable is real; and what is real, is reasonable”5 (Hegel, Grundlinien 14)? This statement was read as an invitation to accept the status quo in the Age of Restoration (1815–48). Yet progressive minds interpreted it in a dynamic fashion so as to express the idea that “whatever is rational must exist.” Heinrich Heine heard this version from Hegel himself at the University of Berlin in 1820 (Heine 4:653).6 By the same token, the Prussian state became a target of criticism when Hegel’s state as the manifest spirit of freedom was compared with its dismal reality, its bureaucracy, and its lack of citizens’ rights. In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel argues that art results from the progressive evolution

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of pure spirit; it is, next to religion and philosophy, one of the decisive moments in the history of the self-liberation of spirit from matter, a struggle that passes through three successive stages: the conflict with matter in the symbolic art of the Orient (architecture), the equilibrium between matter and spirit in the classical sculptures of antiquity, and finally, spirit’s emancipation from all previously achieved balance of form and content in post-Graeco-Roman “romantic” art as evidenced in the areas of painting, music, and literature. Even a capsule-like reduction of his aesthetic system leads to several conclusions: first, Hegel presses “the classification of the arts into the sequence of the historical stages of art” (Wellek 2:320); second, spirit, in its successive manifestations in art, religion, and philosophy finally transcends beautiful art as “the sensuous semblance of the idea”7 (Hegel, Werke 12:160) and turns inside, away from matter or form to the benefit of theory, thus, occasioning the eventual death of art and literature. “Art … finds its true justification only in science”8 (12:35), i.e. philosophy; romantic art as developed in the Christian era turns its back on classical harmony and instead focuses on the inner life of the mind, allowing full scope to the “unbeautiful,” to “sin and evil” as well as the presentation of protagonists torn within (13:15).9 Seen from the position of artistic perfection, ancient sculpture was the unsurpassed climax, but, viewed in terms of the evolution of spirit who withdraws from the external world into itself (13:122), romantic art becomes its highest achievement. Romantic art developed in three stages: from the religious sphere of medieval art through the secular art of chivalry to modern art, a division that implies an essential antithesis between this world and the world beyond. In other words, a gulf exists between the spiritual realm of the mind and the external world that is finally released from its classical fusion with Spirit. Thus the fundamental problem for romantic artists was how to cope with the experience of Weltschmerz or “Zerrissenheit.” The best means to express this dissonance were music and lyric poetry. Studying the life and works of his contemporaries, among them the brothers Schlegel, Novalis, and Tieck, Hegel realized the dangers lurking in the increasing introversion of his age whose religious foundation was fast dissolving under the threat of “irony” (Hegel, Grundlinien 138–9). In his critique of modern literature, Hegel targeted irony in both life and art as represented by Friedrich Schlegel, because in him romantic subjectivity seemed to culminate in undermining any serious effort at conviction or substance. To the ironist everything appears void and vain except his own ego that thrives on solely subjective, even narcissistic feelings, a position Hegel considered evil (Hegel, Werke 101–2). There are only two ways to solve the ironist’s predicament, conversion to faith or madness. Moreover, it would be tantamount to artistic bankruptcy to turn irony into the principle of artistic creation or worse, into a guideline for literary criticism without a philosophical standard at hand (12:99). Out of personal antipathy toward Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel seems to have equated irony with arbitrariness and romantic literature at large (13:136; 12:101–2). Although it appears that Hegel turned into an anti-romantic with his declaration of the end of art and with his construction of an all-encompassing system alien to romantic fragmentation, his European reception took place in the context of romanticism. His disciples and admirers could easily find all essential ingredients necessary to make him a romantic philosopher and to help the younger generation change the world: first, his optimism, undaunted in the face of major catastrophes, was based on the dominant role of spirit or reason in the historical process,

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an idea well encapsulated in the belief that everything that happens has a purpose or function in the scheme of Providence; second, his faith in man’s, especially the philosopher’s, capacity to know everything; third, his conception of a steady universal movement, growth, and evolution; and fourth, his understanding of nations as cultural entities with a history of their own and yet part of a concert of nations moving toward the highest goal, freedom that is to be achieved by great individuals. Most critics agree on one point: Hegel’s legacy to his age can hardly be overestimated. Hegelianism is the term used to identify the chief philosophical trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that developed out of Hegel’s system in various stages and sometimes in mutually exclusive “schools.” The “old Hegelians” on the right were conserving their master’s overall synthesis of opposites in contrast to the “young Hegelians” on the left who employed his dialectic to interpret his thought progressively and in a revolutionary vein during the first stage of his reception between 1830 and 1850 (Knox 491). The German left-wing is well represented by David Strauss (Das Leben Jesu [The Life of Jesus; 1835–36]), Ludwig Feuerbach (Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity; 1841]), Arnold Ruge (ed., Hallische Jahrbücher [Halle Annual; 1838–39]), and Karl Marx (ed., Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher [GermanFrench Annual; 1844], together with Ruge). Instead of focusing on the well-known Hegelian controversies in Germany, this essay attempts to elucidate the transformation of Hegel’s system outside of Germany during the 1840s, a period of antireligious and political radicalism. Johan Ludvig Heiberg introduced Hegel’s philosophy to Denmark, where it flourished in the 1840s, especially in the works of Kierkegaard, first in his dissertation Om Begrebet Ironi med stadigt Hensyn til Socrates (On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates; 1841), then in Begrebet angest (The Concept of Anxiety; 1844), in Philosophiske Smuler eller En Smule Philosophi (Philosophical Fragments or A Fragmentary Philosophy; 1844), and finally in his Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (Concluding Unscientific Postscript; 1846). Hegel had already died when Kierkegaard attended Schelling’s anti-Hegelian lectures in Berlin in 1841–42. Not surprisingly, Kierkegaard polemicized against Hegel with varying degrees of vehemence yet at the same time continued drawing on his terminology and dialectic. Early on, he took over Hegel’s critique of romantic irony as an expression of mere negativity and narcissism, of subjectivity that is without any redeeming ties to real life. “For irony, everything turns into nothing”10 (Kierkegaard 1:296). Instead Kierkegaard advocated a return to Socratic irony and adapted Hegel’s dialectic for his theology (Dialectic Theology), yet he criticized Hegel for his synthesis of existence and reflection. In Enten-Eller (Either/Or), he concluded that existence cannot be pressed into a logical system, a tendency that could only lead to abstractions of the sort found throughout Hegel’s Philosophie der Geschichte that to him seemed to exclude the ups and downs of real life in favor of a neat outcome of the dialectic process. For Kierkegaard, a “system” of reality is not possible, because real life exists only in individuals and their decisions. Whereas Hegel declared that the real was rational and that the harmony and progress of the universe preceded any individual’s happiness, Kierkegaard turned Hegel’s priorities upside down, questioned Hegel’s all-encompassing optimism, replaced his theodicy with the existential dialectic of either/or, his synthesis with a gulf between religion and philosophy, and his “spirit of the universe” with him “who now has infinitely chosen himself”11 (Kierkegaard 3:221) as an act of personal freedom. In Kierkegaard, Hegel’s justifications frequently gave way to angst and

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melancholy (Frygt og bæven, 1843 [Fear and Trembling]; Sygdomen til døden, 1849 [Sickness unto Death]).

Although no French translation of Hegel’s works of any significance was published until 1840 (Cours d’estétique, 1840–51), his impact on French philosophy had been felt even during his lifetime thanks to Victor Cousin, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and later minister of education. Cousin went to Germany in 1817 and 1824 where he befriended Hegel in Heidelberg (Cousin 188–9), who in turn met Cousin in Paris in 1827. Cousin’s eclecticism is not regarded as a major contribution to French philosophy, but his lectures beginning in 1818 incorporated many Hegelian ideas and made his friend well known in France. What seems to have attracted him to Hegel was his history of philosophy and philosophy of history (Hegel, Briefe 3:156), in particular Hegel’s appreciation of the French Revolution. However, Cousin’s eclectic psychological method undermined Hegel’s systematic approach, a fact that Cousin himself recognized early in the friendship when he objected to the “inflexible order” of the dialectic (Cousin 192, 194) that went against his instinct. For this reason, he referred to Hegel as an Aristotelean scholastic with dogmatic roots in the eighteenth century whereas after the 1830s he began to emphasize Schelling’s Platonic philosophy of nature (Cousin 197), perhaps, because he needed to protect himself from “accusations of plagiarism” (Kelly 13). More important than Cousin’s own work was his role as intermediary in naturalizing German philosophy in France (Hegel, Briefe 3:301) and acquainting Edgar Quinet and Proudhon with Hegel. Others attended Hegel’s Berlin lectures (e.g. Eugène Lerminier, Philosophie du droit (Philosophy of Right; 1831) or established contact with the young Hegelians of the émigré group in Paris, among them Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Arnold Ruge, and Mikhail Bakunin. Hegel’s Philosophie der Geschichte with its apotheosis of reason, its emphasis on the necessity of progress for the spirit of the universe toward freedom presented a tremendous challenge to young Polish students who had experienced the fourth division of their country in 1815 (Congress of Vienna) and studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the “new Athens” founded in 1810. How could the dissolution of the Polish state be justified by philosophy? As Tschizewskij reports, their response was overwhelmingly in favor of correcting Hegel’s principles out of indignation over their nation’s debacle with the eventual goal of applying them to the real world (Tschizewskij 12–14). The most influential among them, Count Augustus Cieszkowski embarked on transforming Hegel’s idealism by employing his dialectic in order to shape a philosophy of action for the future arguing that from that point on “philosophy would begin to be applied” (78). Being and thought, moreover, needed to dissolve into action (73). During the early years of Polish emigration after the November Revolution of 1830, Cieszkowski exerted a considerable influence on his countrymen as well as on Russians such as Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) and even on some German young Hegelians, for example Moses Hess. His importance increased after 1843, when he co-founded, together with Carl-Ludwig

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Michelet, the “Philosophische Gesellschaft” (The Philosophical Society) in Berlin, a meeting place for Hegelians of various persuasions. Among other prominent figures are Bronisław Trentowski, who after 1831 studied at Königsberg and Heidelberg Universities and between 1838 and 1853 lectured at Freiburg on the history of philosophy and the encyclopedia of science while revising the Hegelian system with the aid of dialectics (Vorstudien zur Wissenschaft der Natur, [1840; Preliminary Studies Concerning the Science of Naure]). In Poland, Hegel and Trentowski were received simultaneously and had a great impact on Jozef Kremer, J. I. Kraszewski, Z. Krasin´ski, and Karol Libelt (Tschizewskij 20–123). Hegel’s parallel impact on Russia between 1837–1848 was even more sweeping than on Poland. Alexander Herzen states that Hegel’s works were discussed incessantly; “there was not a paragraph in the three parts of the Logic, in the two of the Aesthetic, in the Encyclopaedia, and so on, which had not been the subject of furious battles for several nights together”12 (Herzen 2:115). Several avenues of dissemination traversed this philosophical decade: first, the attraction of Berlin University before and after Hegel’s death as the center of German and westEuropean learning for Russian students such as Ivan Kireyevsky, Mikhail Bakunin, Nikolai Stankevich, and T. N. Granovski; second, the circles and salons in St. Petersburg and as well as those in Moscow that arose alongside the university, the center of Russian Hegelianism; and third, cross-fertilization of ideas among Slavs. Apparently Herzen, when exiled to the Russian countryside, came across Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena and ordered it from Berlin (Walicki 75). Cieszkowski seems to have been instrumental in Herzen’s development of a “philosophy of action” of his own. How well was Hegel actually studied and understood? Certainly, Hegelianism became fashionable in society to the point that all young men pretended to know Hegel and even conversed in a jargon for the initiated, a so-called bird-language that no one else could understand: “The concretion of abstract ideas in the sphere of plastics presents that phase of the self-seeking spirit in which, defining itself for itself, it passes from the potentiality of natural immanence into the harmonious sphere of pictorial consciousness in beauty”13 (Herzen 2:116–17). Such a statement seems formidable even in the scholarly world of the 1990s, yet Kireyevsky thought that most of the young people using this bird-language had not even read Hegel (Tschizewskij 167, 279). However, enough students had made a serious investment in Hegel’s philosophy to participate in heated discussions and to become so devoted to this new thinking that they could appear as “Hegelians,” a recurrent type in Russian literature from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Tschizewskij 279–82). The reception of Hegel in Russia needs to be considered in terms of a process. It started out as a small creek but turned into a flood in circles and salons; it conquered university life as the dominant ideology of the 1840s until it became so dangerous for the authorities that by 1848 mentioning Hegel and German philosophy in the press was forbidden by the censor and the teaching of philosophy abolished at Russian universities (Wolff 165). Obviously, for state and church Hegel had become an unsettling influence with this very transformation of Russian Hegelianism from speculative concerns among conservatives focused on “Reconciliation with Reality” to a distinct “philosophy of action” (Walicki 115). This change ran almost parallel to the German split between right- and left-wing Hegelians and gained the added dimension in the Russian controversy between Slavophiles and Westernizers. But even

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Slavophiles co-existed for a time with Hegelianism until later (Herzen 2:254–55; Walicki 289). Actually, most of the “Westernizers” first met in Stankevich’s circle, e.g. Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky, and Herzen. They were united by an “unbounded love for freedom of thought and hatred of everything that restricts it” (Herzen, qtd. in Walicki 336), a yearning for the emancipation of the individual and of the Russian people in general. Stankevich, “the first disciple of Hegel in the Moscow circle”14 (Herzen 2:114), died too young to contribute much to the translation of philosophy into action, although he knew Cieszkowski and Feuerbach and inspired his friends to study philosophy. Mikhail Bakunin took over the leadership of the Stankevich-circle at the same time as he discovered Hegel, a turning point in his life. Studying his works, he became one of Russia’s pre-eminent Hegelians, who viewed him idealistically early on as the interpreter of the divine spirit’s manifestation in life. Once he arrived in Berlin (1840s), however, he rapidly changed his views on Hegel under the influence of Young Hegelians such as Arnold Ruge. In his periodical Hallische Jahrbücher, Ruge published his famous article on “Die Reaction in Deutschland” (The Reaction in Germany; 1842), in which reconciliation with reality gives way to his revolutionary principle of contradiction; he derived this insight from Hegel’s dialectics, but he freed it from its former equilibrium and fashioned it into a vehicle of negation and destruction of everything positive. Hegel’s theories exhausted themselves and are here replaced by Bakunin’s call to action (Tschizewskij 190–203). Belinsky associated with Stankevich and Bakunin in Moscow before he went to Germany to meet Arnold Ruge in Berlin and to get acquainted with the early works of Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels. Starting out as a romantic pantheist, Belinsky was introduced to Hegel’s ideas about 1835, and he used those ideas to his full advantage before he embraced revolutionary change in literature and social life. Familiar also with Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and the Young Hegelians, Belinsky was to serve as the most important intermediary between German philosophy and Russia, a great teacher and “the most important critic in the whole history of Russian literature” (Wellek 3:243). He adopted Hegel in two areas, his aesthetics and in his view of history. He took over Hegel’s dialectic pattern for the development of literature from lyrical works through epic poems to tragedies, a pattern determined by the rhythm of history. In his last years, he replaced divine spirit by social reality as the focus of poetry and criticism (Tschizewskij 220–21; Wellek 3:251). In a letter to Stankevich, he wrote about a crucial, eye-opening experience when he came across Hegel’s famous dictum, “The real is rational and the rational is real,” which he translated as “force is law and law is force.” This principle excluded any arbitrariness and coincidences in history (Tschizewskij 210) and led to a period in Belinsky’s life during which he reconciled himself with reality, with the particular being subservient to the general law of universal history. Herzen’s question to him was very much to the point: “Do you know that from your standpoint … you can prove that the monstrous tyranny under which we live is rational and ought to exist?”15 (Herzen 2:120). Belinsky viewed history in terms of Hegel’s stages in the dialectic progress of spirit that moves from one nation to a higher level in another people exploiting great individuals such as Peter the Great in the process without their being aware of it. Russia was to become heir to the preceding ages of mankind, predestined to synthesize the best ingredients of each on a higher level (Tschizewskij 218–20).

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By 1841, Belinsky was ready to reevaluate Hegel’s philosophy of history in the light “of all the victims of life and history, of all the victims of chance, superstition, the Inquisition, Philip II”16 (letter to Botkin, qtd. in Tschizewskij 227). Obviously, Belinsky had decided to rescue the individual from the tyranny of the universal law, thereby turning Hegel’s position upside down before Marx and aligning himself with Young Hegelians; in other words, he used Hegel’s method to demolish Hegel (Belinsky 287). For Belinsky, speculative philosophy was returning to life, and a revolutionary approach to reality was in the making. During his days as a student at Moscow University, Alexander Herzen had proclaimed that philosophical ideas should be combined with revolutionary ones (Herzen 2:128) in order to serve as tools for social reform. Exiled repeatedly to the Russian provinces, he learned of Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena with its accent on “philosophy of action” and upon his return to the capital ridiculed the “philosophy of reconciliation” practiced in the Stankevich circle. Intensive study of Hegel followed (115–6), and in 1847 he left Russia for good to live in exile in Paris, London, and Genoa from whence he advocated a new social order for his homeland as formulated in his On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia (1850). Herzen also began with Hegel’s position that “the real is rational” and that the dialectic movement consists of the congruence of logical and historical progress, of the identity of thinking and being. Yet gradually Herzen’s emphasis shifted in favor of being, of a dialectic method applied to reality itself (Herzen 2:119) and a focus on the link between personality and action. Thus he went beyond his beloved Hegel to draw some conclusions the “old Hegel,” caught in his web of philosophical abstractions, had overlooked, but the young Hegel had already formulated in his Theologische Jugendschriften (1844). In them, Herzen discovered the “algebra of revolution”17 (Herzen 2:121) on the way toward man’s emancipation from burdensome traditions. In this light, Hegel’s dialectic is put at the disposal of action promising to inaugurate a new age led by a philosophy of socialism (Herzen 2:113–29; Tschizewskij 275, 277). This procedure entails a second step involving a division of history different from Hegel’s four-part design (Orient, Greece, Rome, Germanic Middle Ages; Hegel, Grundlinien 294); it rather envisions a tripartite dialectic historicism consisting of antiquity, Christian feudalism, and the future epoch of action in Russia (Tschizewskij 85). Obviously, what emerges from the previous discussion is that together these radical Russian thinkers — Belinsky, Bakunin, and Herzen — with the aid of Hegelianism paved the way to Lenin’s Soviet Revolution. It is interesting to see how Italy also became part of the continental drive toward emancipation as expressed in some Hegelians’ call for a return of philosophy to life and action. (For Spain in the late nineteenth century, see García Casanova.) Several Italians had contacts with emigré circles in Paris and London, among them Augusto Vera, who met Victor Cousin in Paris (1839) and was instrumental in turning Naples into a Hegelian center, but even Giuseppe Mazzini, leader of the Risorgimento, knew of Hegel’s importance (Garin 124) and associated with Hegelians such as Arnold Ruge, with whom he co-founded the “European Democratic Committee” in London (1849) as well as with Alexander Herzen (beginning in 1852). Soon thereafter, he met Marx and Bakunin in London, where Mazzini had founded one of his many journals, this one notably entitled Pensiero ed azione. Interestingly, Giuseppe Garibaldi, leader of the “party of action,” followed plans devised by Mazzini in earlier years on his expedition to Sicily in 1860.

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The most important Hegelians second to Vera were Bertrand Spaventa and Francesco de Sanctis, whose Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature; 1870–71) is widely considered the last work published in the spirit of Hegel’s Aesthetics. A letter by Pasquale Villari pinpoints Hegel’s significance for Italy: “To teach Hegel to Italy would mean to regenerate it…. Without philosophy one cannot become a nation”18 (Oldrini 9). As in Poland and Russia, Hegel’s Philosophy of History, translated by Giambattista Passerini in 1840, received enthusiastic attention. For certain, spirit’s progress toward knowing itself in freedom had to include the Italian nation. No wonder, de Sanctis, Bertrando Spaventa, and others saw in Hegel a philosopher of the Italian revolution. Hegel became a cult-figure: “It was a cult, an ideal religion”19 (Oldrini 323), especially after 1843 in Naples. This does not mean that Hegel was welcome; on the contrary, the obstacles mounted by the police state were formidable (e.g., censorship and surveillance) and before 1848 allowed only a barely visible underground reception by means of French translations and without a specific center or program for guidance. The next decade saw a widening interest in other works by Hegel, even in the original. First de Sanctis read Hegel’s Aesthetics and incorporated Hegelian ideas in his Neapolitan lectures Teoria e storia della letteratura (Theory and History of Literature; 1838–48); thereafter he excerpted Die Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) in prison (Castel dell’Ovo, 1850–53), and Silvio Spaventa provided the Italian version of Hegel’s famous preface to Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (1850). A few years later, Bertrando Spaventa discovered in Vincenzo Gioberti and his book Il primato morale e civile degli Italiani (The Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians; 1843) the Italian fulfillment of Hegel. It claimed that Providence had chosen Italy as Europe’s teacher concerning the life of the spirit (Garin 123–38). This assertion amounted to the return of spirit through Hegelianism to its Italian origins. A couple of years earlier, Spaventa had already noted that German idealists appeared to be disciples of Giordano Bruno, but now their spirit had descended to the “field of practical activity, joining the battle of political and social elements”20 (Oldrini 317), a statement totally consistent with Young Hegelian thought in western and eastern Europe. As a late romantic literary critic, de Sanctis formulated his famous idea about poetic form by following Hegel’s definition of classical art and accordingly maintained that an artist’s formal expression is intrinsically linked to his conceptual content; form has a plastic, organic quality comprising the idea and is conceived unconsciously. Works of art reflect the progress of spirit, and each poet continues where the previous one failed: “That which [Milton] was unable to achieve, Klopstock took up in his Messias”21 (de Sanctis, Teoria I:232; Fornacca Kouzel 221). The critic’s task is to uncover the divine idea in literature, since Spirit reveals itself in material form, first in religion, thereafter in the arts and philosophy (de Sanctis, Teoria 2:136). In his later Storia della letteratura italiana (1870–71), he presented the dialectic development of Italian literature from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the modern age, frequently neglecting the uniqueness of literary works but emphasizing the ongoing dialectic process between the ideal and the real, idea and form. Not without reason did Benedetto Croce, known for his denial of the possibility of literary history, find traces of history conceived in Hegelian terms as a dialectic of abstract concepts in de Sanctis’s history of literature (Croce 397). However, de Sanctis differs from Hegel in his strong objection first to Hegel’s emphasis on art not as form but as a manifestation of ideas, thereby fitting the organic unity of each individual

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work into his system (Wellek 4:10); second, to Hegel’s declaration of the end of all art with its transformation into philosophy. De Sanctis believed in the constant regeneration of art as proven by Manzoni and Leopardi (de Sanctis, Teoria I:176, 261). Yet even in this case, “the revolt against Hegel is conducted with Hegelian means”22 (Contini 30). In conclusion, what emerges from this overview of the impact of Hegelianism on Europe in its late romantic phase appears to be the well-documented although nowadays mostly forgotten fact that for both Slavic countries as well as Italy, the philosophical emancipation in thinking carried forward by Hegel and his immediate disciples was to prove a decisive element in the political struggle for liberation from oppression.

Notes 1. “K4:@F@L4b ',(,:b @$>b:" F@$@` &F, &@BD@FZ &F,@$V,6 042>4 …. ',(,:\ F*,:": 42 L4:@F@L44 >"J8J, 4 &,:4R"6T"b 2"F:J(" ^H@(@ &,:4R"6T,(@ @&@(@ P48:@B,*i4 4 BD., 8@H@DZ6 $Z >, $Z:X &2bHX @HR"b>>Zi, "$FHD"8H>ZNX 4*,6 &X FL,D± B:"FH484 BD,*FH"&:b,HX HJ L"2J F", @BD,*±:bbF\ *:b F,$b, B@H,>P4DJ,HFb 42X ,FH,FH&,>>@6 4">ib &X 8D"F@H±” (',DP,>X 2:132). 14. “B,D&Z6 B@F:±*@&"H,:\ ',(,:b &X 8DJ(J X 2:136). 16. “%@ &F,N 0,DH&"N JF:@&46 042>4 4 4FH@D44, &@ &F,N 0,DH&"N F:JR"6>@FH,6, FJ,&,D4b, 4>8&424P44, K4:4BB" II” (#,:4>F846 280). 17. “":(,$D" D,&@:`Pi4” (',DP,>X 2: 137). 18. “Fare intendere Hegel all’Italia vorrebbe dire rigenerare l’Italia” (Oldrini 9). 19. “Era un culto, una religione ideale” (Oldrini 323). 20. “nel campo dell’attività practica, nella lotta degli elementi politici e sociali” (Oldrini 317). 21. “Ciò che egli non riuscì a eseguire fu ripreso dal Klopstock nella Messiade” (de Sanctis, Teroria 2:136). 22. “La rivolta contro Hegel è condotta con mezzi hegeliani” (Contini 301).

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References Belinsky, V[issarion] G. [#,:4>F846, %. '.] 1941. 32$D">>Z, L4:@F@LF84, F@R4>,>4b. ;@F8&": '@FJ*"DFH&,>>@, 42*"H,:\FH&@ B@:4H4R,F8@6 :4H,D"HJDZ; translated as 1948. Selected Philosophical Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Calabrò, Gatano, et al. eds. 1972. L’Opera e l’eredità di Hegel. Bari: Laterza. Cieszkowski, Augustus. 1979. Selected Writings. Ed. A. Liebich. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Croce, Benedetto. 1913. Saggio sullo Hegel. Bari: Laterza. Contini, Gianfranco, ed. 1968. De Sanctis, Francesco. Storia della letteratura. 2 vols. Torino: Unione tipograficoeditrice torinese. Cousin, Victor. 1826. Fragments philosophiques. 1970. Reprint Geneva: Slatkine. de Sanctis, Francesco. 1926. Teoria e storia della letteratura. Ed. Benedetto Croce. 2 vols. Bari: Laterza. ———. 1968. Storia della letteratura italiana. Ed. Gianfranco Contini. Torino: Unione tipografico- editrice torinese. Fornacca Kouzel, Daisy. 1970. “The Hegelian Influence in the Literary Criticism of Francesco De Sanctis.” Hegel in Comparative Literature. Ed. Frederick G. Weiss. Jamaica, NY: St. John’s UP. 214–31. García Casanova, Juan F. 1982. Hegel y el republicanismo en la España del XIX. Granada: Universidad de Granada. Garin, Eugenio. 1972. “La ‘fortuna’ nella filosofia italiana.” L’Opera e l’eredità di Hegel. Ed. G. Calabrò et al. Bari: Laterza. 123–38. Harris, Errol E. 1983. “Hegel’s Theory of Political Action.” Hegel’s Philosophy of Action. Ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich and David Lamb. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities P. 157–72. Heer, Friedrich, ed. 1957 [© 1955]. Hegel: Ausgewählt und eingeleitet von Friedrich Heer. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1949. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Hermann Glockner. Rpt. Jubiläumsausgabe in 20 Bänden. Stuttgart: Frommann. ———. 1952–60. Briefe von und an Hegel. Ed. Johannes Hoffmeister. 4 vols. Hamburg: F. Meiner. ———. 1955. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Ed. Johannes Hoffmeister. Philosophische Bibliothek. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1955. Hegel: Ausgewählt und eingeleitet von Friedrich Heer. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ———. 1959. Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philosophie. Ed. Johannes Hoffmeister. Philosophische Bibliothek 166. Hamburg: Meiner. Heine, Heinrich. 1972. Sämtliche Werke in vier Bänden. München: Winkler. Helferich, Christoph. 1979. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Sammlung Metzler 182. Stuttgart: Metzler. Herzen, Alexander. 1921. [',DP,>X, !. 3.] #Z:@, 4 *J@L4:Z) on the historical role of Russia in Europe was decisively marked by Herder, Schelling, and Hegel. Both sides cite German authorities in their arguments as can be seen in the essays with which the Westerner Peter J. Caadaev in the first of his K4:@F@LF84, B4F\48, ;@F8@&F846 >"$:`*"H,:\). The system-related speculative German method of combining historical reflection with the study of art was central to the literary scene above all between 1820 and 1850. While the differences and distinctions separating the philosophical positions of the German authors may

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not always have been perceived, clear accents were marked. Kant was familiar to only a small number of “initiates”; Schiller was read — extremely intensively — chiefly as a dramatic and lyric poet. Interest focused mainly on the aesthetic writings of Schelling and Hegel, partly also on the literary criticism of the Schlegel brothers. However, distinctions also need to be made here. During the 1820s and ‘30s, the critical study of Schelling was dominant; the reception of Hegel, which ultimately proved more enduring and productive, began only later. Two important histories of philosophy dating from this period, A. Galich’s History of Philosophical Systems (1818–19) and I. Davydov’s Experimental Handbook on the History of Philosophy (1820) end with a treatment of Schelling’s philosophy. In the development of philosophically grounded aesthetic thought during the first half of the nineteenth century, Schelling played the more influential role, particularly as a result of the influence of his System of Transcendental Idealism, Lectures on the Method of Academic Study, Exposition of my System of Philosophy, and Philosophy of Art. Positions taken in Hegelian aesthetics did not have any significant effect until the middle of the 1830s, for example in the works of the philosopher Nikolai V. Stankevich and in the essays of the literary critic Vissarion G. Belinsky (e.g. in his 94H,D"HJD>Z, "D@*>@FH\ (ethnic authenticity, attachment to nation) becomes a central component in idealist-influenced literary criticism, especially with critics like the young Vissarion G. Belinsky and Apollon A. Grigor’ev. The synthetic character which German systems assigned to the work of art (synthesis of nature and spirit, reason and inspiration) was broadened so that now a artistic reconciliation of societal contradictions also appeared possible. The reception of idealism is also significant in another respect. Russian literary critics became familiar with the tools of objective literary criticism, i.e. the concepts and evaluative criteria developed and put into practice in the context of idealist philosophy. Freed from a commitment to the aesthetics of mimesis, critics now attempted to apply the “German method” to reconstructing the ideal content of a given literary work, to determining its quality as an organic unity, and to demonstrating its position and significance in the development of the idea.

Notes 1. “Ich nenne alle Erkenntnis transzendental, die sich nicht sowohl mit Gegenständen, sondern mit unserer Erkenntnisart von Gegenständen, insofern diese a priori möglich sein soll, überhaupt beschäftigt” (Kant 3: B25). 2. “Die Zusammenstimmung des Mannigfaltigen zu Einem” (Kant 10: A45). 3. “Das intelligible Substrat der Natur außer uns und in uns” (Kant 10: A240). 4. “Unter einer ästhetischen Idee … verstehe ich diejenige Vorstellung der Einbildungskraft, die viel zu denken veranlaßt”, die aber “keine Sprache völlig erreicht und verständlich machen kann” (Kant 10: A190). 5. “Ein organisiertes Produkt der Natur ist das, in welchem alles Zweck und wechselseitig auch Mittel ist” (Kant 10: A292). 6. “Moralischer Widerstandes gegen das Leiden” (Schiller 30: 199). 7. “Eine Inokulation des unvermeidlichen Schicksals” (Schiller 21: 51). 8. “Eine vollständige Naturgeschichte der Kunst und des Geschmacks”; “für alle Zeitalter gültige, und gesetzgebende Anschauungen” (F. Schlegel 1: 317–8). 9. “Ist eben das romantisch, was uns einen sentimentalen Stoff in einer fantastischen Form darstellt” (F. Schlegel 2: 333). 10. “Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch” (F. Schlegel 2: 335). 11. “Die neue Mythologie muß … aus der tiefsten Tiefe des Geistes herausgebildet werden; es muß das künstlichste aller Kunstwerke sein” (F. Schlegel 2: 312). 12. “Das Produzierende mit dem Produkt”; “künstlerischen Reflexion und schönen Selbstbespiegelung” (F. Schlegel 2: 204). 13. “Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung” (F. Schlegel 2: 172). 14. “Das einzig wahre und ewige Organon zugleich und Document der Philosophie … welches immer und fortwährend aufs neue bekundet, was die Philosophie äußerlich nicht darstellen kann, nämlich das Bewußtlose im Handeln und Produciren und seine ursprüngliche Identität mit dem Bewußten” (Schelling 3: 627–8). 15. “Reflektiert uns die Identität der bewußten und der bewußtlosen Thätigkeit” (Schelling 3: 619). 16. “Die Kunst, um Objekt der Philosophie zu seyn, muß also überhaupt das Unendliche in sich als Besonderem entweder wirklich darstellen oder es wenigstens darstellen können. Aber nicht nur findet dieses in Anlehnung der Kunst statt, sondern sie steht auch als Darstellung des Unendlichen auf der gleichen Höhe mit der Philosophie: — wie diese das Absolute im Urbild, so jene das Absolute im Gegenbild darstellend” (Schelling 3: 369). 17. “Von dem Subjekt und demnach von der Besonderheit” (Schelling 5: 640). 18. “Der Roman soll ein Spiegel der Welt, des Zeitalters wenigstens, seyn, und so zur partiellen Mythologie werden. Er soll zur heiteren, ruhigen Betrachtung einladen und die Theilnahme allenthalben gleich fest halten; jeder seiner Theile, alle Worte sollten gleich golden seyn, wie in ein innerliches höheres Sylbenmaß gefaßt, da ihm das äußerliche mangelt” (Schelling 5: 676). 19. “Das Schöne bestimmt sich dadurch als das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee” (Hegel 1: 151).

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20. “Dem Inhalte nach ist deshalb die Poesie die reichste, unbeschränkteste Kunst” (Hegel 2: 261). 21. “Das Wort [wird] … zu einem für sich selbstständigkeitslosen Mittel geistiger Äußerung” (Hegel 3: 228). 22. “[Vom darstellenden] Subjekt entfernte und für sich abgeschlossene Wirklichkeit” (Hegel 3: 322). 23. “[In ihrer] ganzen Breite der Umstände und Verhältnisse als reiche Begebenheit im Zusammenhange mit der in sich totalen Welt einer Nation und Zeit zur Anschauung gelangen” (Hegel 3: 330). 24. “[Die totale] Welt einer Nation und einer Zeit [muß] zur Anschauung gelangen”; “[die] gesamte Weltanschauung und Objektivität eines Volksgeistes” (Hegel 3: 330). 25. “Das Sichaussprechen des Subjekts zur einzigen Form und zum letzten Ziel” (Hegel 3: 322). 26. “[Auf] kollidierenden Umständen, Leidenschaften und Charakteren und führt daher zu Aktionen und Reaktionen, die nun ihrerseite wieder eine Schlichtung des Kampfs und Zwiespalts notwendig machen” (Hegel 3: 475). 27. “Kant voulut rétablir les vérités primitives et l’activité spontanée dans l’âme, la conscience dans la morale, et l’idéal dans les arts” (de Staël 4: 113). 28. “Il faut une philosophie de croyance, d’enthousiasme; une philosophie qui confirme par la raison ce que le sentiment nous révèle” (de Staël 4: 145). 29. “C’est au sentiment de l’infini que la plupart des écrivains allemands rapportent toutes les idées religieuses”; “excite en nous l’espoir et le désir d’un avenir éternel et d’une existence sublime” (de Staël 5: 11, 13). 30. “L’enthousiasme se rallie à l’harmonie universelle: c’est l’amour du beau, l’élévation de l’âme, la jouissance du dévouement … l’enthousiasme signifie Dieu en nous” (de Staël 5: 187–8). 31. “Die sinnlichen Eindrücke sollen durch ihr geheimnisvolles Bündnis mit höheren Gefühlen gleichsam geheiligt werden, der Geist hingegen will seine Ahnungen oder unnennbaren Anschauungen vom Unendlichen in der sinnlichen Erscheinung sinnbildlich niederlegen” (A. W. Schlegel 26). 32. “Notwendige und wahre Gedanken und Gefühle, die über das irdische Dasein hinausgehen” (A. W. Schlegel 34). 33. “Le christianisme amène la poésie à la vérité” (Hugo 1: 416). 34. “Un miroir de concentration, qui … ramasse et condense les rayons colorants” (Hugo 1: 436).

References Ashton, Rosemary. [1980] 1994. The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Cassirer, Heinrich. [1938] 1970. A Commentary on Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgement.’ New York: Barnes & Noble. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1969ff. The Collected Works. 13 vols. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. London: Routledge & Kegan. Davydov, I. 1820. Experimental Handbook on the History of Philosophy. Moscow: n.p. Engel, Manfred. 1992. “Träume und Feste der Vernunft: Zur Vorgeschichte des romantischen Projekts einer ‘Neuen Mythologie’ in der Aufklärung.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft 36: 47–83. ———. 1993. Der Roman der Goethezeit. Vol. 1: Anfänge in Klassik und Frühromantik: Transzendentale Geschichten. Stuttgart: Metzler. Frank, Manfred. 1989. Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Galich, A. 1818–19. History of Philosophical Systems, Saint Petersburg: n.p. Garber, Frederick, ed. 1988 . Romantic Irony. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1970. Werke. Vol. 13–15: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I-III. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hoffmeister, Gerhart. 1994. “Deutsche und europäische Romantik.” Romantik-Handbuch. Ed. Helmut Schanze. Stuttgart: Kröner: 130–64. Hugo, Victor. 1963. Théâtre complet. Eds. Roland Purnal, J.-J. Thierry, and Josette Mélèze. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard. Kant, Immanuel. [1968] 1978. Werkausgabe. 12 vols. Ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Vol. 3: Kritik der reinen Vernunft; Vol. 7: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft; Vol. 10: Kritik der Urteilskraft [as customary in Kant studies, pagenumbers refer to the first (A) or second (B) edition of the Critiques].



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Lehmann, Jürgen. 1975. Der Einfluß des deutschen Idealismus in der russischen Literaturkritik des 19. Jahrhunderts: Die organische Kritik Apollon A. Grigor’evs. Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte 3.23. Heidelberg: Winter. Nagavajara, Chetana. 1966. August Wilhelm Schlegel in Frankreich: Sein Anteil an der französischen Literaturkritik 1807–1835. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Orsini, Giann N. G. 1969. Coleridge and German Idealism: A Study in the History of Philosophy with Unpublished Materials from Coleridge’s Manuscripts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. 1856–61. Sämmtliche Werke. 14 vols. Ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling. Stuttgart: Cotta. Schiller, Friedrich. 1943ff. Werke: Nationalausgabe. Eds. Jürgen Petersen et al. Weimar: Böhlau. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. [1809–11] 1966. Kritische Schriften und Briefe. Vol. 5: Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur. Ed. Edgar Lohner. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer [soon to be replaced by vol. 4 of: Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen. 1989ff. Ed. Ernst Behler. Paderborn: Schöningh]. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1958ff. Kritische Ausgabe. Eds. Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner. München: Schöningh. Staël, Germaine de. [1813] 1958–60. De l’Allemagne. 5 vols. Ed. Jean de Pange. Paris: Librairie Hachette.



Romantic Theories of National Literature and Language in Germany, England, and France MARY ANNE PERKINS Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London

The influence of romanticism, however defined, was universal in the sense that it spread throughout the whole of Europe in the early nineteenth century and from there to the rest of the Western world. The fact that this universality was often subordinated to the national interests and identity of some of its greatest exponents is typical of the energy-generating paradoxes on which romantic thought thrived. This tendency is particularly clear in relation to one of the major romantic concerns: the intense interest in the nature, origins, and development of language and literature. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the publication of scores of dictionaries, lexicons, etymological and grammatical studies, histories and philosophies of language, and comparative studies of national literatures. Increasingly widespread agreement arose that the study of language provided a key to questions of epistemology and aesthetics (as the new science of hermeneutics demonstrated). Firm conclusions were drawn concerning national character — both intellectual and moral — on the basis of comparative studies. “The genius of language,” wrote Herder, “is … also the genius of a nation’s literature” (Herder 1:177).1 Language and literature are inextricably linked: “for what was the first language other than a bringing together of the elements of poetry? … A dictionary of the soul, which is, at the same time, mythology and a wonderful epic poem about the dynamics and language of nature as a whole” (Herder 1:740).2 Herder was wise enough to argue that universal judgments concerning the literature of an entire country are at best difficult and uncertain. He questioned whether judgment should be passed “from above” or from within the sphere of literature itself. If from some higher point, then “who can raise himself to this height? Outside the mind of a people, in order to judge it? Who dares to leave the earth, his mother and nurse, and rise up with wings, not provided by nature, to place himself on an airy cloud from whence he can send out a meteoric criticism?” (Herder 1:371).3 Yet writers as geographically and culturally disparate as the German J. G. Fichte, the Irishman Thomas Davis, and the Greek Adamantios Korais attempted to establish the superior character of their national literature on a similar basis: the claim that their language could be linked to ancient and pure roots and was mostly uncorrupted by the admission of foreign words. The shift from dogmatic to critical axioms during the eighteenth century had laid the foundations for the philosophical, comparative, and historical studies of language and literature. The success of the scientific method was emulated in the human sciences. Kant’s brilliance, for example, led to the three great Critiques, which so deeply influenced romantic thought in terms of a philosophical shift toward the active, creative subject. German biblical scholars inaugurated the “higher criticism,” which subjected the Bible to the same critical analysis as other texts. The

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“science” of hermeneutics to which F. D. E. Schleiermacher made such substantial contributions was in its infancy, but its effect on comparative studies would be profound. Romantic historians carried forward the critical ethos of the Enlightenment, though many rejected what they saw as its mechanistic and soulless ideals. The relationship between language and thought had been central to Enlightenment criticism as exemplified in the seminal works of Locke, Condillac, and Rousseau. What made the romantic period different was the approach to history and historical analysis that included a new awareness of national character and culture. For example, the sense of a rooted, connected, and remembered past essential to national identity promoted an intense interest in the history of literatures. The genres of the historical novel and drama gained much of their popularity from both romantic nationalism and the idea of a European universal history. Here again the universally European in concept and in emphasis (i.e. history) finds its most intense and concrete expression in that particular past out of which the individual nation emerged. The novels of Sir Walter Scott were in part for this reason so admired, particularly in France. His emphasis on national character was representative of a European drive to recognize national identity and uniqueness. Despite Herder’s emphasis on the desirability of the diversity of cultures and of the literatures that sprang from them, he and his contemporaries accepted the strength and unity of European history and culture as the common legacy of the Judeo-Christian and the classical traditions. From this shared inheritance, which was centred on ideas of freedom, law, history, and religion, had emerged the Protestant emphasis on individuality, the concept of the sovereignty of the people, and the self-consciousness of national identity. Herder’s great legacy of comparative and historical studies of European literatures and languages inspired romantic thinkers with a sense of the value of cultural uniqueness and the importance of preserving it. Posing the question, “With what did the individual living culture of the nations always begin?” Herder himself provides an answer: “With the awakening and development of its language…. During the dark Middle Ages, with what did the Enlightenment of all of Europe begin? With the translation of the Bible into … national languages” (Herder, Sämtliche Werke 24:46).4 Gadamer provides a particularly insightful discussion of the concept of Bildung in terms of the central aspects of romantic philosophies of language and literature that sprang from Herder’s description of attaining to full humanity by passing through culture and of coming fully to oneself — to perfection — through the experience of the “Other” and of alienation (Gadamer 9–13). Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example, writes, “when in our language we say Bildung, we mean something both higher and more inward, namely the disposition of mind which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavour, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character” (Humboldt 7:30).5 For Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and many other of the German writers who were possessed by the idea of national culture and identity, the nation was inseparably linked to the concept of Bildung in its widest sense of the spiritual whole which was manifested in its religion, philosophy, literature, poetry, mythology, and politics. In his Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur (Fragments on Recent German Literature; 1767), Herder writes of his intention to produce a pragmatic history of the intellectual life of the state, of which a history of literature would provide the groundwork: “such a history seeks to become that which it was in antiquity: the voice of a patriotic wisdom and the reformer of the people” (Herder 1:170).6

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The web of relationships that Bildung represented was often closely linked to that represented by the term logos. Friedrich Schlegel illustrates this point at the beginning of his assertion that “In the world of language, or, what means the same, in the world of art and culture [Bildung], religion appears necessarily as mythology or the Bible” (F. Schlegel 93).7 In German romantic thought particularly, intellectual, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic development are all essential to the life of the nation, and all are interactively reconciled through the medium and the dynamic of language. According to Herder, “a people that has had great poets without a poetic language, great prose writers without a pliant language, great sages without a precise language is preposterous” (Herder 1: 177).8 The particular character of the language determines the particular character of a people. Although the new self-consciousness of national identity and of the inescapable historicity of language, thought, and aesthetic judgment were not confined within national boundaries, national and cultural difference yielded widely different responses. German writers, for example, from the end of the eighteenth century, had begun to attribute the lack of progress in German culture and literature to a lack of German self-confidence and to the tendency to adopt, or at least tolerate undue influence from, the ideas and language of other nations, particularly France. Justus Möser, in a series of articles appearing in 1781 and later published under the title Über die deutsche Sprache und Litteratur (On the German Language and Literature; 1781), berated the German tendency to adopt foreign intellectual and linguistic models instead of developing their own rich heritage. Karl Barth concurred claiming that the Germans had for too long built their history, everything they had learned, everything they had made on the work of foreigners (Barth iv). Jakob Grimm saw this borrowing as an inevitable historical process, though its worst effects could be limited, he argued, by the study and preservation of national linguistic and cultural roots (Thomas 96). The sense of inferiority that had been experienced under the dominant French influence of the eighteenth century was now vehemently challenged by German intellectuals who stimulated a reinterpretation of history in which “Germanic” was often identified with “European.” For example, for Fichte, Novalis, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, the fitness of the German people to represent universal humanity made the German nation great. (Germany was not united as a nation state in the political sense until 1871. I use the term nation here in the same sense as many German writers of the period: that is as a people with a linguistic, cultural, and historic identity.) Novalis argued that German nature in general is representative of genuine humanity and therefore should be considered an ideal and that no nation could compete with Germany in terms of vigorous universalism. In a letter to August Wilhelm Schlegel, he observed “German nature is cosmopolitanism mixed with the strongest individuality” (Schlegel, Schriften 1:650; Meinecke 55).9 Others, in contrast, laid greater emphasis on the particular virtues that distinguished German character and German history. In defence of a certain poverty of German drama, August Wilhelm Schlegel argues that “in the drama the nationality does usually, nay, must show itself in the most marked manner, and the national character of the Germans is modest and retiring” (Lectures 36). “The Germans are a speculative people; in other words, they wish to discover by reflection and meditation, the principle of whatever they engage in” (36). Concerned with a higher object than “the mere passive repetition of the Grecian, the French, the Spanish, or the English theatre, … they are in search of a more perfect form, which, excluding

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all that is merely local or temporary, may combine whatever is truly poetical in all these theatres. In [this] matter, however, the German national features ought certainly to predominate” (36).10 Part of the problem for German dramatic art, he implies, is that the ideas behind it are beyond the reach of other nations. Its abstract, spiritual content is the very essence of German character; German drama should not be occupied with the trivial and the particular, but with the great themes, the moral lessons of history, with the great history of the German spirit. He concludes his series of lectures, however, arguing that in the end historical drama should remain thoroughly national. Friedrich Schiller had already proclaimed that Germany, situated as it is in the middle of Europe, was also the heart of humanity. It was for the Germans to reach the true heights. He claimed that the German people are a true nation in the sense that their nationhood resides in moral character and is not intertwined with a political destiny. In the early draft for a poem to be entitled “Deutsche Grösse,” he suggested that the Germans could become the Greeks of the new age. “This precious possession of ours, the German language, expresses everything, all that is deepest and most fleeting, the spirit, the meaningful soul” (Schiller 2.1:432).11 In England, the interest in literary history tended to focus strongly on the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. But the sense of national identity was largely based on a perception of the contribution of England to the civilized world through the relation of church and state in the “Glorious” Constitution. Coleridge, for example, explores the works of seventeenth-century divines in conjunction with a deep interest and involvement in political history and criticism. In their struggle for supremacy with Utilitarianism, the philosophers of romanticism were deeply critical of those elements within the Enlightenment (particularly the work of the philosophes) which had contributed to it. The influence of French thinkers upon philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment such as David Hume and Adam Smith was seen to have led inexorably to the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. Coleridge constantly emphasized the dangers to the “Spirit of the nation” and to the constitution of the denigration and ignorance of metaphysical realities. His prose works sought to restore language and thought to the sense of spiritual values, the teleology of history, the proper relation of church and state on which, he believed, the health of the nation depended. His detailed historical studies of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the works of Bacon, Shakespeare, and Milton all contributed to his sense of impending threat to the national character and integrity brought about by the abandonment of their ideas and principles. On the other hand, as with almost all the European romantics, his literary interests, philosophical criticism, and historical researches spread far beyond national boundaries. The French romantics were equally anxious to proclaim the virtues of their own national language and literature; and they too laid claim to Europe. Victor Hugo, for example, predicted that “in the twentieth century, there will be an extraordinary nation. This nation will be great, which will not prevent it from being free…. The capital of this nation will be Paris, and it will not be called France at all; it will be called Europe. It will be called Europe in the twentieth century, and, in the following centuries, transfigured even more, it will be called Humanity” (Hugo 289–96).12 The perpetuation of classical values and taste, particularly in the dramatic writing of the eighteenth century, was of particular importance in French literature. Condillac, for example, compared French and Latin. French had “less variety and less harmony…. But it makes us amends on the side of simplicity and perspicuity … it renders us naturally more

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precise, and gradually invests the mind with that character of clearness and simplicity, by which this language is so superior in many respects.” He believed this precision had led to “the progress of sound philosophy,” which more than compensated “for the loss of a few beauties peculiar to the ancient languages” (Condillac, Essay 271).13 In 1784 Antoine Rivarol published his prize-winning Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française (Discourse on the Universality of the French Language) in which he famously argued that French was the heir to the Latin used when Rome ruled the world (Jacob and Gordan 112). But by the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, French writers were on the defensive. The fact that Chateaubriand’s Essai sur la littérature anglaise (Essay on English Literature) focuses on English literature, especially on the work of Milton and Shakespeare, clearly points to the sense of the French romantics that France had lost her cultural dominance in the world: “We are excluded from the new universe in which the human race makes a fresh start”; it is hardly possible, he complains, to hear French spoken except in some small foreign dominion since France has been stripped of her great conquests. German literature has invaded English literature just as, once, Italian and then French had “erupted in Milton’s country,” and the English increasingly now rejected the French school of literature in their fanatical pursuit of novelty (Chateaubriand 2:240, 289, 297).14 Romantic historians reevaluated the literature of past ages on the basis of a new relative sense of aesthetic judgment. One consequence of this development was the revival of interest across western Europe in the works of Shakespeare, which had fallen into disfavour under the dominance of the eighteenth-century French rules of drama. Their revival was partly due to a new interest in common speech — that language “of common men” that Wordsworth valued so much in poetry — and to the vividness, directness, and power that it communicated. In Germany, “it was [G. E.] Lessing who first introduced the name and the works of Shakespeare to the admiration of the Germans” (Coleridge 7.2:209). Herder, Schiller, A. W. Schlegel, and Coleridge were among the host of Europeans who wrote critical essays on the great English playwright. Coleridge noted that, “on the continent the works of Shakespeare are honoured in a double way; by the admiration of Italy and Germany and by the contempt of the French” (Coleridge 5.1:208). According to Coleridge, Shakespeare was the answer to the obsession of the French with the dramatic principle of the three unities. He had more moral force than modern French dramas (Coleridge 5.1:227), and his works reflected the true character of the English nation, of its constitution, and of its dedication to liberty. English drama was in this sense superior even to the great classical dramas: “The origin of the English stage is less boastful than that of the Greek stage: like the constitution under which we live, though more barbarous in its derivation, it gives more genuine and more diffused liberty, than Athens in the zenith of her political glory ever possessed” (Coleridge 5.2:474). In any comparison of European romantic literary historians, the predominance of common interests is striking: for example, in folk idioms, in the relation of language to moral and intellectual character, in the symbolic power of the imagination, and in the expression of true feeling. But significant differences in emphasis reflect national interests. German literary historians concentrated on the restoration of the confidence and spirit of a truly German literature in relation to foreign languages and literatures. The English, on the other hand, sought to reflect upon the literary traditions of an earlier Elizabethan romanticism and of the great

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defenders of English liberty, law, and national religion. French literary historians sought to confirm their own sense of national identity through emphasis on the virtues of reason and civilization in their own literature and their inheritance of the genius of classical Rome. Herder himself had acknowledged those qualities of the French language which justified its claim to be the language of reason. In A. W. Schlegel’s Die Sprachen (The Languages) published in the first volume of the Athenaeum, characters representing both modern and classical languages (English, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Latin) participate in a discussion in which each argues for the merits of his own language. The Frenchman claims superiority over the German on the ground that French contributes to understanding through its natural, orderly progressions (Die Sprachen 46–7). Schlegel’s dscussion neatly encapsulates the competitive spirit that motivated comparisons of national languages and literatures. Differences of approach and emphasis reflected not only national but religious distinctions: both Novalis’s Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe; 1799) and Chateaubriand’s Essai of 1836 argued that Protestantism had contributed to the demise of great art. On the other hand, Martin Luther’s contribution to the German vernacular was noted by many of those who contributed to the historical study of language and literature as the foundation of a truly German literature. In the early nineteenth century, comparative critical studies were encouraged by the realization that a developed and flourishing national literature was one of the prerequisites for a strong sense of patriotic pride and national identity. If Herder provided the original impetus for comparative literary studies with such works as Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur (Fragments on Recent German Literature), the tendency was strengthened by the romantics’ growing sense of the importance of national difference as witnessed by the widespread influence of Mme de Staël’s De la littérature (“On Literature”; 1800), which was indebted to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s recommendation that she study German literature. Although his own efforts concentrated linguistic relations, he drew his own conclusions as to the qualities and significance of national literatures as evidenced, for example, in his correspondence with Schiller during the 1790s. German literature, he proclaimed, was always philosophically inclined, while that of the French tended rather toward fantasy. Although Germans had written no serious prose drama before Goethe thus, perhaps, neglecting the genre, their love of that which is natural and richly substantial was in stark contrast to “the often empty and unnatural artificiality of the French, now and then the English, and even the Greeks” (Humboldt 2:56 ).15 Coleridge was equally confident that “English excels all other languages in the number of its practical words…. In truth, English may be called the harvest of the unconscious wisdom of various nations” (Coleridge 5.2: 481–82). Against the German view that a language of pure descent is superior to “a composite language” like English, Coleridge argued that the English “possess [a] wonderful … variety of modified meanings in Saxon and Latin quasi-synonyms, which the Germans have not” (Coleridge 14.1:320–21). French, on the other hand, he considered good only for “the names of trades” and “military and diplomatic terms.” He acknowledged the “metaphysical and psychological force” of German and judged that Italian is “the sweetest language[,] Spanish the most majestic” (Coleridge 5.1:291). However, even Coleridge admitted that “an aversion to the epigrammatic unconnected periods of the fashionable Anglo-Gallican taste [had] too often made

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[him] willing to forget, that the stately march and difficult evolutions, which characterize the eloquence of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Jeremy Taylor” were, despite their “intrinsic excellence, still less suited to a periodical Essay” (Coleridge 4.1:20). He found Greek far superior to modern languages, only equalled “in the variety of terminations” by German. However, the sound of the German language was judged inferior in other respects: “Nature seems to have dropped an acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian prose is excessively monotonous” (Coleridge 14.2: 173). The idea that some nations’ combination of Christianity and “earnestness of mind” expressed through philosophy and the ideals of freedom and law made them more fully European than others is central to Mme de Staël’s “On Literature.” However much she seems to be giving an objective comparison, she conveys her idea of the superiority of northern literature, which she and many other romantics concluded had descended from Ossian’s work. His poems, she points out, are not as artistically advanced as those of Homer, indeed, the two cannot be compared. “There is no parity, then, between the Iliad and Fingal”16 (de Staël, “On Literature” 178). However, she doubts whether the images of nature in the literature of the south, though more “voluptuous” and “more brilliant in some respects, give rise to as many thoughts and have as immediate a relation to the soul’s feelings. Philosophical ideas go with dark images, as if spontaneously. Voluptuous southern poetry is very far from harmonizing with meditation and inspiring the things reflection should prove; it almost entirely excludes ideas above a certain level” (de Staël, “On Literature” 178). If Ossian is monotonous, the “fault is less common in the English and German poetry that is derived from his work. Culture, industry, and commerce have varied the landscape in several ways” (de Staël “On Literature,” 178).17 One of the most important of literary developments, the intense romantic interest in symbols, was reflected in Creuzer’s work, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (The Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancients; 1810–12), which explored the double nature of the symbol. Just as the language of nature must be interpreted symbolically as a revelation of the divine, so symbols must be created through which the inner life, the thoughts feelings of men and women could be expressed (Fiesel 137). The idea of nationhood and national identity contains paradoxes and apparent contradictions so that the sense of a national spirit and character, like personal identity, could not be adequately expressed in terms of empirical analysis or rational definition. For this reason, the symbol had a vital role in expressions of nationhood and nationalism; it could become an incarnation of the idea of the nation, an embodiment of national spirit. Symbols of nationhood abound in the literature of this period. Sometimes they reflect a genuine philosophical appreciation of the power of the imagination realized in the symbol. More often, together with the mythology of national heroes that appear in every literary form, they simply and directly express a political, cultural, and historical sense of identity and difference. The work of the French romantics, such as Hugo and Chateaubriand, is liberally scattered with references to St Denis, St Joan (particularly in the work of Michelet), to the Oriflamme, and the lily. Many German writers drew on Tacitus’s Germania for their myths of German origin; the oak grove and the element of iron are recurring themes. Roger Langham Brown points out — quoting Erich Heintel’s description of Herder’s view (95) — that every

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nation has its own storehouse of ideas which have been turned into symbols that is its national language. This store has existed through the centuries, has suffered increases and decreases, and has experienced more revolutions and changes (75). Yet, although the symbol becomes, in many instances, an object of national reference, the profound aesthetic and philosophical fascination with the nature of symbols is a European, not merely a national, phenomenon. Coleridge is one of those who finds the symbol to be of universal significance far beyond the often limited outlook of nationalism: since “an idea in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol” it is a universal principle of mind. For Coleridge, as for many of the romantics, “nation” was primarily an idea; that is, “a realizing knowledge, a knowledge causative of its own reality” (Coleridge, “Ideas” 11.131–3). Clearly then, the communication of this universal idea took place through the power of the symbol and the imagination. The power of the particular symbols of particular national identities should not obscure the fact that, in this period, writers across Europe became fascinated by the reconciliation of the universal with the particular. The symbol seemed uniquely powerful to effect this, one form of which was the reconciliation of European with national consciousness. The influence of this great period in literary history on future generations of literary criticism has been enormous. It marked the beginning not only of literary historical criticism and the acknowledgment of the significance of the reader’s response but also of the need for “Otherness” without whose opposition a national literature cannot fully develop. A hundred years later in “The Unity of European Culture,” T. S. Eliot wrote that two conditions are necessary for a national literature to renew its creative activity and linguistic discoveries: it must be able “to receive and assimilate influences from abroad” and “to go back and learn from its own sources.” The “sources which are peculiarly its own, deep in its own history” are equally as important as the common European sources “that is, the literature of Rome, of Greece and of Israel” (Eliot 116). Here Eliot looks only to European literature and in so doing is less bold, less imaginative, perhaps, than the romantics. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, and the Grimm brothers, for example, all recognized the potential enrichment offered by the study of nonEuropean languages and cultures. Yet he captures the essence of the romantic emphasis on a literary dialectic between past and present, between national spirit or genius and the universality of language and imagination.

Notes 1. “Der Genius der Sprache ist also auch der Genius von der Literatur einer Nation” (Herder 1:177). 2. “Denn was war diese erste Sprache als eine Sammlung von Elementen der Poesie? … Ein Wörterbuch der Seele, was zugleich Mythologie und eine wunderbare Epopee von den Handlungen und Reden aller Wesen ist!” (Herder 1:740). 3. “Alle allgemeinen Urteile über die Literatur eines ganzen Landes sind schwer, und unsicher. Wo soll man stehen, um sie zu übersehen: hoch über ihr; oder in ihrer Sphäre? Über ihr: wer kann sich dahin heben? außer der Denkart eines Volks von ihr richtig urteilen? Wer mag es wagen, die Erde, seine Mutter und Nährerin, zu verlassen, und mit Flügeln, die uns die Natur nicht gab, sich in eine luftige Wolke heraufzusetzen, um ein kritisches Meteor vorzustellen?” (Herder 1:371). 4. “Die eigentliche lebendige Cultur der Völker, womit fing sie immer an… ? Mit der Erweckung und Bildung ihrer Sprache…. In den dunkeln mittlern Zeiten, womit fing die Aufklärung des gesammten Europa an? Durch

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Übersetzung der Bibel in … Nationalsprachen (Herder, Sämtliche Werke 24:46). 5. Wenn wir aber in unsrer Sprache Bildung sagen, so meinen wir damit etwas zugleich Höheres und mehr Innerliches, nemlich die Sinnesart, die sich aus der Erkenntniss und dem Gefühle des gesammten geistigen und sittlichen Strebens harmonisch auf die Empfindung und den Charakter ergiesst” (Humboldt 7:30). 6. “Kurz! … eine solche Geschichte suche das, was sie bei den Alten war, zu werden: die Stimme der patriotischen Weisheit und die Verbesserin des Volks” (Herder 1:170). 7. “In der Welt der Sprache, oder welches ebenso viel heißt, in der Welt der Kunst und der Bildung, erscheint die Religion notwendig als Mythologie oder als Bibel” (F. Schlegel 93 [Ideen 38]). 8. “Ein Volk, das ohne poetische Sprache große Dichter, ohne eine biegsame Sprache gute Prosaisten, ohne eine genaue Sprache große Weise gehabt hätte, ist ein Unding” (Herder 1:177). 9. Deutschheit ist Kosmopolitismus mit der kräftigsten Individualität gemischt” (Schlegel, Schriften 648). 10. “Die deutschen sind ein spekulatives Volk, d.h. sie wollen dem Wesen von allem, womit sie sich beschäftigen, durch Nachdenken auf den Grund kommen…. Im Drama [muß und darf] die Nationalität am entschiedensten hervortreten, und die deutsche Nationalität ist bescheiden, sie macht sich nicht vorlaut geltend…. Unsre Aufgabe ist aber nicht, das griechische oder französische, das spanische oder englische Theater bloß leiden zu wiederholen, sondern wir suchen wie mich dünkt eine Form, welche das wahrhaft Poetische aller jener Formen, mit Ausschließung des auf herkömmliche Übereinkunft Gegründeten in sich enthalte; im Gehalte aber soll deutsche Nationalität vorwalten” (Schlegel, Vorlesngen 33–4). 11. “Das köstliche Gut der deutschen Sprache die alles ausdrückt, das tiefste und das flüchtigste, den Geist, die Seele, die voll Sinn ist” (Schiller 2.1:432). 12. “Au vingtième siècle, il y aura une nation extraordinaire. Cette nation sera grande, ce qui ne l’empêchera pas d’être libre…. Cette nation aura pour capitale Paris, et ne s’appellera point la France; elle s’appellera l’Europe. Elle s’appellera l’Europe au vingtième siècle, et, aux siècles suivants, plus transfigurée encore, elle s’appellera l’Humanité” (Hugo 289–90). 13. “Si nous comparons le françois avec le latin, nous trouverons des avantages et des inconvéniens de part et d’autre. De deux arrangemens elle est donc par cet endroit, moins variée et moins propre à l’harmonie. Il est rare qu’elle souffre de ces inversions où la liaison des idées. Par-là elle accoutume de bonne heure l’esprit à saisir cette liaison, le rend naturellement plus exact, et lui communique peu à peu ce caractère de simplicité et de netteté par où elle est elle-même si supérieure dans bien des genres. Nous verrons ailleurs combien ces avantages ont contribué aux progrès de l’esprit philosophique, et combien nous sommes dédommagés de la perte de quelques beautés particulières aux langues anciennes” (Condillac, Essai 250). 14. “nous sommes exclus du nouvel univers où le genre humain recommence”; “La littérature germanique a envahi la littérature anglaise, comme la littérature italienne d’abord, et la littérature françoise ensuite, firent autrefois irruption dans la patrie de Milton” (Chateaubriand 2:240; 289, 297). 15. “die oft leere und unnatürliche Künstlichkeit der Franzosen, hier und da der Engländer und sogar der Griechen” (Humboldt 2:56). 16. “Aucune parité ne peut donc être établie avec justice entre l’Iliade et le poëme de Fingal” (de Staël, Œuvres 4:263–4). 17. “plus brillantes à quelques égards, font naître autant de pensées, ont un rapport aussi immédiat avec les sentiments de l’âme; les idées philosophiques s’unissent comme d’elles-mêmes aux images sombres. La poésie du Midi, loin de s’accorder comme de celle du Nord, avec la médiation, et d’inspirer, pour ainsi dire, ce que la réflxion doit prouver, la poésie voluptueuse exclut presque entièrement les idées d’un certain ordre” (de Staël, Œuvres 4:264).

References Barth, Christian Karl. 1840. Teutschlands Urgeschichte. 2nd ed. Baireuth: Grauischen Buchhandlung. Beiser, Friedrich. 1996. The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Brown, R. L. 1967. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Conception of Linguistic Relativity. The Hague: Mouton. Chateaubriand, René Vicomte de. 1836. Essai sur la littérature anglaise. 2 vols. Bruxelles: Hayman.



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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Works. Eds. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer. Bollingen 75; 1983. Biographia Literaria. Vol 7.1–2. Eds. James Engell and W. Jackson; 1987. Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature. Vol 5.1–2. Ed. R. A. Foakes; 1990. Table Talk. Vol. 14.1–2. Ed. Carl R. Woodring; 1969. The Friend. Vol 4.1–2. Ed. B. Rooke; 1995. Shorter Works and Fragments. Vol 11.1–2. Eds. H. J. and J. R. de J. Jackson. Princeton: Princeton UP. ———. “On the Divine Ideas”; mss. Condillac, Etienne Bonnet de. 1973. Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. Auvers-sur-Oise: Galilée. ———. 1756. Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, being a supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. Trans. Mr. Nugent. London: Nourse. Eliot, T. S. 1948. “The Unity of European Culture.” Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber. 113–28. Fiesel, Eva. 1927. Die Sprachphilosophie der deutschen Romantik. Tübingen: Mohr. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. Trans. W. Glen-Doepel (1975). 2nd rev. ed. Trans. and rev. Joel Wiensheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Sheed and Ward. Grimm, Jacob. 1848. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. 2 vols. Leipzig: Weidmann. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1877–1913. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. B. Suphan. Berlin. ———.1960. Johann Gottfried Herder Sprachphilosophische Schriften. Ed. Erich Heintel. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Humboldt, Wilhelm Freiherr von. 1903–36 Gesammelte Schriften. Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Ed. Albert Leitzmann. 17 vols. Berlin: Behr. ———. 1962. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Schiller und Wilhelm von Humboldt. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. Kaiser, Gerhard. 1973. Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Sakularisation. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Athenaeum. Macpherson, James. 1996. The Poems of Ossian and Related Works. Ed. Howard Gaskill. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Meinecke, Friedrich. 1970. Cosmopolitanism and the National State. Trans. Robert B. Kimber. Princeton: Princeton UP. Möser, Justus in Frederick II, King of Prussia. 1964. De la littérature allemande: Franz-dt. Mit der Möserschen Gegenschrift. Critical Edition. Eds. Christoph Gutknecht and Peter Kerner. Hamburg: Buske. Rougemont, Denis de. 1966. The Idea of Europe. Trans. Norbert Guterman. New York: Macmillan. Schiller, Friedrich. 1983. Schillers Werke. Ed. Norbert Oellers. 42 vols. Weimar: Böhlhaus Nachfolger. Schlegel, A. W. 1969. “Die Sprachen.” Athenaeum: Eine Zeitschrift. Rowohlts Klassiker der Literatur und der Wissenschaft, Deutsche Literature 29. Ed. Curt Grützmacher. 2 vols. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. ———. 1966. Kritische Scriften und Briefe. Vol 5. Vorlesung über dramatische Kunst und Literatur. Ed. Edgar Lohner. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. ———. 1978. Schriften. Eds. Hans Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel. München: Hanser. ———. 1846. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Trans. J. Black. London: Bohn. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1964. Kritische Schriften. Ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch. München: Hanser. Staël, Mme Anne Louise Germaine de. 1820. Œuvres complètes. 14 vols. Paris: Treuttel et Würtz. ———. 1987. “On Literature Considered in Its Relationship to Social Institutions.” An Extraordinary Woman. Trans. Vivian Folkenflik. New York: Columbia UP. 172–208. Tacitus, Publius Cornelius. 1991. Tacitus’ Agricola, Germany, and Dialogue on Orators. Trans. rev., and ed. Herbert W. Benario. Norman: U Oklahoma P. Thomas, Richard Hinton. 1951. Liberalism, Nationalism and the German Intellectuals, 1822–1847. Cambridge: Heffer.



Sir Walter Scott and the Beginnings of Ethnology CAROLYN BUCKLEY-FLETCHER Trinity College

Around the middle of July 1802, a meeting took place between a young Edinburgh lawyer, a border shepherd, and his mother. The lawyer was Walter Scott, who was gathering material for the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. His host was a self-educated poet named James Hogg, who had been copying down ballads from the oral tradition of his family and community ever since coming across the first two volumes of the Minstrelsy in the spring of that year. In Hogg’s thatched cottage his mother, Margaret Laidlaw, recited to their guest the traditional ballad “Auld Maitland.” Scott was delighted and asked if it had ever been in print: O, na, na sir,” she replied, “it never was printed I’ the world, for my brothers an’ me learned it an’ many mae free auld Andrew Moor and he learned it free auld Baby Mettlin, wha was housekeeper to the first laird of Tushilaw. She was said to hae been another nor a gude ane, an’ there are many queer stories about hersel’, but O, she had been a grand singer o’ auld songs an’ ballads. Ay, it is that sir! It is an auld story! But nor that, excepting George Warton an’ James Stewart, there war never ane o’ my sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel’, an’ ye hae spoilt them awthegither. They were made for singing an’ no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never be sung main An’ the worse thing of a’, they’re nouther right spell’d nor right settee down.” (Hogg 136–37)

This meeting well symbolizes the changes taking place in the relationship between the oral and print cultures in England. Scott, self-appointed archivist, historian, and antiquarian and later recognized as one of the fathers of British anthropology and archaeology, is one of the seminal figures in that cultural transition. The same impulse that shaped the emergent social sciences — the impulse to preserve, to record, to commemorate — animates his literary work. In the introduction to The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Scott voices his hope that by “such efforts, feeble as they are, I may contribute somewhat to the history of my native country; the peculiar features of whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving into those of her sister and ally” (cxxii). In the preface to the Waverley novels, he remarks that his fiction begins in the interest of the preservation of ancient manners and customs, concerns shared by history and ethnology. It ends in a reflection and commentary not only on the crisis facing traditional cultures, but on the intellectual dilemmas of his own contemporaries, dilemmas inherent in literate attempts to salvage a largely preliterate past. It is a commentary remarkable for its candor and insight into the enterprise at large. Scott’s role is in part determined by the historical and geographical accidents of his birth. Scott was born in the second half of the eighteenth century to middle-class parents in Edinburgh, a city particularly distinguished by its progressive character in a nation where primitive, even atavistic tribal traditions had persisted long after their eclipse in Europe and England to the

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south, a country also distinguished by its fierce divisions and fiercer loyalties of clan, church, and kin. Scotland was a kingdom uniquely marked by its own internal polarities. Emerging from the northern edge of Europe, where cultures collided head on, where the practices of industrialism and the tenets of the Enlightenment had taken root and had grown with a remarkable rapidity, in seeming inverse proportion to the rapid eclipse, even annihilation of Scotland’s ancient traditions, Scott’s work gives form to the very extremities of his time and place. While the claims of Scott’s birth and history along with the enthusiasms of his contemporaries go far in explaining the subjects of his work, they do not fully account for his manner of rendering of them, but his education does: the comparative method he learned at the University of Edinburgh became the basis for later developments in ethnology and anthropology. (Particularly important in this regard, notes Marinell Ash, was the influence of Ferguson and Dugald Stewart, whose comparative approaches to the study of societies past and present are reflected in Scott’s student work, notably his 1789 paper to the student Literary Society, “On the Origins of the Feudal System,” where Scott argues for the cross-cultural appearance of feudalism in widely disparate cultures [443].) At the time Scott was writing, several distinct approaches to the study of earlier or primitive cultures had appeared. At the opening of the nineteenth century, the antiquarianism and mythography that had dominated much of the eighteenth century began to give way to an early ethnology and a proto-anthropology, which were not, however, fully defined until well into its second half of the century. (John Pilkey describes the position of Scott’s work within larger developments in the nineteenth-century social sciences.) In 1802 James Hogg and Margaret Laidlaw clearly recognized Scott’s leading role in antiquarian and folklore pursuits. By mid-century, his part in the growth of ethnology and archaeology as well as a nascent anthropology was widely, even officially, recognized. In 1851 Daniel Wilson, pioneer of both Scottish and American archaeology, opens The Archaeology and Prehistorical Annals of Scotland in praise of Scott: The zeal for Archaeological investigation which has recently manifested itself in nearly every country in Europe, has been traced, not without reason, to the impulse which proceeded from Abbotsford. Though such is not exactly the source which we might expect to give birth to the transition from profitless dilettantism to the intelligent spirit of scientific investigation, yet it is unquestionable that Sir Walter Scott was the first of modern writers to teach all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught — “that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled with living men.” (xi)

Modern critics have agreed. Pointing to Scott as a seminal figure behind the work of Wilson and others, Marinell Ash seconds Wilson noting that the achievements in early archaeology and related studies “would not have been possible without the intellectual legacy that Scott transmitted to the historians — and prehistorians — of the nineteenth century” (441). In his study of the persistence of the oral tradition in nineteenth-century Great Britain, David Vincent notes the importance of Scott’s contribution to the antiquarian tradition and the archaeological work that followed it. Comparing Scott’s work north of the border to Brand’s in the south, Vincent cites them together as the fathers of British archaeology, pioneers in the development of modern inquiry into peoples and cultures (22). By the middle of the nineteenth century, Vincent continues, “an army of middle-class antiquarians was at work following the guidelines

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laid down by Scott and Brand, and adding to the material collected in their pioneering volumes” (23). Other critics have noted the impress of these developments on Scott’s own work. John Pilkey suggests that “Scott’s good fortune was to stand at a crossroads in the progress of the British interpretation of human origins” (iv), a crossroads where the traditions of the eighteenthcentury British mythographers and antiquarians begin to yield to the emerging social sciences. In a 1986 study, “Dialectic, Rhetoric, and Anthropology in Scott’s Waverley,” Louise J. Smith explores the intersection of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and nineteenth-century anthropological historicism in Scott’s fiction. Both note that Scott’s work is distinctly conscious of its position. Scott’s work bears them out. The obvious text here is Scott’s Antiquary, where these pursuits supply much of the action and character of the novel. The weaknesses of antiquarianism and the frauds of mythography are profiled in the genial caricature of Jonathan Oldbuck and the more grotesque figures of Herman Dousterswivel and his dupe, Sir Arthur. In their persons the novel pokes fun at the credulity of antiquarianism and condemns the pseudo-mythical claims of mythography. While the assumptions of both studies are basically discredited — and by the same agent (Old Edie, who of all the characters has his feet most firmly on the ground) — the distinction is clear. The antiquarian, while crusty and overcredulous in his pursuit of antiquities, shows sound feeling and judgment in all else. Dousterswivel and Sir Arthur, on the other hand, are not attractive characters in any sense. The character of Sir Arthur is distorted by a range of selfish passions; Doustereswivel’s, by pure greed. He is little more than a common swindler. Antiquarianism, if sometimes foolish, Scott shows us, is at least honest in its intentions and is born of a real enthusiasm for history and tradition. Pseudo-mythical pursuits like those of Dousterswivel, which claim to discover or reveal hidden truths or treasures of that past, are, the novel suggests, inevitably tainted with opportunism, self-seeking, and a whole range of base and reprehensible motives. The Antiquary is recognizably Scott’s most self-conscious and critical treatment of contemporary appetites for past and primitive. But Scott’s work is much more than a caricature and commentary on these pursuits. It is not merely reactive, but rather responds to more subtle changes in the intellectual landscape of the European mind. In its texts, the self-conscious activity of the social scientist and scholar seems to merge with the creative activity of the literary artist. Its issue is a new and uniquely malleable genre responsive to the encounters convulsing European society along historical, cultural, and intellectual frontiers. It is a genre that, in the comparative freedom of fiction, explores the subjective experience codified in the “objective” disciplines of history, ethnology, and anthropology. As a historian, antiquarian, and ethnologist, Scott responds to a cultural crisis. As a novelist, he comments on that response by creating a genre that expresses European society’s deepest anxieties about its past and present, anxieties that shape the new disciplines, anxieties that take on tangible form and substance in these texts, and anxieties that are joined in the fictional text with the larger literary conventions of romanticism. In this fiction, the encounter with past and primitive — an experience distanced and objectified in the narratives of history and ethnology — is expressed with a freedom and clarity found nowhere else, and it is consciously linked to an experience now called romanticism. These are narratives of those encounters, which explore their dangers and attractions and strike a deeply responsive chord among Scott’s contemporaries

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by expressing the dilemmas inherent the differentiation of self and other at the heart of work in the emergent social sciences. The genre begins in the play of identities. The first of Scott’s heroes, Edward Waverley is introduced while rapt in daydreams of legendary family heroes — medieval and Jacobite — of Sir Wilibert the Crusader and William Waverley, the young Jacobite — and is drawn irresistibly into the Highlands — a regressive process rendered with an almost archetypal clarity. Waverley passes first from the Hanoverian base at Dundee into the medieval feudal enclave of Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine, and from there into the hands of Highlander and clansman Evan Dhu MacCombich, who leads the youth into the encampment of Donald Bean Lean and his nomadic robber band — a steady progression from the realities of the contemporary world back through time to the cave itself. In the process, Edward’s identity becomes blurred as it merges with that of other atavistic individuals and groups. He puts off his British clothing and assumes the “garb of old Gaul,” the Highland gear of “a son of Ivor” or clansman (Waverley 112). Abandoning king and country, he joins the Highlanders in a rebellion that itself marks a regressive movement in the national and collective psyche. But it all has a distant fairy-tale quality about it — an air of unreality. Amidst the swelling war cry of the attacking clan, Edward Waverley is suddenly seized by a feeling of alienation. Looking at his tartan, his weapons, and his companions in disbelief, he internally dissociates himself from the scene. The remainder of the novel chronicles his return to contemporary society through a kind of depressurization, as he passes through a series of five transitional identities in order to reenter contemporary society safely with position, property, and privilege intact. The novel closes with the image of an Edward pardoned and restored standing in the midst of his wedding party while gazing at a sentimental portrait of himself in rebel’s bonnet and Highland tartan arm-in-arm with his brother in rebellion, Fergus — arch-rebel and last chieftain of the Highland clan of Vich Ian Vohr, a less fortunate figure disemboweled, dismembered, and decapitated. The danger of that encounter is transmuted and framed in the art of portrait and text. The immersion in past and primitive is contained and deliberately mystified by an authorial sleight of hand. Romanticism is implicated in all this. The idealization of past and primitive associated with romanticism is, in fact, the very subject of the first historical novel, Waverley. The titular hero’s adventures chronicle the impulse toward a more primitive past and the harsh chastening of that impulse, of those yearnings for a more primitive — a more “heightened” way of life — which, faced with the barbarities and cruelties native to those traditions and with the equally barbarous and cruel policies of a modern imperialism, draws back in horror. Set in the midst of a world dominated by Machiavellian movements, movements that catch him up, spin him about, and spit him out exhausted, disheveled, gasping for breath, still not knowing what hit him, the protagonist escapes with his life only with the help of a kind of deus ex machina, the intercession of a friend or relation intimate with the winning side. Fergus, his Highland counterpart and “brother” is literally torn to pieces — limb from limb — by the ferocity of history. Edward, the survivor, having seen all this and briefly tasted its horror, is happy to stay by the fireside henceforth, armin-arm with his Rose. His immersion in the landscape of his imagination almost cost him his life. He survives, but lets fall those romantic dreams and embraces the simpler and certainly more conventional life of husband, proprietor, and citizen. His high purpose is abandoned for a

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more pedestrian peace and quiet. Waverley and his literary descendants launch their quest for the past and primitive in the teeth of political, social, and cultural realities that come crashing in on them. Having run the gauntlet formed by the collision of the earlier idealized vision of history with a brutal reality, the hero makes his peace with his own time and place. It is a kind of renunciation of the earlier quest and an acknowledgment of the claims of the present. Dreams of political apocalypse and cultural utopia fade into the blurred outline of memory — into that sentimental portrait of Edward and Fergus, itself a visible symbol of Scott’s own rendering and enframing of the romantic quest of past and present. Springing from a later romanticism, its hopes for social and political utopia chastened and conditioned by the cataclysms through which it had passed — a romanticism whose exaltation of the primitive as a model for modern man had met bitter defeat again and again — the genre is one way in which romanticism assesses itself, acknowledges its own limits, and writes its own eulogy. But the tragedies that close the revolutionary action in Waverley mark the immolation not only of Flora and Fergus as well as the youthful romantic impulse, but also of the primitive, elder culture from which they sprang. The Mac-Ivors are extinct; the apocalyptic and utopian hopes, the dream of reviving an idealized past, are spent. This is the discourse after the flood recording the great changes that had taken place, recording not only the demise of romantic hopes, but also the demise of a culture and people wiped off the face of the earth — the discourse of a nascent ethnology. Scott’s work is not only a part of this, but is also a profoundly self-conscious part tracing the trajectories of all these contemporary approaches to past and primitive — romanticism, antiquarianism and mythography, and the emergence of the modern anthropological disciplines. What gives these novels their wide appeal is perhaps not their conservative “happy” endings, but the element of risk — the threat of annihilation or absorption. Even in the most cautious of these chronicles or adventure stories — novels like Rob Roy or Waverley — the heroes momentarily lose their identity. Their survival hinges on its recovery. He, or more rarely she, must contend with a host of shadow selves, not only the individual double — the hermit, the beggar, the idiot, the outlaw or rebel, the criminal, the traitor, and all the “others,” the marginal figures who populate the text — but also the collective doubles as well — shadow figures of contemporary culture such as the Highlander, Cossack, or Mohican — who are all projections of modern consciousness and culture at risk. What emerges is a kind of shadow play of desire and differentiation, cultural and individual. It is a cathartic experience. Part of what makes the historical novel so dynamic, what gave it such phenomenal force in its own time is its direct representation of this play of identities at the borders of history, culture, and self in the personal experience of the protagonist. There is a focus, familiarity, and intimacy in the fictional reading that reveals what remains unspoken, though not concealed in the scientific text; it reveals the fascination with the other. Indeed, it could not be concealed. It is the mainspring of the narratives concerned with past and primitive, which emerge from the first half of the nineteenth century. In the larger narrative of differentiation, there is a narrative of desire — a hunger for alternate experience — a response to the call of past and primitive. This impulse to explore and define the relationship between self and other, past and present, as well as primitive and modern is at the bottom of the early discourse of the social sciences. Theirs are disguised or distanced

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“scientific” narratives of the conflict and confrontation of identities expressed so freely in the figure and adventures of the protagonist — a youth on the brink of adulthood, the persona of a nation and a culture moving into the modern world — turning back to confront its own past and primitive self. The genre that seems to spring full-grown from the mind of Sir Walter Scott, amateur antiquarian, ethnologist, and historian turned novelist, is an expression of this fascination with the other — past and present — paired with the need to differentiate, to explore the boundaries of the self, a fascination implicit in the emergent discourse of ethnology, history, and psychology. Drawn to the shadow side, venturing into foreign universes, the scientific narratives maintain a cautious distance — through the persona of the historian, the ethnologist and the antiquarian. The novel’s protagonist, noted for his typicality and passivity, emerges as the persona of this modern consciousness — a focal point for the concerns, anxieties, and aspirations of the age, an expression of the emergent, even neophyte consciousness of modern Europe. His desire to explore alternate worlds and alternate experience without losing his own privileged cultural identity is a metaphor for the larger ventures of the intellectual community exploring beyond the boundaries of self, but careful about the safety and integrity of its person and property. The early historical novel is only one episode in a larger chronicle of literary encounters and inversions, but it is particularly intriguing because it emerged roughly simultaneously with scientific “narratives” in ethnology, history, and even psychology, which share a common subject matter — the past and primitive — and a common medium — the prose narrative. It is surely no coincidence that these begin to emerge and take on a disciplinary identity and a common discursive mode at roughly the same time. It is a symptom of an underlying disease in culture and consciousness. The shadow self of man and culture is projected and constructed in a narration of distance and differentiation that becomes “science,” taking on an air of authority and authenticity, and acquiring the directing and ordering potency associated with “disciplinary” activity. Born of the tension between the impulse to recapture a more primitive experience and the necessity to repudiate that condition, a tension spawning a new wave of narrative discourses, both literary and scientific, the historical novel explores in personal terms the workings of larger cultural imperatives and gives a face and a name to the impulse at work in the emergent disciplines. Ethnology, history, and other emergent disciplines like psychology arise as modes of self-definition — communal and individual. They allow contemporary consciousness to observe at a safe distance its own past and primitive experience, while all the while maintaining those boundaries seemingly so critical to modern consciousness and that distance formalized in the concept of scientific objectivity, which affords the individual an opportunity to enter alternate worlds without compromising the integrity of his modern identity — the freedom and detachment of the tourist, the voyeur, the professional, the author. This is the subject of the Waverley novels. Edward Waverley, Frank Osbaldistone, and Darsie Latimer are all implicated. First drawn to the past and primitive, they pull back to regroup seeking a safe distance as those cultures move toward their inevitable end. Theirs is, in this sense, an act of bad faith repeated in text after text across Europe. From where she sat, Laidlaw was right. Scott’s work, however sincere, must remain from her perspective an act of betrayal, albeit a highly self-conscious and articulate one. Committed to commemorating and preserving the forms of a passing culture, Scott’s work is, for all its efforts, predicated on the death of that culture. But from where she sat, Laidlaw was missing



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half the picture. What Laidlaw could not have seen was Scott’s role not only as conservator and commemorator, but as commentator and critic of the whole enterprise. Laidlaw’s accusation was aimed at Scott’s archival work. What might she have said of the historical novel? Perhaps she would have damned it too. Or perhaps she would have said that there at least Scott himself conceded that act of betrayal — that act of bad faith — and that the genre made an honest man of him, if not his generation.

References Ash, Marinell. 1983. “A Past ‘Filled with Living Men’: Daniel Wilson and Scottish and American Archaeology.” Scott and His Influence. Ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt. Occasional Papers 6. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Influence. 443–54. Hogg, James. 1983. Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott. Ed. Douglas S. Mack. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Pilkey, John Davis. 1974. “Walter Scott’s Fiction and British Mythographic and Ethnological Movements.” Diss. University of Kansas. Scott, Sir Walter. 1910. The Antiquary. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. ———. 1813. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Constituting of Historical and Romantic Ballads, Collected in the Southern Countries of Scotland, with a Few of Modern Date, Founded upon Local Tradition. Philadelphia: M. Carey. ———. 1985. Waverley. Ed. Andrew Hook. New York: Viking Penguin. Smith, Louise Z. 1986. “Dialectic, Rhetoric, and Anthropology in Scott’s Waverley.” Studies in Scottish Literature 21: 43–52. Vincent, David. 1982. “The Decline of the Oral Tradition in Popular Culture.” Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England. Ed. Robert D. Storch. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 20–47. Wilson, Daniel. 1851. The Archaeology and Prehistorical Annals of Scotland. Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knoc.



III. Expansions in Time

Although the idea had been variously raised during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century centuries, Herder’s proclamation that a robust and vigorous sense of national identity could only be sustained by drinking deeply from native springs found a particularly receptive audience. Cultural practices and aesthetic norms drawn from alien traditions may in the short term yield pleasing results but would ultimately emerge as counterfeit and spurious foundations. For many traditions, Herder’s admonitions meant an essential paradigm shift that involved charting a course based on a recovery and recontextualization of local history rather than endeavoring to accommodate themselves to cultural patterns respectfully handed down from classical antiquity. Political conservatism, though admitting of considerable interpretive breadth, is similarly a position that attributes far greater importance to social institutions and initiatives that are understood to have developed in a historically demonstrable manner as opposed to those that arise from the thinking of individual theorists or factions in response to specific concerns. Michael Gassenmeier and Jens Martin Gurr identify Edmund Burke as the father of modern political conservatism and trace the development of his thinking from an early liberalism to his outspoken denunciation of the French Revolution. The impact of his pragmatically grounded defense of time-honored institutions has been considerable in both British and American political thought and is followed up to the redeployment of many of his arguments by the American new conservatives during the closing decades of the twentieth century. For the nations situated on Europe’s northern edge, the challenge of an authentic history was not that of persevering in the defense of venerable institutions but rather that of recouping a sense of their distinctive past that had nearly slipped into oblivion over the course of several centuries. All of the Nordic nations — Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland — emerged from the period of the Napoleonic Wars diminished and dispirited. In “Distorted Echoes: The Mythology of Nordic Nationalism,” Steven P. Sondrup examines some of the varying ways in which they turned to the heroic age of the Vikings as a means of renewing their language, reconfiguring a sense of national identity, and securing a valued cultural patrimony. S. P. S.



Burke’s Conservatism and Its Echoes on the Continent and in the United States MICHAEL GASSENMEIER AND JENS MARTIN GURR University of Duisburg

The Term Conservatism The term conservatism, which in different countries and at different times has undergone a fair range of reinterpretations, designates a political philosophy that attributes incomparably greater value to institutions and practices of society that have evolved historically than it does to the societal models of individual political thinkers. Political thinkers arguing for the dignity and value of forms and methods of government that have evolved historically generally do so on the grounds of a decidedly skeptical and pessimistic image of human nature, which they vigorously and frequently defend against conceptions of the natural equality, rationality, and benevolence of human beings propagated by radicals and liberals (Viereck 8f.). Conservative approaches have played a considerable role in the political and anthropological discourse of all ages, but it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that conservatism was elaborated into a consistent political philosophy in response to the French Revolution. The British MP and writer Edmund Burke is undisputedly regarded as the founder of modern political conservatism (Kramnick 4). The Immediate Impulse for Burke’s Polemic against the French Revolution The immediate impulse for writing his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which within a few years of its publication in 1790 became the prayer book of those opposed to the revolution, was the salutations which the London-based Society for Promoting Constitutional Information and the Revolution Society had sent to the constituent assembly in Paris in October 1789 (Dishman 73–158). These messages were intended both as panegyrics on the French revolutionaries and as warnings to the British politicians reluctant to agree to reforms. Above all, Burke was enraged by the substance and the line of reasoning of a widely debated sermon which Dr. Richard Price, a politically influential Presbyterian divine, had delivered before members of the Revolution Society on November 4 and which he had published in London with the letters of salutation. Dr. Price’s sermon culminated in the following encomium on the French Revolution: What an eventful period is this! I am thankful that I have lived to it …. I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge, which has undermined superstition and error. — I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever; and nations panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the idea of it. — I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute,

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This concluding passage in which the political divine envisages a revolution in England modelled on the French in the event that the requested political reforms were not carried out filled Burke with “a considerable degree of uneasiness” (qtd. in Fennessy 100) as he remarks with unsurpassed understatement. But what mainly provoked Burke to react and finally prompted him to write the Reflections was the interpretation of “the principles of the [Glorious] Revolution” that Price outlined to the members of the Revolution Society (Burke, Reflections 99). To Burke, Price’s interpretation of the principles of the Revolution of 1688, which ascribes to parliament not only the right to elect and dismiss the head of state but, in a wider sense, also the right to decide between a constitutional monarchy or a presidential system of government, is nothing but dangerous political heresy that hardly has anything to do with the Glorious Revolution but has all the more to do with the ignominious Puritan Revolution. For, as Burke explains, the “profoundly learned men” (118) who, in the Bill of Rights, formulated the principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, explicitly referred to “the succession of the crown” (100) as well as to the “most sacred rights and franchises” of the British “as an inheritance” (118). The Puritan “Apostle[s] of Liberty” (157), on the other hand, no less eagerly than the French revolutionaries and their British claques, subscribed to a policy of extirpating “superstition and error” (158) and insisted on their supposedly unalienable right to choose their governor and system of government according to their predilections, by means of which they succeeded in ruining the country within a few years (157f.). Burke’s Shift from Radical to Radical Conservative Connoisseurs of the political scene least expected this critique from Edmund Burke, who in the 1770s had acquired a reputation as a devoted reformer. A member of the Commons since 1765, Burke had advocated many liberal reforms. Before Adam Smith he demanded freedom of trade. He attacked the slave trade before Wilberforce. He advocated the abolition of discrimination against Catholics as well as the nonconformists’ claim to full civil rights. He developed plans for a liberalization of the penal law and defended freedom of the press. In his pamphlet, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), he argued against the enhancement of the royal prerogatives pursued by George III in favor of the enlargement of parliamentary influence. In the conflict with the American colonies, he obstinately fought for a compromise by negotiations and repeatedly spoke against the exploitation of Ireland and India (Godechot 52f.). But the British who sympathized with the French Revolution and were surprised or shocked at Burke’s having become an opponent of the Revolution had overlooked two facts: first, the former champion of transatlantic as well as domestic opposition had for years assumed a stance increasingly resembling that of his former political opponents; and second, Burke’s advocacy of

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reform had in no phase of his political career been guided by beliefs comparable to those of the French revolutionaries or their radically democratic sympathizers in England (Godechot 53). Having risen to the position of spokesman for the opposition formed by Lord Rockingham in the House of Commons during the 1770s, Burke more explicitly and vigorously advocated decidedly liberal positions, both in his pleading for more parliamentary competence in the constitutional controversy inaugurated by George III and in his critique of the transatlantic colonial policy of the Crown. By the beginning of the 1780s, however, the days of the liberal Edmund Burke were over: when in June 1780 England found itself domestically destabilized and largely isolated in the web of world powers after numerous defeats in the American colonies and the appearance of varying opposing alliances, an oriflamme calling for change and occasioning a considerable “swing to the right” was unfurled in the metropolis: the revolt of the London street mob, which has gone down in history as the Gordon Riots (Meller 189–214). During this period when London presented itself as a “sea of flames” (Hibbert 35) and the United Kingdom barely escaped the masses’ attack on the foundations of its establishment, Edmund Burke, who had defended himself and his house against the rebels, became a radical conservative, who for fear of the mob’s violence was never again prepared to make a secret of his veneration for the old order (67). Burke’s Verdict on the French Revolutionaries: Hominem Non Sapiunt A key tenet of the Reflections frequently varied throughout the work states that the drafting of a constitution requires exceptional abilities: The constitution of a state, and the due distribution of its powers, [are] a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions. The state is to have recruits to its strengths and remedies to its distempers …. The nature of man is intricate. (Burke, Reflections 151–52)

The key competence required of the architects of a polity is “a deep knowledge of human nature,” which Burke understands to be “intricate,” that is difficult to estimate and to calculate and requiring a social order capable of promoting its “strengths” and of eliminating or at least controlling its “distempers.” It is predominantly in classical antiquity that Burke finds men who considered a thorough study of human nature an indispensable prerequisite for the establishment of a stable and flourishing commonwealth: The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an under-graduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the property itself, all of which

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With a polemical turn against the members of the French National Assembly whose philosophical and mathematical knowledge he compares to that of undergraduates and excisemen and on the authority of Montesquieu, who admired the British constitution, Burke develops some of his key arguments against the French revolutionaries, who believed that after the overthrow of the old order they themselves could realize the idea of a perfect constitution that they claimed was dictated by no lesser a faculty than unerring reason. Drawing on Montesquieu, Burke argues that political laws cannot and need not be derived from abstract principles of reason. Rather, their adequacy depends upon whether under certain political, social, and economic conditions they serve to constitute and warrant stable social orders. In order to make suitable and reliable laws, legislators need to study the social phenomena relevant to their constitutional system using empirical methods similar to those employed by scientists studying natural phenomena in search of the underlying laws of nature. Put more concretely, what is required of legislators is a careful study of human beings, a study of human nature in a general sense embracing all abilities and limitations of the species and a study of the “second nature” — the differentiations, conditioning, and privileges that citizens acquire during the development of a polity with respect to their different origin, education, cultural surrounding, occupation, and economic status. But as Burke proceeds to make clear with the saeva indignatio of the satirist, the delegates of the constituent assembly in Paris do not have the faintest notion of all this. They have much, but bad, metaphysics; much, but bad, geometry; much, but false proportionate arithmetic; but if it were all as exact as metaphysics, geometry, and arithmetic ought to be, and if their schemes were perfectly consistent in all their parts, it would make only a more fair and sightly vision. It is remarkable, that in a great arrangement of mankind, not one reference whatsoever is to be found to any thing moral or any thing politic; nothing that relates to the concerns, the actions, the passions, the interests of men: Hominem non sapiunt. (296–7)

Elsewhere the National Assembly, whose unfathomable incompetence Burke rarely fails to emphasize, is even portrayed in a nightmarish image of monstrous perversity and infernal anarchy. The Assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty. They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them; and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them; domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and proud presumptuous authority. As they have inverted order in all things, the gallery is in the place of the house. This Assembly, which overthrows kings and kingdoms, has not even the physiognomy and aspect of a grave legislative body — nec color imperii, nec

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frons erat ulla senatus. They have a power given to them, like that of the evil principle, to subvert and destroy; but none to construct, except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction. Who … but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque, and abominable perversion of that sacred institute? Lovers of monarchy, and lovers of republicks, must alike abhor it … notwithstanding the applauses of the Revolution Society. (161–2)

Burke here takes up a literary topos that innumerable writers bent on preserving the status quo have kept alive from classical antiquity down to the student revolts of our own time. But Burke makes the traditional topos yield much more than what the comparison of political revolutions with hollow comedies and vulgar farces commonly conveys (Demandt 355f., 359ff.). By equating the National Assembly with a fair at which an audience of ferocious men and shameless women wrenches a performance from the players turning everything topsy-turvy in order to make themselves the actors in a horror show, Burke suggests the unleashing of a “power … like that of the evil principle” of a satanic destructiveness that cannot be stopped by anyone or anything. Burke’s Anthropology and His Apotheosis of the British Social Hierarchy Burke denigrates the anthropological ignorance of the philosophes, of their “revolutionary disciples,” and “the whole clan of the enlightened among us” and sets against it his own empirical anthropology, which he claims to be the result of scrutinizing historical analysis and unbiased observation of human behavior in his own age. But he does not develop his anthropology in a consistent, let alone in a systematic way. Since he chose to write his Reflections in the form of a letter growing, as it were, by accident into an extensive political treatise (Burke, Reflections 84f.; Dishman 283), his anthropology only gradually takes shape. But a passage from his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) reads like a summary of the relevant remarks in the Reflections: Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites … in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. (Burke, Works 4: 319)

To the delegate to the French National Assembly who echoes the famous complaint in the first sentence of Rousseau’s Du Contrat social (On the Social Contract; 1762) in his demand that humanity be freed from chains, Burke points out the necessities of political control: “Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power … be placed somewhere.” According to Burke, all human beings are driven by cravings and passions that, if given free rein, would undermine the interests and the freedom of the other as well as the existence of the entire body politic. Since the individuals who constitute society are not morally equal but of

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significantly different moral status, human beings cannot possibly be given equal liberties. Without ever making this explicit, Burke proceeds from the assumption that in every society there are individuals easily able to master their “appetites” and “passions” and others who are completely unable to do so with all possible gradations of self-control in between the extremes. To Burke civil liberties are not universal, abstract, and unalienable rights to which all men have equal claim. He regards them as rights to which “men are qualified … in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” To Burke, therefore, the refusal of those in power to grant the “men of intemperate minds” full “civil liberties” has nothing to do with discrimination. On the contrary, it is seen as a differentiation vital to the creation and maintenance of a viable social order. Deficits in self-restraint and self-government in the “men of intemperate minds” must be compensated by the “controlling power” of the state: “men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” In another passage in the Reflections that also speaks of the “men of intemperate minds,” Burke’s apology for the established hierarchical order is carried yet a step further: By having a right to every thing they want every thing. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of the individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle. (151, italics ours)

Having emphasized different meanings of the word want denoting both “desire” and “lack” in the first few sentences and having exploited this ambiguity for the subtly ironic characterization of the people “who want everything,” Burke places both the “liberties” and the “restraints” or “restrictions” in the same category as the “real rights of men” (149), which he had proposed and defined shortly before in the course of his polemical refutation of the “rights of men” (148) as propagated by the “political metaphysic[ian]s” (149). It is to be reckoned among the rights of the “men of intemperate minds,” as Burke’s line of reasoning might be summarized, that certain of their liberties be restricted for only a restriction of their liberties guards them from going astray and ending up on the gallows. And it is to be reckoned among the rights of the “men of soundness and sobriety” that the “men of intemperate minds” be restrained from doing mischief by putting their covetous hands in chains as the only way in which the state can secure the welldeserved liberties and privileges of the former. Another fateful heresy of enlightened philosophy, according to Burke, is the idea of the “intellectual equality of men” upon which the French revolutionaries and the “whole clan of the enlightened among us” (183) base their conviction that — as Richard Price had proclaimed before the Revolution Society — the “diffusion of knowledge” to all social strata would reveal the aristocracy’s and the clergy’s instruments of power to be “superstition and error” and the

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overthrow of despotism would initiate a “dominion of reason and conscience” (Price 3). With more persuasion and broader effect than any other writer of the period, Thomas Paine advanced this campaign of the “diffusion of knowledge” in his polemical treatises appearing between 1776 and 1795. Endowed with an unparalleled susceptibility for their cares and hopes, he encouraged the masses to trust their own reason and judgment and to recognize the pillars of the ancien régime as the roots of all inequality, injustice, and oppression. In his very first work, Common Sense (1776), he claims, “I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense: and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession” (Paine 1: 84), and later in The American Crisis he maintains, “I dwell not upon the vapours of imagination; I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes” (Paine 1: 178, italics ours). This apotheosis of the “self-sufficient reason of [the] individual” propagated by Paine, Price, and other enthusiasts of enlightenment and the denigration of all “custom and tradition” as “prejudice” (Fennessy 35) were to Burke not only a political but also an intellectual horror that provoked him into resolute, often sarcastic, sometimes ironic objections: [In] this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we [the British] are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. (Burke, Reflections 183)

It may well be that the original impulse provoking Burke to this remarkable rehabilitation of “prejudice” and to the equally forceful depreciation of individual “reason” was pure sarcasm, the mere joy of denouncing the author of Common Sense as the propagator of sheer nonsense (Wilkins 110). This view is supported by what is only ostensibly Burke’s self-critical or ironic way of describing himself and the majority of his British compatriots as people who even in an enlightened age have preserved their natural sensibility, their “untaught feelings.” But Burke does not stop at the mere pleasure of polemicizing. His skeptical judgment of man’s individual reason (“the private stock of reason … in each man is small”) is a core idea of his anthropology based, as he tirelessly points out, on the empirical study of human behavior, a core idea that recurs throughout, not just in the Reflections (Burke, Works 6: 147). And his high estimate of the much-denounced “prejudice” logically follows from his conviction that a society can only

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remain stable so long as it supplies its citizens endowed with no more than moderate cognitive resources with general aids to reflection and orientation (“the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages”). His formulation, “prejudice is of ready application in the emergency,” shows that he associates it with the dignity of the example able to serve as a model in future decisions along the same lines, a connotation of the word prejudice derived from the Latin praejudicium (Allport 6). On the other hand, the affective quality suitable for internalization that he ascribes to the word “prejudice” (“Prejudice … has … an affection which will give it permanence…. [It] renders a man’s virtue his habit … [and] his duty becomes part of his nature”) shows that he wants the term to be understood in the sense in which the Scottish sentimentalists understood it. According to their moral philosophy, our understanding of the world and of ourselves is not so much based on intellectual cognition as on our “moral sense” (Tuveson 241). “Prejudice” to Burke is a higher form of “latent wisdom,” an orientation that is acquired by young people in the course of their socialization and proves reliable because it is always available and does not appeal to isolated faculties only, but rather to the entire person: “will, emotion, and the social sense, as well as reason” (Tuveson 133). Even the somewhat surprising extension of the term prejudice to encompass the numerous British institutions is probably to be understood as a polemical move against the sweeping critique of the “component parts of the English constitution,” which Thomas Paine launches in the first chapter of Common Sense (1776) entitled, “Of the Origin and Design of Government in General”: “I know it is difficult to get over local or longstanding prejudices, yet if we will suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English constitution, we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new Republican materials” (Paine 1: 72). And having disqualified the widespread belief “that the constitution of England is an union of three powers, reciprocally checking each other” as “farcical” (Paine 1: 72) and as a “mere absurdity” (73), Paine proceeds: The prejudice of Englishmen, in favor of their own government by King, Lords and Commons arises as much or more from national pride than reason…. Wherefore, laying aside all national pride and prejudice in favor of modes and forms, the plain truth is that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey. An inquiry into the constitutional errors in the English form of government, is at this time highly necessary; … [but we are not] capable of doing it … while we remain fettered by any obstinate prejudice. And as a man who is attached to a prostitute is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favor of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one. (74–5)

That this combination of redundancy and reductionism in Paine’s line of reasoning provoked Burke to the above extension of the concept of “prejudice” to encompass the institutions indiscriminately dismissed by Paine is implied in the introductory sentence of Burke’s defense, which can hardly be read other than as a polemic against such “cabals” (Burke, Reflections 185) as Paine and Price: “instead of quarrelling with establishments, as some do, who have made a philosophy and a religion of their hostility to such institutions, we cleave closely to them” (188). But it is only in the following passage that this is made abundantly clear. Here Burke first

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completes Paine’s incomplete list of the “component parts of the English constitution” by naming them individually: “We are resolved to keep an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy” (188) and proceeds with a successive appraisal of these institutions, which in his Reflections henceforth appear as “our prejudices, not … destitute of reason, but involving in [them] profound and extensive wisdom” (188–9). With the same term Burke uses for experiences and impressions that are acquired in the course of a person’s socialization and whose “reason” and “latent wisdom” he appropriates as moral aids in orientation, he also designates the continuously “meliorated and adapted” (123) institutions of the kingdom to whose “reason” and “profound and extensive wisdom” he ascribes the beneficial effect of so channeling the thought and behavior of all classes that these may be conducive both to the interest of the individual orders and the entire body politic. If Burke begins his appreciation of these institutions with the “church establishment” the “first of our prejudices” (188), he does not fail to give a theological and psychological foundation to his esteem for the Established Church (cf. 187). But his key argument in favor of the value, even indispensability of the “religious system, of which we are now in possession” (189) is its political utility. This religious system on which all the other political institutions of the state are founded and through which they receive their “consecration” (189) endows the office-holders with an understanding of the dignity of their office and the responsibility involved. In the subjects, it instils a feeling of “inferiority” (197) that suggests and facilitates “natural subordination” (372). To the monarchs, who exert their rule as God’s representatives on earth, this is of vital importance since it makes them realize “that they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment, nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid, permanent existence … and to a permanent fame and glory, in the example they leave as a rich inheritance to the world” (189). But this “consecration of the state, by a state religious establishment” (190) is even more important to the free citizens who form the “collective sovereignty” (190) in the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain: “[The] idea that they act in trust; and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author and founder of society … ought even to be more strongly impressed upon the minds of those who compose the collective sovereignty …. They should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole fabric of their society” (190, 192). Finally, the church arguably fulfils its most important function by preaching the “principles of natural subordination” to the majority of the population, to the “men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life” (124) and by giving them “consolation” (372): “The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavor, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice” (372). The conclusions Burke draws from these remarks are obvious: enlightened philosophy with its sweeping critique of the “ancient principles and institutions,” a critique devoid of all respect and understanding, is a disaster. And the French Revolution, which translates these enlightened maxims into practice, is a catastrophe. For what grows from the debris of the old order is not

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the promised “dominion of reason and conscience” as Richard Price has it, but “a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time, poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter” (174). Burke justifies his prophecy with the three words “Hominem non sapiunt,” which he lays like a curse upon the revolutionaries: they are doomed to fail because the egalitarian image of man they proclaim is a “monstrous fiction” (124) and because the radically democratic form of government deduced from it is a “monster of a constitution” (313), which does not turn the ostensibly oppressed masses into free and responsible citizens, but into a “swinish multitude” (173) bent on its foul work until “a popular general … who possesses the true spirit of command” will establish himself as a dictator and usurps universal jurisdiction. “But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master; the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic” (342). Passages such as this one, which only few years after the publication of the Reflections were understood as presentiments of the September Massacres, the rule of terror of the Jacobins and Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power as war lord and absolute monarch, brought Burke the prestige of being regarded as a prophet (Dreyer 39ff.). In truth, these predictions are based on a creed in the philosophy of history that Burke shared with many of his contemporaries and that Gottfried August Bürger in his essay, Die Republik England (The Republic of England; 1793), which he wrote in order to plead for a more balanced and unprejudiced observation and evaluation of the French Revolution, encapsulated in the simple dictum, “Many an event of the future is mirrored in the past” (Gassenmeier, Bürger 43, 46f.). For Burke, this thinking in historical analogies and parallels was dominant from beginning to end in writing his Reflections. What aroused Burke’s fear, made him put pen to paper, and inspired the nightmarish visions of the smashing of all social and cultural assets of civilization that recur throughout in his work is the fact that in the proclamations and actions of the French Revolution he recognized the fundamentalist fanaticism of the Puritan rebels who had plunged England into chaos and submitted it to the reign of terror of a martial despot. Pragmatism versus Mystification in Burke’s Reflections In most of the extended passages defending the British social hierarchy against the critique of enlightened thinkers and those sympathizing with the French revolutionaries, Burke argues largely pragmatically and could rely on the approval of the powerful and the beati possidentes. Using this same pragmatic line of reasoning, he defended the Anglican Church mainly on the grounds that it serves to keep the turbulent masses within bounds by obligating them to “subordination” and “obedience.” But Burke knew of course that by an overwhelming majority of people — whom he bluntly qualified as “men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life” (124) — this pleading for the clergy would not be favorably received in an age “poisoned” by “incendiaries” such as Paine and Price, an age which tended to denounce the aristocracy and clergy as “oppressors” and their claims to power and property as “superstition and error.” Since Burke was well aware of this situation, his Reflections develop a double strategy that is as ingenious as it is intriguing. On the one hand, he pragmatically defends the

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political status quo; on the other, grandiloquent pathos and rhetorical refinement serve to endow it with an aura of sacrosanctity. The central idea that Burke endeavors to restore is the shaken hierarchy of privileges of the great “chain of being,” the conception of the macrocosm as a gradation of beings, a conception that owes its foundation to Plato and Aristotle, its systematic elaboration to neo-Platonism, and its arguably most famous poetic rendering in English literature to one of Burke’s idols, Alexander Pope (Lovejoy 183ff.). Both Burke’s arch-enemy, Voltaire, and his friend of many years’ standing, Dr. Johnson (Lovejoy 252ff.), ridiculed this idea propagated by anti-Enlightenment philosophers, poets, and theologians of the eighteenth century as a scholastic concoction and botchwork of pseudometaphysics. To Dr. Johnson, it was merely a “beautiful fiction,” one “raised by presumptuous Imagination, to rest on Nothing at the Bottom, to lean on Nothing at the Top” (qtd. in Lovejoy 254). Voltaire regarded it as a “great phantom [meant to please] those good folk who fancy they see in it the Pope and his cardinals followed by archbishops and bishops …. O Plato … I fear that you have taught us only fables, and have never spoken except in sophisms. O Plato! you have done more harm than you know” (Lovejoy 252–3). But this rejection did not keep Burke from developing the most remarkable arguments from this empirically, philosophically, and theologically equally untenable model in order to consecrate and sanction the hierarchy. A good number of the ideas Burke develops are strikingly reminiscent of Pope’s version of the “chain of being” in the Essay on Man: Pope’s interpretation of the hierarchical order of the cosmos as the model of the God-given order of society is echoed in Burke’s Reflections wherever he speaks of the “entail” (192), of the “whole chain” (193), or of the “continuity of the commonwealth [which must not] be broken” (193). Pope’s “disposing Pow’r” (Epistle 1: 287), which assigns every human being his or her “own point [and] due degree” (1: 283) in the common “ORDER” (1: 281) and obliges everyone to “Submit” (1: 285), finds a correspondence in Burke’s Reflections, where “subordination,” which on the pragmatic level has been declared politically desirable, is clothed into the phrase “the principles of natural subordination” (372), thus imputing to it the dignity and incontestability of a law of nature. The curse, “Vile worm! — oh Madness, Pride, Impiety” (1: 258), which Pope hurls at anyone who — “absurd[ly] … claim[ing] to “be another, in this gen’ral frame” (1: 263–64) — threatens to break “[a]ll this dread ORDER” (1: 257), finds its correspondence in Burke’s Reflections in the innumerable imprecations against the revolutionaries. Finally, “the care of Heav’n” (2: 266), which keeps the poor in jovial mood in Pope’s poem, returns in Burke’s glorification of the Anglican Church offering “consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice” (Reflections 372) to those struggling in vain, just as it lies behind Burke’s denigration of the anti-clerical critic denounced as the true “oppressor, the merciless enemy of the poor and wretched” (372). But the most ambitious application of the analogy between macrocosm and sociocosm developed in Pope’s version of the “great chain” occurs in the famous “social contract” passage of the Reflections. It is inconceivable why, to this day, this passage is still regarded as “an affirmation and then elaboration of a Lockian idea” (Love 530), although F. J. C. Hearnshaw as early as 1931 proposed a reading significantly different from the established one, which, in his characteristically irreverent manner so appropriate to the passage discussed, he handily expressed in the following formula: Burke’s social contract “is resounding nonsense…. It sublimates

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Locke’s contract theory into limbo” (Hearnshaw 93). As previous critics have shown, Burke in this context does indeed use key terms of Locke’s contract theory developed in the Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) when he speaks of “Society” (194) as a “contract” (194), a “compact” (195), or a “corporation” (195) according to which the rulers are to act in the interest of the commonweal and are accountable to the public. But how little Burke’s social contract theory has in common with that of Locke and other theorists of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries becomes apparent in Burke’s use of the mere terms of liberal and democratic constitutional models that are alien to the concepts developed in the contract passage. For despite Burke’s largely constitutional stance in the better part of his book, here his contract knows nothing of a constituent assembly of citizens, let alone of their right to choose between different forms of government, nor does it hold the executive power accountable to the legislative power, a provision central to Locke’s concept of government. In Burke’s “Society” anchored in the “chain of being,” those in power are accountable only to God: “They are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author and founder of society” (Burke, Reflections 190). All other passages expounding his view of the “contract” also revolve around His will: “Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place” (195). Here, “each contract of each particular state” is explicitly tied to the “chain of being.” For just as “the great primaeval contract of eternal society” has appointed each creature its proper place in the hierarchy of the creation according to an inviolable and unchangeable law, so the “contract of each particular state,” which is “but a clause in the great primaeval contract” irrevocably assigns each human being a certain position and function in a hierarchical social order. According to the will of the omnipotent author of the “primaeval contract,” there can be no alternative: “If that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow” (195). For the rebels, who refuse the “submission to necessity” because they wrongly regard the system of government and the order of society as an “object of choice,” Burke ordains the same fate God ordained for Satan, the prototype of the rebel. They are driven from the “world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence” and are cast “into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.” And into this hell Burke presumably not only wishes John Locke, the originator of the right of resistance and of the idea of choice among different forms of government, but with him all those who were led up the garden path of history leading to anarchy and chaos: Richard Price, Thomas Paine, and the whole Gallic rabble, who, coupling their subversive “political speculations” with “the coarsest sensuality” (Kramnick 143ff.) doubled their burden of sin. By taking refuge in this mystification of the British establishment, Burke seems to admit implicitly that pragmatic and rational arguments are not sufficient to present his apology for the old order — passed off as constitutional patriotism — as the defense of a just cause. More

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precisely, he acknowledges that the apology for the old order can be mounted — if at all — only from the perspective of the elites by whom the claims, expectations, and hopes of more than 90 percent of the British population are unscrupulously declared illusions perdues and therefore simply considered negligible. But this mystification apparently seemed commendable to Burke despite its incompatibility with the essentially pragmatic approach of his apologia. For what Burke intended to make available to the elites, whom he believed to have cause to fear for the survival of the “principle of natural subordination,” was not merely an apology for the status quo in order to strengthen their self-confidence and their will to self-assertion, but also a well of solemn terms, concepts, and ideas from which the higher castes — whom Burke doubted to be intellectually as resourceful as they were influential and powerful — might draw in order to reintroduce “submission” as an inviolable law of nature to their rebellious subjects. Early English Reactions to the French Revolution When Burke’s Reflections appeared in November 1790, they were embraced by the British upper classes. But neither the Pitt government nor public opinion welcomed his biting and uncompromising dismissal of the French Revolution. Burke’s friend and long-standing political companion Charles James Fox considered the fall of the Bastille “the greatest and best event ever to have happened in the world” (Morley 30), and many intellectuals and poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Blake, and Burns shared his enthusiasm. But the view of pre-revolutionary France as a despotic regime and of the revolutionaries as people legitimately struggling for the freedom and economic renewal of their country was also predominant among a large proportion of the politically astute population. Leading British papers commenting on the events in France saw the French as finally bringing the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to their backward country in order to establish a form of government similar to the constitutional monarchy of Britain (Fennessy 3). This widespread opinion was no mere self-complacent fiction. In addition, many other Continental luminaries, such as Voltaire, arguably the most brilliant critic of absolutism, had described England as the truly liberal and tolerant society, which had successfully crowned an unparalleled struggle for liberation with the expulsion of the Stuart tyrants and the liberalization of the economy, the sciences, and religious and intellectual life and had become the model for the nations on the continent striving for political and social reforms (Gassenmeier, Londondichtung 222ff.). The Reception of Burke’s Conservatism in Britain and the United States A number of English radicals, however, regarded both Burke’s depiction of the French revolutionaries and his presentation of the British constitution as downright distortions. They replied with critiques of monarchy and aristocracy and with vindications of the political and social revolution that resulted in one of the most profound controversies concerning the fundamentals of politics in modern history. The spectrum of Burke’s opponents stretched from the radical left-wing populists to liberal humanitarians and included radical Whigs and Dissenters (Butler 2ff.). The most famous pamphlets that emerged from the campaign were Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), her A Vindication of the Rights of

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Woman (1792), Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), and William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) (Butler 72ff., 107ff., 149ff.). With the onset of the Jacobin reign of terror and the increasingly overt imperialist policy of the revolutionary armies culminating in the unprovoked destruction of the Swiss republic in 1798, Burke’s conservative creed gained new currency. Like many other intellectuals who saw their dream of universal liberty perverted into a nightmare of imperialist conquest and oppression, Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth recanted their former trust in the moral and political maturity of the liberated masses. And praising the once derided Burke as the much too long unacknowledged “Son of Genius and Freedom” (Gassenmeier, “Technique” 238ff.), they manifested their revised solidarity with the lower orders of society in post-revolutionary sermons in prose and in verse echoing Burke’s good tidings: society, they preached, is an organism differentiated into various classes, the respective function of which is equally valuable irrespective of whether it is granted or denied the right to vote and to rule. That right, Coleridge argued, was best left in the hands of an ethically trained aristocracy, “that small but glorious band [of] disinterested Patriots … whose mind is habitually imprest with … soul-ennobling views … and [who] may be justly said to dwell in the presence of the Most High.” “To those only,” he continues, “the avowal of political Truth” should be made and “never to the multitude, who ignorant and needy must necessarily act from the impulse of inflamed passions” (qtd. in Gassenmeier, “Taming” 60). Although Burke was praised as one of the great masters of the English language and his teachings as the essence of political wisdom, the romantic myth of Burke the heroic Tory was kept alive by his biographer, George Croly, an Anglican minister who actively and zealously opposed the Chartists, whom he regarded as Jacobins reincarnate. His purpose in writing on Burke during the 1840s was to compile “an anti-revolutionary manual of [his] wisdom” which was hoped to preserve the hierarchical society against the new menace of the working poor (Kramnick 41). In general, however, Burke was perceived rather as a precursor of liberalism and utilitarianism than as the prophet of reaction during the nineteenth century. Emphasizing his opposition to the Crown during the 1770s and his role in the American Revolution, John Morley, his second great nineteenth-century biographer, read Burke with his rejection of natural rights and other abstract principles as the pioneer of constitutionalism paving the way for Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. This embrace of Burke by Morley and other Victorian liberals like Henry Buckle, Leslie Stephen, and William Lecky marks the first step in his bourgeois acceptance (Kramnick 42). The historical process by which the author of the Reflections was enlisted to support the cause of the triumphant bourgeoisie became even more evident in the United States, where the bourgeoisie had established its rule untroubled by aristocratic opposition. Here Woodrow Wilson, the Princeton professor of jurisprudence and political economy and twenty-eighth president of the United States, praised Burke’s “mind [for] work[ing] upon concrete objects,” which he saw manifested in his disclaim for all “abstract reasoning [or] premises” (128) and “system[s]” (141), his preference for “[e]xpediency,” and his “practical and utilitarian” approach to the problems of society and everyday politics (158). Unlike the Victorian liberals who tended to overlook Burke’s tirades against the French revolutionaries, Wilson could also subscribe to Burke’s polemics against the bourgeoisie’s

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revolutionary philosophy and its struggle against the ancien régime, which to him seemed no less “radically evil and corrupting” than it had seemed to Burke in his days (155). Toward the end of the 1920s, however, when the “founder of Conservatism” seemed to be safely established both in Britain and in the United States by scholars like Arthur Baumann (Baumann 37ff.), Robert Murray (Murray 407f.), and Alfred Cobban (Cobban 12f.), his reputation suffered a series of attacks no less destructive than those that the radicals Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin had launched against the Reflections in the 1790s. The target of Sir Lewis Namier and his disciples, the great demythologizers of Burke in the twentieth century, was not, however, the author of the Reflections, but the younger author of the Observations on … the Present State of the Nation (1769) and the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), who had emerged as a leading propagator of party government and major critic of George III. The government of party Burke recommended as an efficient remedy against George III — whom he depicted as arrogating power to himself and trying to dominate both the executive and legislative power — was, to be sure, the government of a particular party, the “body of high-minded men” associated with Burke’s Whig-patron Wentworth, the second Marquess of Rockingham (Dreyer 31f.; Kramnick 112f.). Namier’s professed aim was to dethrone and demythologize Edmund Burke by unmasking his conception of late eighteenth-century history — with his portrait of the ambitious George III striving to corrupt parliament and subvert the Constitution — as a mere fiction (Namier, “George III” 17). His subtexts, however, are far more devastating: by suggesting that Burke was perfectly indifferent toward the sublime ideas and ideals he propagated in his pamphlets and speeches, that they were nothing but clever rationalizations for positions he thought expedient to hold, Namier not only ascribes to Burke a “fertile, disordered, and malignant imagination,” but also depicts him as a downright hypocrite whose lofty ideas are nothing but sanctimonious cloaks thrown over the interests of faction and connection (Namier, “George III” 140f.). While Burke was debunked by Namier’s school in Britain, his reputation was revived to unprecedented heights by America’s “Cold War Conservatives” in the 1950s and by the “New Conservatives” in the 1970s. For Russell Kirk, Lewis Bredvold, Peter Stanlis, or C. P. Ives, the spokesmen (Kramnick 45) of the former, Burke, whom they claimed to have saved Christian Europe from the terror of Jacobinism, became the congenial voice of warning needed during the Cold War to inspire the free world in its struggle against “the threat of world Communism” (Kirk 16ff., 209ff., Stanlis 248f.). And Allen Bloom, Irving Kristol, Jeffrey Hart, and Edward Banfield, the spokesmen of the latter, who indicted the universities of the late 1960s as hotbeds of naive “utopian illusions” (Kristol 144), of a “simplistic image of human nature,” and of a “revolutionary theory [of] freedom” (Hart 224), wove the arguments and keywords Burke employed in depicting the enemies of his consecrated state into their portraits of the young generation, which “has nothing left in God or man against which to measure itself” (Bloom 115ff.). And Edward Banfield, the most academic of the “New Conservatives,” sounds like Burke reincarnate whenever he turns on yesterday’s restless, mindless, and speculative tamperers: A political system is an accident. It is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstance. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident — the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society…. To meddle with the structure and operation of a

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Burke’s Conservatism and Its Echo in France In France, Pierre Gaetan Dupont’s translation of the Reflections appeared as early as 1790. But the book was rather poorly received even by the right (Godechot 64). Burke’s unreserved praise of the British constitution and his fierce criticism of the events in revolutionary France seem to have thwarted a wider appreciation of his doctrine (Zobel-Finger 86). Burke’s impact, however, is claimed to have been felt in the works of the two émigrés, Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, who, like Marx and Engels half a century later, are almost consistently named in one breath (Zobel-Finger 88). But since de Bonald shared the essential views of de Maistre (Godechot 96ff.) and only the de Maistre acknowledged his indebtedness to the author of the Reflections, the question of Burke’s influence in France can only be discussed here with reference to his writings alone. The Savoy-born Joseph de Maistre left his home country — then a French speaking province of Piedmont-Sardinia — after it was invaded by the revolutionary army in 1792. Having spent the first decade of his exile in Switzerland, he moved to the Russian court in St. Petersburg from 1803 to 1817 as the envoy of the king of Sardinia where his restorationist creed was strengthened by the example of the still functioning absolute monarchy. His major work, Considérations sur la France (Considerations Concerning France), first published in Lausanne in 1796 and in London in 1797 (de Maistre 27), is said to echo the whole spectrum of Burke’s Reflections (Artz 66). After reading it, de Maistre wrote to a friend in January 1791: “I cannot tell you how Burke has strengthened my anti-democratic and antiGallican views” (qtd. in Artz 66). Certainly, a first reading of de Maistre’s major work does suggest an affinity with the Reflections: in order to suggest the divine origin and the timeless validity of the hierarchically structured society of the ancien régime, de Maistre employs a variation of Burke’s version of the “chain of being” at the very beginning and, once again in the fifth chapter (31–57). In keeping with Burke’s encomium of the British constitution, he praises the “ancient French Constitution” (71) with the “grand prerogatives” (72) of the hereditary monarch, the “well-founded privileges” of the nobility, and the “rights and duties” of the lower orders (71ff.). Like Burke, he explains and defends the political and social inequalities with an eminently skeptical image of human nature (Weiss 48). He presents the “passions” as tending to “sully and pervert even the most simple creations” (57); he takes the cognitive and creative powers of men in general to be exceedingly limited (31) calling even the reason of the wisest but “a trembling light” (81).1 And regarding the reason and the self-control of the masses as virtually nonexistent (55, 63), he invokes the beneficial effect of prejudices in which he finds the “holiest laws” of religious and secular authorities quasi-internalized (Godechot 90). And recalling Burke’s polemics against the spiritual fathers and the ruthless disciples of enlightened thinking, de Maistre qualifies the philosophes as “a power essentially disorganizing” (57) and ascribes to the revolutionaries a downright “satanic character” (56).2

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At closer inspection, however, parallels between the Reflections and the Considérations indicate how similar language can be used to express widely differing political creeds. With his appeal to the “ancient French Constitution” (71ff.), which he claims does not “result from deliberation” or historical development (62) but is the product of divine influence (62) attributing “legislative power” (72) to the “most Christian king of France” (61)3 for all times, de Maistre propagates a theory of government fairly incompatible with Burke’s principles according to which legitimate authority lies within the strict bounds of constitutional accountability, i.e. within the perimeter laid down in the documents of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (Grab 20). Both writers, it is true, favor tradition against the innovations of 1789 based on “mere abstract reason,” but their traditions differ widely. Burke fights against the allegedly anarchic and terrifying consequences of the revolutionaries’ political and anthropological ignorance and inexperience for the sake of preserving the achievements guaranteed in the Bill of Rights of 1689. De Maistre fights for the sake of reestablishing the absolute monarchy, which Burke criticized as one type of those “simple governments [that] are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them” (qtd. in Preece 257). Burke develops his own intriguing double strategy when he weaves into his pragmatic defense of the political status quo grandiloquent mystifications that endow it with an aura of sacrosanctity. De Maistre elaborates Burke’s persuasive employment of images of divine order into a providentialist theory of history based on the theology of the Old Testament according to which God’s covenant can either be accepted together with a lasting relationship with Him or be rejected thus incurring his hatred and punishment (Clerval 86ff.). Consequently, de Maistre reads political constellations and struggles as acts of a theological or cosmic drama in which order and chaos become visible as emanations of angelic and diabolic powers, while revolutions and restorations are understood as re-enactments of original sin and redemption. Attributing a providential cause to the events in France, he explains the outbreak of the revolution and its expansion across the Continent as the result of the moral and religious decadence of the French and other peoples of Europe. Attracted by the glittering prospects of satanic seducers and lusting after the forbidden fruit of unqualified liberty and independence, the French were drawn into “a fight to death between Christianity and philosophy” (59) because some time, de Maistre prophecies, this struggle will yield a new satanic religion. Before long, however, Christianity will again triumph and restore a renovated and regenerated form of monarchy with a strengthened “theocratic element” (71). Convinced that France was being punished for having suffered the boat of order to be overcharged with the cargo of the Antichrist, de Maistre is not content with the restoration of the ancien régime. He wants to see a new regime set up based essentially on religion, a regime that will owe its unprecedented stability to “a greater number of high dignitaries of the Church in the civil government” (71f.).4 Supported by this “theocratic element,” the restored monarch is to annul the restraints that the regent, Phillip II, and Louis XVI had allowed to be imposed on their prerogative by the parlements, which had increasingly managed to undermine “the unity of power” attributed to the king of the nation in the “divinely inspired … ancient constitution of France” (72) and personified in the late “superb monarch Louis XIV” (73). When de Maistre paid a visit to France and to Louis XVIII, who had been a professed admirer of his Considérations, the restored monarchy turned out to be a great disappointment to him.

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Instead of establishing an absolute monarchy with a strengthened theocratic element, Louis XVIII had instituted a form of government which in de Maistre’s eyes consolidated many of the most lamentable achievements of the Revolution (Weiss 50f.). In his later writings, de Maistre drew the logical conclusions from his contempt for the sort of constitutional state Burke had propagated in his Reflections and Louis XVIII had come near to establishing by failing to scrap the Charter of 1814, which limited his prerogative, by choosing moderate royalists as his ministers, and by dissolving the ultra-dominated chamber to pave the way for the moderate royalists who emerged with a comfortable majority after the elections of 1816. In Du Pape (Concerning the Pope; 1819), written when he was back in Turin, where the restored rulers of Savoy had appointed him head of the judiciary and minister of state, de Maistre characterizes the types of “order” reestablished after the Congress of Vienna as fundamentally defective throughout Europe, renounces his former ideal of absolute monarchy as advocated in the Considérations, and requires the recognition of the Pope as Europe’s lawgiver and final authority. Only the union of earthly and spiritual power in the papacy, de Maistre argued, could end the perilous instability caused by rulers who, instead of ruthlessly outmanoeuvring the “rebellious and insolent fomenters of disorder,” enter with them into the most outrageous forms of compromise. In terms of practical politics, de Maistre proclaims in his last unfinished work, Les Soirées de Saint-Petersburg (The Evenings of St. Petersburg; 1821), the remedy is “more faith and more police,” which combination he summed up in his own frank formula: “the Pope and the executioners,” the former meant to give faith, the latter meant to eradicate the fomenters of disorder (Hackenbroch 124). In the final analysis, de Maistre translated Burke’s mainly pragmatic defense of “an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy” (Burke, Reflections 188) into an — allegedly Christian — reactionary authoritarianism bordering on totalitarianism, which after de Maistre presents itself in a diversified range of appropriations. In the later nineteenth century, it was adapted to industrial France by the clerical restorationist and editor of the influential newspaper L’Univers religieux (The Religious Universe; 1843 ff.), Louis-François Veuillot. And in the twentieth century, it augmented the ideology of Charles Maurras, the far-right founder of L’Action française (French Action), who ably integrated de Maistre’s idea of uniting the European powers under one supreme authority into his philosophy of collaborating with Nazi Germany. Burke’s Conservatism and Its Echo in Germany and Austria In his chapter on the development of conservative thought, Karl Mannheim states: “Germany achieved for the ideology of conservatism what France did for the Enlightenment — she exploited it to the fullest extent of its logical conclusions” and that the main stimulus came from Burke. “Counter-revolutionary criticism … achieved its most consistent exposition on German soil…. Prussia and Austria were the main citadels of conservatism” (Mannheim 82–83). Of the German writers who acknowledged their indebtedness to Burke, Adam Müller paid the most encomiastic homage to the Englishman:

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I say it with pride, he belongs more to us than to the British. I glory in the fact that my own ideas of the State … are hopeful children of his mind. He is recognized in Germany as the most influential and happiest mediator, between separation and unity of powers and of labor, between the principles of nobility and that of the bourgeoisie, and thus, no matter how influential his deeds may have been for Great Britain, his glory belongs to the German sphere. (qtd. in Preece 261)

But Müller not only made himself into a disciple of Burke, he also succeeded in convincing the majority of intellectual historians of the Burkean nature of his thought (Preece 255, 261). Even a brief investigation of Müller’s Elemente der Staatskunst (Elements of Statecraft; 1809), however, will show that he translated Burke’s conservatism into a nostalgic defense of feudalism. In his Elemente Müller presents the contemporary Continental societies as decaying and disintegrating (Müller 72ff.). As the underlying reasons for that progressive decline, the beginning of which he dates back to the 1780s (76), Müller points out an “unreserved idolization of absolute and exclusive private property” (76), a “reckless pursuit for ever more profit and produit net” (76) and a professed “detestation of all forms of moral conduct” in private and social life which had been shaped by Christian instruction and by the “institutions, traditions, customs, and laws of the state” since the Middle Ages (75f.). Great Britain, on the other hand, Müller portrays as the “happy island” (87) that prospered into the “first and foremost of all Christian states” (87) during this period of severe crises in Europe despite the fact that her economy was liberalized to a greater extent than in any other country and that her “international trade, her commerce and her industry were immensely extended and enlarged” (89). The explanation for Britain’s stability and growth is found in the “balanced constitution” of her “organic state” (90), in the equilibrium between “the spirit of feudal law” (89) represented in the House of Lords (91) and “supported by agriculture, real estate, and war” (90) and “the spirit of the right of property” (89), represented in the House of Commons (92) and “supported by industry, trade, commerce, and peace” (90). Since this “balanced constitution,” Müller argues, has kept alive both the “spirit of feudalistic obedience” (92) and the “spirit of feudalistic liberty” (92), Britain allowed the formation of a third estate, which flourishes because it enjoys no more than “limited rights” (99) and which is prepared to “sacrifice its own interests for those of the Commonwealth” because it has always preserved its devotion for “Christian ideas” (99) and regarded the state as consecrated by its religious establishment (96, 99). The logical conclusion of Müller’s comparison between the recent developments on the continent and in Britain is his plea for the restoration of feudalism in the European countries. With its vassals freely accepting personal links and loyally fulfilling civil or military duties and its lords accepting responsibilities for the former and remunerating them in the form of fiefs, feudalism is claimed to be no less than a social embodiment of “the Christian idea of the unconditional reciprocity of human relations to be confirmed, if required, by unreserved selfsacrifice, the most beautiful death” (94). There are aspects of Müller’s Elemente der Staatskunst that may suggest a somewhat closer affinity with features of Burke’s Reflections (Preece 261). Müller’s central message, however, his plea for the restoration of feudalism, is not indebted to Burke, whose defense of the aristocracy is remarkably marginal and has, as Mannheim noted, “too much of a rhetorical flavour” (Mannheim 138) in the Reflections. Even in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), where he presented “the aristocratic principle” as “safeguard

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in a well-balanced system of government against both popular and monarchical despotism” (Burke, Works 3: 86f.), Burke is far from idealizing the nobility or emphasizing the feudal structure of English society. Müller’s idolization of feudalism is homemade German romanticism. It is adumbrated in the Patriotische Phantasien (Patriotic Phantasies; 1778) of Justus Möser, who believed the stability of a state to reside in the power of the institutions that regulate landed property and reduce the influence of economic liberalism and capitalist bureaucracy (Godechot 107), and it is prefigured in Novalis’s Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe; 1799), that most exuberant praise of the harmony of medieval society in which each class had contentedly performed its duties and enjoyed its rights, secure in the knowledge that its social functions were divinely sanctioned and would be divinely rewarded (Weiss 41). What Adam Müller espoused in his Elemente is not Burke, but the romantic dream of a renewed medieval spirituality and a vision of Europe united in one vast political and moral empire under the holy leadership of the Pope, a vision with which not only Novalis but also the major antirevolutionary German romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel, Joseph von Görres, Friedrich von Schelling, and the Bavarian theocrat Franz von Baader were intoxicated (Zobel-Finger 96), long before Joseph de Maistre in his Du Pape translated it into a nightmarish policy of repression. If Karl Mannheim’s dictum, “Burke was anything but what … Gentz and his friend [Adam] Müller believed him to be” (Mannheim 82), is accurate as far as the latter is concerned, it does not do full justice to the achievement of the first German translator of the Reflections. In his later years, Gentz may be said to have “wavered [between] the conservative theory … of Edmund Burke, and that of Joseph de Maistre … realiz[ing] the inadequacy of both, [seeking] for a third, and [finding] rest nowhere” (Mann 279f.). In the 1790s, however, the later confidential adviser to the all-powerful Metternich came closer to a balanced understanding and appropriation of Burke’s conservatism than any of his other German, if not European, disciples. When Gentz translated the Reflections in 1793, he had lost his initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution and had overcome the prejudice he had fostered against “the principles and conclusions” of Burke’s book when he first read it in April 1791 (Träger 861).5 But this does not mean, as R. J. Sweet has argued, that he translated the book above all “because it was a magnificently eloquent tirade against the course of events in France” (Sweet 21). In his introduction to his translation of the Reflections, to be sure, Gentz points out a number of problematic features of the book: he makes no secret of his reservations about Burke’s “elevated stance,” his “unconnected, arbitrary, and frequently irregular sequence of ideas,” and his manner of formulating his opinions “with the voice of thunder,” which may, he owns, “preclude an unbiased reading of the work” (Burke, Betrachtungen xxvff.). That none of these features could preclude a conscientious reading and an unbiased judgment of the book on his own part is documented by his excellent translation, his extensive explanatory and critical annotations, and the five political treatises that Gentz added to the Reflections (Burke, Betrachtungen 122ff.). Here he presented Burke as a defender of the Bill of Rights of 1689, distinguished his stance from those of the propagators of divine right, the apologists of absolutism, and the nostalgic encomiasts of the medieval paradise lost. And Burke’s constitutionalism is shown to be based not so much on the respect for its feudal heritage, but rather on the Whig conceptions of liberty and equilibrium, which allowed the formation “not of an excellence in simplicity, but of one far superior, an excellence in composition,” a balance between contending powers, institutions,

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principles, classes, and individuals on the British isles (Burke, Betrachtungen 202ff.). In later years, Gentz adopted Burke’s conception of liberty in a series of articles, published in English as The French and American Revolutions Compared (1800), in which he interpreted the American Revolution as a defense of ancient liberties and charters against British usurpation and the French Revolution as an unhistorical, speculative, and ideology-laden undertaking (Gentz 1). Gentz applied Burke’s fundamental notion of “balance of power” in his Essay on the Financial Policy and National Wealth of Great Britain (1801), which aroused the admiration of British economists and politicians when translated into English (Godechot 117). For Gentz, the practical politician, Burke’s principle of equilibrium remained the great guiding idea even after Napoleon’s overthrow. He, who had so long and emphatically called the European monarchs to arms against Bonaparte, wished to maintain the defeated empereur on his throne fearing that his fall would result in a new outbreak of Jacobinism in France and in the ascendancy of Russia among world powers. Gentz’s German translation and appropriation of the Reflections, we may conclude, imparted the essentials of Burke’s conservative creed in more authentic terms than any other work of his professed devotees. In the German-speaking countries, however, with their lack of a tradition of freedom and constitutional development, the romantic appropriation of Burke’s conservatism prevailed, which threw overboard his liberal constitutionalism and, overemphasizing his consecration of the organic and hierarchical society, made the nation and its established or reestablished rulers the objects of awe and emotional veneration. Doing so, the romantic “disciples” of Burke supplied the doctrine required to buttress the continuing autocracy of the traditional elites both before and after the defeat of Napoleon. The theories of Burke spread widely both directly as well as indirectly though often in severely distorted fashion. However, one cannot deny their influence at different points along the ideological spectrum from the extreme right through genuine conservatism to middle-of-the-road liberalism.

Notes 1. “Les passions humaines ont beau souiller, dénaturer même les créations primitives”; “cette lumière tremblottante” (de Maistre 57, 81). 2. “une puissance essentiellement désorganisatrice”; “un caractère satanique” (de Maistre 57, 56). 3. “Aucune constitution ne résulte d’une délibération”; “au Roi très-Chrétien” (de Maistre 72, 61). 4. “c’est le combat à outrance du christianisme et du philosophisme”; “élément théocratique”; “un plus grand nombre de pontifes dans le gouvernement civil” (de Maistre 59, 71). 5. “Prinzipien und Sclußfolgerungen” (Träger 861).

References Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley. Artz, Frederick B. 1974. Reaction and Revolution: 1814–1832. New York: Harper. Banfield, Edward. 1964. “In Defense of the American Party System.” Political Parties U. S. A. Ed. Robert Goldwin. Chicago: Rand McNally. 21–39.

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Baumann, Arthur. 1929. Burke: The Founder of Conservatism. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Baumer, Franklin. 1977. Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600–1950. New York: Macmillan. Bloom, Allen. 1969. “The Democratization of the University.” How Democratic is America? Ed. Robert Goldwin. Chicago: Rand McNally. 109–36. Burke, Edmund. 1793. Betrachtungen über die französische Revolution nach dem Englischen, neu bearbeitet mit einer Einleitung, Anmerkungen, politischen Abhandlungen und einem kritischen Verzeichnis der in England über diese Revolution erschienenen Schriften von Friedrich Gentz. Trans. Friedrich von Gentz. Berlin: Friedrich Vieweg dem Älteren. ———. 1866. The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. 6 vols. London: Bell and Daldy. ———. 1969. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Butler, Marilyn. 1984. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Clerval, A. 1983. “Lire Joseph de Maistre.” La Nouvelle revue française. 369: 86–90. Cobban, Alfred. 1929. Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the 18th century. New York: Macmillan. Demandt, Alexander. 1978. Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken. München: Beck. Dishman, Robert B. 1971. Burke and Paine on Revolution and the Rights of Man. New York: Scribner. Dreyer, Frederick A. 1979. Burke’s Politics: A Study in Whig Orthodoxy. Waterloo, On.: Wilfred Laurier UP. Fennessy, R. R. 1963. Burke, Paine and the Rights of Man: A Difference in Political Opinion. The Hague: Nijhoff. Gassenmeier, Michael. 1987. “Wordsworth’s own Account of the French Revolution.” Beyond the Suburbs of the Mind: Exploring English Romanticism. Eds. Michael Gassenmaier and Norbert Platz. Studien zur englischen Romantik 2. Essen: Blaue Eule. 2: 116–36. ———. 1989. Londondichtung als Politik. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1992. “The Taming of Liberty: Visions and Revisions of the French Revolution in Coleridge’s Early Poetry.” Romantic Continuities. Eds. Günther Blaicher and Michale Gassenmaier. Studien zur englischen Romantik 4. Essen: Blaue Eule. 51–64. ———. 1994. “Gottfried August Bürgers Aufsatz ‘Die Republik England.’ “Gottfried August Bürger (1747–1794). Eds. Wolfgang Beutin and Thomas Bütow. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. ———. 1997. “Poetic Technique and Politics in Wordsworth’s Prelude.” Expedition nach der Wahrheit. Eds. Stefan Horlacher and Marion Islinger. Heidelberg: Winter. Gentz, Friedrich von. 1800. The French and American Revolutions Compared. Trans. John Quincy Adams. Presently available under the title Three Revolutions. 1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood P. Godechot, Jacques. 1971. The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789–1804. New York: Fertig. Grab, Walter. 1984. “Politische Ideale und Illusionen konservativer und linksliberaler Denker im Revolutionszeitalter.” Ein Volk muß seine Freiheit selbst erobern. Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg. 15–32. Hackenbroch, M. 1964. Zeitliche Herrschaft der göttlichen Vorsehung: Gesellschaft und Recht bei Joseph de Maistre. Bonn: Bouvier. Hart, Jeffrey. 1967. “Burke and Radical Freedom.” Review of Politics 29.2: 221–38. Hearnshaw, F. J. C. 1931. The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Revolutionary Era. London: Harrap. Hibbert, C. 1958. King Mob: The Story of Lord John Gordon and the Riots of 1780. London: Longmans Green. Kirk, Russell. 1967. Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House. Kramnick, Isaak. 1977. The Rage of Edmund Burke: A Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative. New York: Basic Books. Kristol, Irving. 1972. On the Democratic Idea in America. New York: Harper & Row. Love, Walter. 1965/66. “Meaning in the History of Conflicting Interpretations of Burke.” Burke Newsletter. 7:526–38. Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1942. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Maistre, Joseph de. 1980. Considerations sur la France. Ed. Jean Tulard. Paris: Garnier. Mann, Golo. 1946. Secretary of Europe: The Life of Friedrich Gentz, Enemy of Napoleon. New Haven: Yale UP. Mannheim, Karl. 1953. Conservative Thought. Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology. London: Routledge & K. Paul.



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Meinecke, Friedrich. 1963. Werke. Vol. 1. Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte. Ed. Walter Hofer. 3rd ed. München: Oldenburg. Meller, Horst. 1982. “Die frühe romantische Dichtung in England.” Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Klaus von See. Vol. 15. Europäische Romantik II. Ed. Klaus Heitmann. Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion. 189–214. Morley, John. 1907. Burke. London: Macmillan. Müller, Adam. 1809. Die Elemente der Staatskunst: Öffentliche Vorlesungen im Winter 1808 auf 1809, zu Dresden, gehalten. Berlin: Sander. Murray, Robert. 1931. Edmund Burke: A Biography. London: Oxford UP. Namier, Sir Lewis Bernstein. 1929. The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III. London: Macmillan. ———. 1930. England in the Age of the American Revolution. London: Macmillan. ———. 1958. “The Character of Burke.” The Spectator 19 December. ———. 1962. “King George III: A Study of Personality.” Crossroads of Power. New York: Macmillan. Paine, Thomas. 1894–96. The Writings. Ed. M. D. Conway. 4 vols. New York: Putnam. Pope, Alexander. 1963. The Poems: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations. Ed. John Butt. New Haven: Yale UP. Preece, Rod. 1980. “Edmund Burke and his European Reception.” The Eighteenth Century 21.3: 255–73. Price, Richard. 1789. Discourse on the Love of our Country. Oxford: Woodstock Books. Stanlis, Peter J. 1958. Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P. Sweet, R. J. 1970. Friedrich von Gentz. Westport, CT: Greenwood P. Träger, Klaus, ed. 1979. Die Französische Revolution im Spiegel der Deutschen Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Roderberg. Tuveson, Ernest. 1948. “The Origins of Moral Sense.” Huntington Library Quarterly 11: 241–59. Viereck, Peter Robert Edwin. 1965. Conservatism Revisited. New York: Free Press. Weiss, John. 1977. Conservatism in Europe 1770–1945. London: Thames and Hudson. Wilkins, B. T. 1967. The Problems of Burke’s Political Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon. Wilson, Woodrow. 1896. Mere Literature and Other Essays. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Zobel-Finger, Margrit. 1982. “Konterrevolutionäre Literatur in Europa.” Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Klaus von See. Vol. 15. Europäische Romantik II. Ed. Klaus Heitmann. Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft. 83–102.



Distorted Echoes The Mythologies of Nordic Nationalism STEVEN P. SONDRUP Brigham Young University

By means of language a nation is reared and educated, by means of language it becomes orderly and honorable, obedient, civilized, sociable, diligent, and powerful.1 J. G. Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, “Brief 57”

The centrality of national identity in romantic thought has long been obvious. It, however, is a complex issue involving a wide range of factors that manifest themselves in extremely varied ways throughout Europe as well as North and South America. To be sure, much of the romantic impetus to address national concerns can be traced to Herder — specifically to Von deutscher Art und Kunst, Von Ähnlichkeit der mittlern englischen und deutschen Dichtkunst, and Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität — and more generally to Hamann, whom Herder both critiqued but also promoted as well as to Montesquieu, whom he frequently cites. For the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Herder’s most important contribution was the recognition that the essence of a community was not to be sought in its political institutions or its high culture that were often contaminated by foreign influences of various sorts, but in the literary art of the simple and often remote populations that had maintained contact with their cultural and ethnic roots in ways precluded by the homogenizing international culture of urban centers. The influence of the young Herder on the even younger Goethe during their days in Straßburg is legendary, and the literary fruits of his awakening Goethe’s interest in Shakespeare, the Gothic, and folk literature are enthusiastically celebrated. In many respects, German romanticism is a manifestation of and reaction to the emerging acceptance of the non-classical past as a source of literary inspiration as well as a rallying point for the heightening of national consciousness in both an aesthetic as well as a political sense. The varied responses were, to be sure, complex ranging from enthusiastic endorsement of the uniquely Germanic past in the pioneering philological work of the Grimms or the music dramas of Wagner to the more nuanced and complex thought of Hölderlin and the late Goethe, for example. Although Herder’s influence at home was substantial, his impact outside Germany was also pervasive where it may well have had even greater long term results as a catalyst in the development of new centers of national communalism. The historical and sociological importance of nationalism as well as its conceptual complexity have become even more apparent in the declining years of the twentieth century than they were during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Although Marx predicted movement toward internationalism, the cohesive

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force of nationalism and the idea of nationhood have manifested their thoroughgoing potency vis-à-vis ideologies and political pragmatism even while nations are moving toward various overarching forms of political and economic integration. It is surely to belabor the obvious to point out that both Britain and France, though already politically integrated modern nation-states to which Herder himself even turned with an admiring glance, developed amplified senses of national identity in the revivification of their respective historical uniqueness during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the case of Britain, Percy (Reliquies), Wharton, and MacPherson come immediately to mind; with regard to France, the somewhat later rediscovery of its own richly varied medieval heritage looms large. Smaller ethnic and national communities all across Europe — in both eastern Europe as well as western, in the north as well as the south — also began seeking ways to legitimize claims for independent national political recognition in the distinctive aesthetic glories — literary, architectural, musical, or folkloric — of their past. On the peripheries, these rousings of nationalist sentiments were even more vigorous and variegated than in the well-established cultural centers. Since many nations not situated in the European heartland were struggling to establish not only an identity but also a presence in the growing community of modern nation-states, the stakes were higher. To the east Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Serbian, Bulgarian, Russian, and Romanian cultural as well as political nationalists were energetically promoting the viability of their respective traditions; in the south of Europe, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese partisans were in various ways celebrating and promoting extremely divergent aspects of local culture. In the north, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Faeroese, and Icelandic writers were examining their collective as well as distinctly individual pasts in order to rediscover historical justifications for political and social aspirations. The ends to which they went and the results they achieved must be counted as among the most notable achievements of romantic nationalism and invite particular attention. With regard to the vigorous and consequential implementation of Herder’s social-cultural agenda, northern Europe offers some particularly arresting examples that are in part a result of political and cultural developments that provided an especially hospitable environment for his thought. When the Kalmar Union completely collapsed in 1520, the political unity that had to varying degrees consolidated all of the Nordic area from Finland in the east to Iceland in the west as well as various outpost along the Baltic came to an end. Denmark and Sweden each plotted an individual and self-sufficient course under the direction of relatively strong and independent monarchies. The Danish realm included all of what is today Denmark as well as parts of Germany and Sweden and all of Norway and Iceland along with Greenland and the Faeroe Islands and would eventually also embrace the Danish West Indies, fortifications in Ghana, and a small claim at Trankebar in India; the Swedish sphere of influence extended through most of what is now Sweden and Finland — which in 1155 had officially been made a province of Sweden by King Erik acting in concert with Henry, Bishop of Uppsala — and at various times also encompassed parts of Poland (and between 1784 and 1878 the Caribbean island of Saint Bartholemew). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, each began to formulate narratives chronicling its own historical development often in fanciful and highly imaginative ways. In Denmark the fashioning of a national history is inextricably associated with Iceland. Among the most important early developments in the forging of a proud national past was the 1636

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publication in Amsterdam of Runir seu Danica litertura antiqvissima, vulgo Gothica dicta (Runes or the Oldest Danish Literature Popularly Called Gothic) by Ole Worm and the Icelandic scholar, poet, and priest, Magnús Ólafsson (1573–1636). The title itself reveals the conflation of various concepts that later were more carefully discriminated: the term runes did not designate just inscriptions using letters of the futhark, but ancient Nordic literature generally, and Gothic referred to what in modern parlance would be called Norse. Later in the century, Arni Magnússon, perhaps the greatest collector of medieval Icelandic manuscripts, arrived in Copenhagen where he worked with Thomas Bartholin (1659–90), the son of the well known scientist and publisher, on the anthology of Old Norse texts entitled, Antiquitatum danicorum de causis contemptae a danis adhuc gentilibus mortis, libri tres: ex vetustis codicibus & monumentis hactenus ineditis congesti (Why the Danes Did Not Fear Death during the Pagan Period). In noteworthy contrast to Denmark’s early and thoroughgoing orientation toward the heroic traditions preserved in Iceland, Sweden pursued a rather different course. Like their contemporaries in Denmark, Swedish scholars investigated and published editions of Icelandic texts, but Sweden also fancifully linked its claim to political legitimacy to being the original homeland of the Goths whose conquest of the Roman Empire was indicative of military prowess and valor. The first documented account of an official claim to prominence based on Sweden’s Gothic heritage is a report of an address in 1434 at the Council of Basel by bishop Nils Ragvaldsson in which he claimed priority in seating over the Spanish representative because the Goths, whose presence in Spain had been used to buttress the Spanish prelate’s claim, had migrated there from Sweden. Although doubt had already arisen concerning the historical plausibility of the claim, Johannes Magnus took it up in his Gothorum Sveonumque historia (History of the Goths and the Swedes) published in Rome in 1554. During the period of Sweden’s political and military supremacy in the seventeenth century, assertions of preeminence grounded in a culturally superior Gothic past became even more extravagant, and Sweden’s acquisition in 1648 of the Gothic Bible — the Codex Argenteus, a fourth-century manuscript containing 187 leaves of Bishop Wulfila’s translation of the Bible into Gothic, now in the Uppsala University Library — as a result of military victory near Prague during the Thirty Years War tended to validate that line of thinking. The zenith of the Swedish Gothic fantasy came in the 1679 publication of Olaus Rudbeck’s (1630–1702) Atland eller Manheim (Atlantica or Sweden) to which two further volumes were added while a fourth and final volume remained unfinished at Rudbeck’s death. Rudbeck postulated that Sweden was the world’s most ancient and venerable kingdom from whose Gothic sources all culture and learning flowed to the rest of the world. This unlikely conclusion derives from the speculation that Plato’s Atlantis was actually Sweden. Indeed all ideal communities described in classical literature and especially the Hyperborean Isles were taken as longing portrayals of ancient Sweden. Though the implausibility of Rudbeck’s thesis is obvious to modern readers, his imaginative speculations and linguistic deductions were widely entertained with an almost religious fervor and garnered official state support. With the advent of the Enlightenment, however, more critical historical methods largely discredited such capricious approaches, and Swedish Gothicism migrated from the historical to the socio-literary sphere. The geo-political situation in Scandinavia had remained relatively stable for the nearly three hundred years after the collapse of the Kalmar Union during which these particular facets of an

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orientation toward the past emerged. The situation, however, changed dramatically during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In consequence of an ill-conceived and poorly fought war with Russia during which Sweden sought to maintain its allegiance to Britain and opposition to Napoleon’s Continental System, Sweden lost its sovereignty over the Åland Islands and far more significantly over Finland, which became a relatively independent grand duchy within the Russian empire (Treaty of Fredrikshamn/Hamina, 1809). As a result of Denmark’s failure to support the continental blockade against Napoleon, moreover, the Treaty of Kiel awarded Norway to the Swedish monarch as a partial compensation for the loss of Finland. This course of events left everyone directly involved disspirited, unhappy, and deeply frustrated with regard to a sense of national identity and dignity. The Danes were embarrassed by the loss of Norway; the Swedes were humiliated by the loss of Finland for which the union with Norway did not compensate; the Norwegians and the Finns were disgusted by being used as pawns in the greater European game of power politics that took only scant account of their own nationalistic aspirations; and the Icelanders felt — understandably — marginalized and neglected after suffering enormous deprivations as a result of the interruption of trade during the Napoleonic Wars. Against this background, each of them renewed efforts — whose origins date back centuries — and formulated strategies to ground a new sense of national identity and political resolve in the cultural achievements of the past. Their zeal to achieve the sense of national well being that Herder promised derived from the cultivation of the unique aspects of the indigenous national heritage was often far greater than their historical understanding, and the creativity of their appropriation of history remains far more revealing than the question of the acuity of their vision of their collective past. The past they wanted and imaginatively constructed for themselves, thus, discloses more in this context than the past they actually had. Sweden’s cultural response to the humiliating defeat manifest itself most strikingly among an energetic group of young students in Uppsala who founded the Gothic Society in order to promote the cultivation of the ancient national virtues of courage, valor, and honor, which Herder’s thinking that had made its way to this university city seemed to promise would lead to national renewal. The two most important members of the society were E. G. Geijer and A. A. Afzelius, and the society’s most notable project was the publication of the short-lived journal Iduna, named for the goddess of youth and wife of Bragi, the god of poetry, in Norse mythology. Geijer published a number of poems extolling Norse virtues and became a prominent figure in Swedish cultural politics; Afzelius achieved prominence as a collector of folk tales. Gothicism remained an important tradition at Uppsala, which became Sweden’s most significant center of romantic culture, and from there continued to influence Swedish writers throughout much of the nineteenth century. From the point of view of literary merit as well as enduring importance, the most important advocate of Swedish romantic Gothicism is Esaias Tegnér. His poem “Svea” (1811) so vigorously advocated a military campaign to reclaim Finland — “och inom Sveriges gräns erövra Finland åter” [1:371] (and conquering again bring Finland within Sweden’s borders) — that the venerable Swedish Academy invited him to moderate its inflammatory rhetoric in order to receive a proposed prize lest the government be embarrassed by its strident tone (1812). His masterpiece, however, is certainly the long poem Frithiofs saga, (1825), which Longfellow translated into English in which he endeavors, among many other things, to provide an edifying view of Norse heroism suitable for modern Christian Sweden.

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Denmark, though, is typically mentioned as the country that first responded to romantic influence from abroad and nurtured distinctly romantic native-grown sentiment. With interest in the Nordic past having been sustained by the publication of The Prose Edda (1660), Heimskringla (1633), and Íslendingabók (1733 in Latin; 1738 in Danish) by the indefatigable Peter Frederik Suhm and by the appearance of Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc, ou l’on traite de la religion dex loix, des mœurs et des usages des anciens Danois (Introduction to the History of Denmark in which the Religion, Laws, Customs, and Practices of the Ancient Danes Are Considered; 1755; famously published in 1770 in an English translation by Bishop Percy under the title Northern Antiquities) and the enormously popular Monumens de la mythologies et de la poesie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves (Monuments of the Mythology and Poetry of the Celts and particularly of the Ancient Scandinavians; 1756) by the courtappointed Swiss historian, Paul Henri Mallet, Denmark was prepared to embrace and adapt many of the attitudes and practices central to Herder’s early romantic thinking. This attempt to plumb the depths of the Old Norse literary tradition that was just emerging was characterized by a mixture of philological sophistication that was growing rapidly in its acuity and accuracy of historical vision and a lingering tendency to leap to unwarranted and sometimes amusingly fanciful conclusion. One particularly revealing example can be observed in the Danish appropriation of Beowulf. Responding to this newly emerging need to collect literary monuments that documented the national past, Grímur Thorkelin obtained a travel grant from King Christian and in 1785 went to Great Britain and Ireland, where he remained until 1791 when he was named the Keeper of the National Archives in Copenhagen. Returning to Denmark, he had with him two copies of the composite, eleventh century codex of Beowulf, (CottonVitellius A. xv), one that he had commissioned to be made by a member of the British Museum staff, perhaps James Matthews, known as Thorkelin A (Ny Kgl. Saml. 513) and one he made himself, Thorkelin B (Ny Kgl. Saml. 512). On the basis of his transcription, he prepared the first published edition of Beowulf, De Danorum rebus gestis seculi iii & iv: Poëma Danicum dialecto Anglo-Saxonica published in Copenhagen in 1815. The edition consisted of a printed version of his transcription accompanied by a facing-page Latin translation. From the beginning, the edition has not fared well: critics at home and abroad have noted hundreds of errors and a generally sloppy and slovenly approach to the editing of the text. From a philological point view, perhaps the most important contribution of the edition is that it preserves part of the original manuscript that was subsequently damaged in a fire. The edges of many pages of the original codex were singed in

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1731 and have since fallen off but fortunately not before Thorkelin’s transcriptions were made. Beyond helping to restore what was in the original manuscript, the edition itself is highly problematic, yet its Latin preface reveals an arresting array of assumptions, conclusions, and conjectures that offers considerable insight into the cultural hopes and aspirations of the early years of the nineteenth century. The title Thorkelin gave the volume is also highly suggestive: De Danorum rebus gestis seculi iii & iv — Concerning the Things Done by the Danes during the Third and Fourth Centuries — stresses Thorkelin’s belief that what is now known as Beowulf is best understood as an account of ancient collective Danish heroism rather than an account of the acts of an individual hero. The subtitle, Poëma Danicum dialecto Anglo-Saxonica — A Danish Poem in the Anglo-Saxon Dialect — claims the epic narrative as part of the distinctly Danish cultural heritage even more clearly and explicitly and construes Old English as a dialect of Old Danish or probably more aptly what is typically called Old Norse. Although the events the poem narrates are clearly set in the ancient Danish realm of political and cultural influence, the artistic crafting of the poem is just as clearly the work of an Old English poet — regardless of whether one accepts North Umbria during the vigorous and sophisticated age of Bede, Mercia during the reign of the great King Offa, seventh-century East Anglia, or some other locale as the origin — and it speaks to the poetic sophistication and literary taste of Anglo-Saxon culture. The introduction to the edition, though, is even more specific and wide ranging than the title in laying claim to the poem. Among all the monuments of the ancient Danish world which devouring time has left us, the epic of the Scyldings, now published, stands out as an astonishing achievement. For here we have an overflowing fountain from which can be drawn knowledge about the religion, poetry, and deeds of our people in the third and fourth centuries. (Bjork 298)4

That Beowulf should be regarded as a notable monument of ancient Danish customs and mores is not surprising or problematic. Thorkelin, though, not only views it as a source of knowledge about the national past but also see it indirectly as a national rallying point and source of national pride and confidence. After describing how he was able to gain access to the manuscript version of the poem, he explicitly aligns the poem with the Danish cultural tradition and castigates those who would argue otherwise. That our poem of the Scylding is indeed Danish will be clear to anyone who sees that the author was an eyewitness to the exploits of kings Hroðgar, Beowulf, and Hygelac, and was the eulogizer at the funeral of Beowulf, who died in Jutland in the year of our Lord 340. By Hercules! I am astounded that Hickes attributed to the Anglo-Saxons a song that poured forth from the Danish bard, fired by the flame of hyperborean Apollo. (Bjork 302)5

Thorkelin’s avowal of the poem’s Danish provenance is based on scarcely anything more than bravura and enthusiasm, certainly nothing even remotely resembling careful philological analysis. The assertion though buys into the popular tradition that Beowulf was Oðin’s son, Boe, who according to Suhm had died in 340. His summary dismissal of the respected scholar George Hickes’s attribution of Beowulf to Anglo-Saxon sources is more troublesome. The first recorded reference to Beowulf is in Humphery Waley’s Antiquæ literaturæ septentrionalis liber alter,

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which is the second volume of Hickes’s Linguarum veterum septentrionalium Thesaurus. Thorkelin’s rebuke of Hickes is a result of his uncritical zeal and naive acceptance of a widely circulated notion that all of the major ancient languages of northern Europe could be explained in terms of Danish. Obviously he [Hickes] does not remember that the language spoken by the English before William I had been common to three peoples of the north — all called by one name “Danes” — who spoke slightly different dialects of the same tongue. This fact is as clear as the light of day, even if no other authority could be found for it. For our epic plainly teaches that the Anglo-Saxon idiom is actually Danish, a language cultivated and kept pure even to this day by the inhabitants of Iceland, who dwell almost beyond the path of the sun. (Bjork 302)6

With greater historical distance and more sophisticated philological understanding, it is easy to be amused by Thorkelin’s exaggerations and unwarranted conclusions. Even though in many cases he is simply repeating and in some cases amplifying questionable deductions of contemporaries, he probably could and should have known better. Yet these highly problematic determinations illustrate a desire to requisition the glory of a bygone civilization for contemporary use in establishing a sense of national identity. This uncritical eagerness to lay claim to important cultural monuments of antiquity should not, however, obfuscate a modern effort to understand the eighteenth-century desire to validate a national present on the basis of accomplishments of the past. It not only sought an authentic and unadulterated source of national identity as an indication of cultural well-being as Herder had argued, but also appropriated the accomplishments in order to confirm and justify contemporary claims for attention. Implicit in the claim that Beowulf should be recognized as a Danish cultural achievement are the assumptions that not only the heroic acts of Beowulf himself are distinctive markers of national identity, but also that the purely literary value of the poem also endowed nineteenth-century Danish society with undeniable cultural merit and potential. The traditional account of romanticism’s arrival in more or less fully developed form in Denmark just eleven years after Thorkelin’s return to Copenhagen is striking in its simplicity and directness. The young scholar, Heinrich Steffens (1773–1845), had spent time in Jena beginning 1798 during which he attended the now-famous lectures of Schelling and Fichte and was befriended by Schlegel, Tieck, and Novalis and had, thus, an immediate and first-hand introduction to the principal aspects of early German romanticism as it was articulated in Jena. In 1802, he returned to Copenhagen, where he gave a series of public lectures highly critical of the enduring strains of Enlightenment rationalism and offering ardent endorsement of the major tenets of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, art, and history. The first nine of the lectures were subsequently published in Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger (Introduction to Philosophical Lectures; 1803). Among the members of the audience of the original lectures, however, were two young men who both later became leading figures in Danish cultural life: Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850) and N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872). The lectures had a profound effect on Grundtvig in suggesting new modes of historical understanding, which became particularly important in the ongoing struggle to reconcile his enthusiastic appreciation for Old Norse culture with his commitment to Christian values. Herder’s segmentation of universal history into three principal periods — primal innocence, decline pursuant to the Fall, and eventual achievement of

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a golden age — offered Grundtvig important new conceptual tools for configuring and understanding history, not only local and regional history, but the history of the world and the human family as well. Although his early interests were wide ranging, Grundtvig’s later career concentrated on efforts to reform the Danish State Church and on pedagogy. The impact of Steffens’s lectures on Oehlenschläger, though, is more readily apparent and fully acknowledged. Oehlenschläger not only heard the lectures but also sought Steffens out for an extended conversation, which has become legendary in the history of Danish literature. The result of their contact was to confirm in Oehlenschläger the intellectual and aesthetic viability of his nascent interest in the national past and to energize his resolve. He accordingly reworked poems that were published the following year, Digte (Poems; 1803), and wrote what is one of the most famous poems in Danish literature, “Guldhornene” (The Golden Horns), which relates in ecstatic terms the story of the discovery and subsequent loss of two gold drinking horns fashioned some time around 400 A.D., which came to represent a call to greater attention to and appreciation of the Germanic past. Although the composition of “Guldhornene” is often seen as the beginning of Scandinavian romanticism, its actual import is better understood in symbolic terms. Steffens was not the only purveyor of German romantic thinking in Denmark, and the authors upon whom he had the most profound effect had all shown tendencies toward romantic themes and techniques before he first appeared upon the scene. He nonetheless galvanized tendencies and inclinations that otherwise may have remained dormant and catalyzed a series of reactions extending through much for the first half of the nineteenth century that proved extremely productive in many aspects of Scandinavian cultural life. Oehlenschläger, however, was not so naive as to presume that Norse culture could be transplanted into modern Christian society. He fully apprehended that a vast historical gulf divided the two worlds, yet his understanding of the Norse gods as seen for example in Balder hin Gode (1806) and Hakon Jarl (1807) portrays them as embodiments of eternal values that could conceivably eventually be reconciled with Christian virtue. In responding specifically to inquiries about distinct Nordic virtues, he explains he is awaiting a time when “the holy cross will be fused and become one with Thor’s mighty hammer” (25:147–8).7 Does a nation, even an uncultivated nation have anything more dear that the language of its fathers? In it lives its entire treasury of ideas concerning tradition, history, religion, and principles of life, all its heart and soul.8 J. G. Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, “Brief 10”

Although the cultural-philosophic problems arising from Oehlenschläger return to Nordic myth are not to be dismissed too lightly, the challenge that faced Norwegians was more complex and daunting and of a distinctly immediate and practical nature. Although Norway had been a prominent and independent country during the Viking Age, it lost its sovereignty during the late fourteenth century and remained part of Denmark until 1814 when it was united with Sweden. Having been prohibited from importing grain and other food and from exporting wood and fish during the British blockade, Norwegians suffered enormously from famine and other hardships.

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When word of the provisions of the Treaty of Kiel, which united Norway with Sweden, reached Norway in January of 1814, an independence movement was already well under way. A constitutional assembly met in April and by May had drafted a constitution drawing liberally on that of the United States and France (1791) as well as the thinking of Rousseau and Montesquieu. The constitution was signed on May 17 and Christian Frederik was elected king but to no avail. Although Britain was generally sympathetic to the nationalist aspirations, commitments favoring union had been made to Napoleon’s erstwhile general Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, who had become king of Sweden as Karl Johan. Although the bid for an independent constitution had failed, the nationalist sentiments that it inflamed could not so easily be quelled. Against the background of these political developments, Norwegian writers faced the challenge of providing plays, poems, and narratives of various sorts that addressed the growing need for national self-definition. Like writers all over Europe responding to the same need, they turned to their past and the rural areas that had not been contaminated by the leveling forces of internationalism. Norway, however, faced a distinctive problem in this regard. Having been politically united with Denmark for nearly five hundred years, the language of government, the church, and the educated city dwellers had become ever more like Danish. To be sure, differences remained, but they were minimal. The need for a national language that clearly and unambiguously distinguished the Norwegians from the Danes was acutely felt. Their thinking echoed Herder’s views that it is by means of cultivating a distinct and particular language and its attendant literature that a viable national state is grounded. Two approaches arose in response to this need for a national Norwegian language: a fairly conservative Norwegianization of the basically Danish language advocated by Knud Knudsen (1812–1895) on the one hand or the constitution of a new genuinely Norwegian language out of an amalgam of rural dialects championed by Ivar Aasen (1813–1896) on the other. Knudsen, an educator and linguist, shared many of Aasen’s views on the need for a national language and on particular linguistic adaptations that should be made. But he was not willing to go as far in adopting what cultivated urban dwellers would have thought unnatural or unfamiliar. His reforms that have implications for all aspects of the language can most clearly be seen, however, in terms of orthography and diction. The cumulative result of his efforts gave rise to Bokmål or Riksmål, as the language is more widely known, which is what most speakers typically have in mind when referring simply to Norwegian. It is today one of the two official languages of Norway and is used as a language of choice by more than 80 percent of the population. Its success and preeminence were virtually assured when prominent writers like Bjørnson and Ibsen adopted it in whole or substantial part. Later spelling reforms — those of 1907, 1917, and 1938 — continued along the lines first mapped by Knudsen and have yielded a contemporary language clearly centered on a Norwegian base. The work of Ivar Aasen, though not as far reaching in terms of the contemporary language, is even more interesting from the point of view of the fundamentally romantic impulse of validating nineteenth-century political aspirations in rediscovering the past. Aasen set about the task of shaping a language consistent with the romantic nationalistic sentiments with two purposes in mind: he primarily sought to restore the indigenous system of writing — orthography, diction, morphology, and syntax — that had come rather abruptly to an end at the time of

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Norway’s union with Denmark; he secondarily wanted to establish a language that would more adequately meet the needs of all of his countrymen than the written language of the urban centers. During extensive travel in rural regions, Aasen familiarized himself with the overarching similarities as well as a whole range of minute details from the various distinct dialectics he encountered. After more than four years of traveling and collecting material in southern Norway, examining it in detail, and synthesizing conclusions on the basis of methods and procedures derived from Jacob Grimm and the highly respected Danish linguist, Rasmus Rask, he was ready to suggest norms and standards that were a reconstruction of an ideal or synthetic form of the dialects. His goal was the reconstitution of the language that Old Norwegian would have become if it had not disappeared. Since the project was understood as the continuation of a historical linguistic process, it tended to be more linguistically conservative than any of the dialects individually. What resulted is the other of Norway’s two official languages, Nynorsk or formerly Landsmål, which was first officially recognized in 1885. After its approval and introduction into the school system of Norway, it gradually gained acceptance until 1944 when estimates suggest more than a third of the population used Nynorsk as their primary language. The most important results of Aasen’s work are presented in the grammar, Norsk grammatik (1864) and the dictionary, Norsk ordbok (1873). As early as 1850 with the publication of the preliminary Ordbog over det norske Folkesprog (Dictionary of the Language of the Norwegian People), however, Aasen’s preface makes the inherent worth and dignity he attributes to the language of rural Norwegians clear. The old talk that the language of the peasant farmers is evil and ugly can no longer find any support among linguists, since already even a superficial knowledge of the old language is enough to show that it is precisely the language of the farmers that we must keep if we want to attribute any value to nationalism in language. It is thus to hope that the recognition of the language’s true value will eventually become more and more wide spread and that even the populace will thus be led to give more attention to the language of our fathers and seek to maintain it. (4)9

That noteworthy values relating to national identity can be found in the uncorrupted language of rural people had long since become an important rallying cry for nationalists all over Europe, and efforts to collect specimens of their unique and particular use of language were legion. Herder’s celebration of folk customs and the Grimms’ far more philologically sound methodologies had motivated armies of collectors. None, however, had harbored more far-reaching goals than Aasen. Whereas typically those who endorsed this celebration of rustic language did so with the view to renewing poetic language as a means of resuscitating the national spirit, Aasen’s goals were nothing short of constituting a language that would become the medium not only of literary discourse but also of everyday use by Norwegians from all walks of life. The fact that he was able to formulate a language based on perceived rural discursive practices and standards that won widespread acceptance and eventual legal recognition enduring to this day is a singular manifestation of the romantic commitment to the language of the people with the least contact with homogenizing educational standards. Aasen’s awareness of the wide-ranging implication of his undertaking gradually grew and developed. In the preface to his first grammar, Det norske Folkesprogs Grammatik (Grammar of the Norwegian People’s Language; 1848), he stressed the

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close relationship of the language norms he was advancing to those of other Nordic languages. By 1864 when Aasen wrote his second grammar, entitled simply Norsk Grammatik, he expressed his confidence that it was the only language that fully embodied the cultural heritage of the Norwegian people. At the very end of the grammar, he describes the language as, not only … a priceless memorial from our forefathers, and a clear sign of the people’s rightful position in the genealogy of the related peoples, but … also … the only mode of expression that is completely suited to the people’s thoughts and to the country’s inherited customs. (§399)10

Although the question of a nationally viable language was a concern of romantics in many parts of Europe, none went quite as far as the formulation of what became a new national language intended for general use by the populous. Although Manzoni’s eventual masterful recourse to the Tuscan dialect, for example, went a long way toward establishing it as the norm of literary Italian, it by comparison has probably had fewer far reaching consequences and implications. Although the eventual impact of Aasen’s work was without doubt significant, the means by which it was accomplished are relatively modest. Neither the Ordbog over det norske Folkesproget nor the Norske Ordbog claims to be a definitive historical dictionary of the language. In comparison to the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch or other examples of historical lexicography, they are small indeed. Although Aasen clearly articulates his hope that his dictionaries will become the foundation for future scholarly research, they are intended for practical use in providing a language that both embodies the spirit of the nation and is a serviceable means of communication for people throughout the country. Aasen’s view that his construction of what Norwegian would have been had the course of political history been different was indeed a viable and functional means of communication initially met with some skepticism. In order to demonstrate its practicability, Aasen published Prøver af landsmaalet i Norge (Samples of Norwegian Country Language; 1853), which shows the language’s flexibility in various situations including ordinary discursive prose, conversation, poetry, and his own translations of passages from Shakespeare, Schiller, and Tegnér. Aasen himself was the first poet to use Nynorsk as his medium of communication. As a poet, he was blessed with only modest talent, but his poems show a linguistically inventive mind at work. He also wrote a one act play, Ervinge, (The Heir), which has been something of a favorite among Norwegian amateur theatrical groups, but is today principally of only cultural-historical interest. The most accomplished and well-known writers of Nynorsk are Arne Garborg, (1851–1924) all of whose novels with the exception of Trætte Mænd (Weary Men; 1891) are written in that language, and the novelist, dramatist, and poet Tarjei Vesaas (1897–1970). Aasen, though, was not alone in laying the foundation for an emergent community by defining its language. The Faeroe Islands — eighteen small islands located between the Shetland Islands and Iceland in the North Atlantic — were also empowered during the early nineteenth century with a written language that eventually led to a sense of ethnic identity and a flourishing literary culture. Settled initially by Celts and then colonized by Vikings from western Norway, the Faeroe Islands were eventually incorporated into the Norwegian realm with both church and state affairs being administered from Norway. Like Norway itself, they were in due course integrated into the far-flung Danish empire, and Danish became the language in which official business was conducted.

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The literary heritage of the Faeroes, however, is meager: only two runic inscriptions and a handful of documents from the fifteenth century have survived. Even with the Protestant emphasis on use of the vernacular, the liturgy and the Bible both persisted in Danish even though translations were readily made into Icelandic. Not until Jens Christian Svabo (1746– 1824) devised his own orthography and prepared two collections of ballads (1773 and 1781–82), was anything added to the corpus of Faeroese literature. But growth was relatively rapid. During the summer of 1817, Hans Christian Lyngbye, a Danish biologist, was in the Faeroes studying algae and happened to write down a few fragments of popular ballads he heard. Upon his return to Copenhagen, he presented them to P. E. Müller, a respected philologist who recognized them as bits and pieces of the widely disseminated medieval account of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer. Interest was immediately aroused and additional material was collected enabling Lyngbye to publish his find as Færøiske Qvæder om Sigurd Fofnerbsbane og hans Æt (Faeroese Ballads about Sigurd Fofner’s Bane and His Kin; 1822). With curiosity in the indigenous Faeroese material having been piqued, it is hardly surprising that the Faeroese student in Copenhagen should feel called upon to help in establishing the integrity and viability of their native tradition. Of these, by far the most important is Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb (1819–1909), who, encouraged by the great Danish philologist and folklorist Svend Grundtvig, undertook an extensive project to collect ballads. As a serious collector, he had to come to terms with the fact that there was still no widely accepted written form of the language. Like Lyngbye before him, he had to devise an orthography himself. With more philological sophistication than his predecessor, he patterned the orthography he established on Icelandic. Although Faeroese and Icelandic are closely related, their linguistic development had early on diverged rendering them mutually unintelligible in their modern forms. From a strictly pragmatic point of view, Icelandic, thus, may not have been the best foundation for Faeroese orthography. The spelling that is not strictly phonetic, however, preserves aspects of the language no longer obvious in speech thus making the written language significantly more readily accessible from the point of view of the other Nordic languages. During the 1850s, he published samples of the material that he had been collecting and in 1871 gave his mentor, Grundtvig, his collection of ballads. Grundtvig then eventually published the material under the title Føroya kvæði: Corpus Carminum Færoensium (Faeroese Songs) in fifteen volumes to which a sixteenth and two supplementary volumes were eventually added. The serviceability of the language in varied contexts was demonstrated in Hammershaimb’s volume, in many respects paralleling Aasen’s Prøver, now known as Færøsk Antologi (Faeroese Anthology) that was originally published as six annuals between 1886 and 1891 with the help of his compatriot Jakob Jakobsen, who is still well remembered for his work with Shetland Norn. Hammershaimb’s seminal initiatives proved to be very productive. On December 26, 1888, a manifesto was signed articulating the commitment of those involved to protect and promote Faeorese culture. The manifesto led to the founding of the Føringafelag (Faeroese Society) and eventually the Føringatíðindi (1890; Faeroese Newspaper), the first periodical publication in Faeroese. In succeeding decades, Faeroese literature flourished producing writers with international reputations, among whom Christian Matras, Heiðin Brú, Martin Joensen, William Heinesen, and Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen (although the latter two published in Danish rather than

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Faeroese exemplifying the complexity of Faeroese language politics) are those to have achieved the most obvious level of literary sophistication. These are national pieces that the people sing and sang from which one becomes acquainted with the way of thinking of the people, their language of feeling.11 J. G. Herder, Von Ähnlichkeit der mittlern deutschen und englischen Dichtkunst

Finnish first emerged as a written language during the 1540s with the publication of ABC-kiria (ABC Book; 1543?), Rucouskiria (Prayer Book; 1544), and Se Wsi Testamenti (The New Testament; 1544) at the hand of Michael Agricola (1510?-1557). He had intended to translate the Old Testament as well but was only able to finish the Psalms before his death. Although he is certainly to be credited with the considerable accomplishment of the redaction the Finns’ spoken language, he as a pious churchman regrettably inveighed against the singing of the old epic songs that had originated in a pagan tradition. The songs were suppressed as the work of the devil until the middle decades of the seventeenth century when, as a corollary to their interest in some of the most extravagant claims about Sweden’s Gothic past, Swedish scholars invited clerics in the Finnish-speaking part of the realm to gather any artifacts suggestive of a glorious past and to pay particular attention to the ancient historical songs. Almost as a complement to and certainly in the same spirit as Rudbeck’s fanciful Atland eller Manheim, Daniel Juslenius (1676–1752) wrote a history of Finland’s capital city, Aboa vetus et nova (Åbo Old and New), in which his narrative ranged well beyond even the imagined annals of the city to include the history of the entire nation. According to Juslenius, Finland had its origin in the migration of Noah’s grandson, Magog (the son of Japeth), and had later been the homeland of the Amazon women. Although certainly not credible by historical standards, his work nonetheless drew on and validated indigenous folklore not only vis-à-vis Swedish domination but also in terms of the vast array of national traditions generally. A systematic and intellectually viable study of the Finnish of the nascent Finnish literary tradition and particularly of Finnish folklore had to await the work of Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739–1804), Daniel Juslenius’s great-nephew on his mother’s side. By the 1760s, the cultural allegiance to the Swedish language, culture, and tradition had become particularly strong at the clear expense of Finnish. Although working in general terms within the conceptual world of Enlightenment thinking, Porthan — the brightest star in the Finnish scholarly firmament during the last half of the eighteenth century — began collecting bits and pieces of the epic songs with which he had become acquainted as a young man and saw in them not only a pristine and unspoiled beauty but also a manifestation of the ancient Finnish indigenous spirit. Since Porthan was probably better informed about the major European intellectual developments of the period than any of his compatriots in spite of the fact that he was reluctant to travel, it is not surprising that he reflects important strands of Herder’s thinking in a series of dissertations published between 1766 and 1778 collectively entitled De Poësi Fennica (Concerning Finnish Poetry). Although Porthan’s critical attention was divided between Finnish poetry conceived in terms of established literary standards and that whose origin was in the innate and unspoiled traditions of

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the people, it was the latter that he saw as normative and perceived in them not only a reflection of the past but also a manifestation of the Finnish national spirit free from any foreign tincture. Porthan’s theoretical views were widely influential and formed the intellectual foundation for the folklore collection of one of his close friends, Christfrid Ganander. Although not endowed his colleague’s intellectual capacity or critical acumen, Ganander was the more energetic collector. His most important publication, Mythologia Fennica (Finnish Mythology; 1798), was a compendium of folkloric material — riddles, proverbs, songs, and incantations — organized alphabetically as a kind of encyclopedia. He undertook the task of preparing a Finnish lexicon based in large measure on the samples of folklore that he collected. Although the manuscript was complete in 1787, it was not published until 1937–40 when it appeared in a three-volume edition under the Swedish title Nytt finskt lexicon. Finland’s severance from Sweden and incorporation into the Russian empire was from the Finnish point of view at best a mixed blessing. Although free from the allegiance to Sweden and invited by the czar to join the worldwide community of nations, Finland’s position was precarious and could at any moment revert to one of subservience. Herder’s views, however, were making their way throughout Finland from Germany or indirectly from Sweden — particularly from the Gothic circle around Geijer and Atterbom — and had emboldened a number of young men with patriotic inclinations. They not only read Herder and drew inspiration from him, but also recorded their perceptions in their journals. What they took from their reading was the perception that every nation lives under different geographical, historical, and social circumstances and accordingly develops along different lines and must, therefore, be true to it own particular national spirit. The health of a nation was seen as a function of its adherence to its own destiny, which in turn determined its ability to contribute to the utopian state of Humanität. The immediate implication was that the endeavor to adopt foreign cultural practices — either Swedish or Russian in the case of Finland — rather than nourishing those that are native and intrinsic could yield only an insecure and stifled body politic. These ideas were espoused with patriotic fervor by a group of students at Åbo Academy who were inspired not only by their reading of Herder but the instruction they received from one of Porthan’s students, Pehr Johan Alopaeus, as well as by their reading of Mythologia Fennica. These young men, often known collectively as the Åbo romantics, sought to create an authentically Finnish literature and culture of such vigor and distinction that it would become a source of national pride and a rallying point for nationalist aspirations such that the Swedish-speaking Finns would summon the necessary fortitude and resolve to learn Finnish. The irony implicit in their idealistic calls to action was that they were with few exceptions written in Swedish and emerged from homes whose mastery of Finnish was at best tenuous. This inherent difficulty notwithstanding, they set out on numerous missions to collect material in rural Finland. Although their aspirations were laudable, the results of their labor, which consisted in the main of fragments of longer epics and brief incantations, were meager. On the basis of what they were able to assemble, many educated Finns despaired of Finnish ever being taken seriously as a literary language or becoming a generally accepted language of commerce and culture. Even though the results of their collecting were scant and failed to realize any concrete political change, their work established the necessary theoretical and to an extent methodological foundation for later work.

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Elias Lönnrot (1802–84), a medical student and an energetic Finnish nationalist, in due course followed up the pioneering efforts of the Åbo romantics in a way that led to stunning results. Lönnrot had the good fortune of studying with Reinhold von Becker, the publisher of Turun Wiikko-Sanomat (Turku Weekly News), one of the earliest Finnish-language newspapers, and the author of a variety of articles on various aspects of Finnish culture but, perhaps, most notably a series of articles entitled “Väinämöisestä” (About Väinämöinen), which are more important in terms of their method of concentrating on one particular heroic figure drawn from the folk tradition than in terms of their content per se. Under von Becker’s supervision, Lönnrot wrote his dissertation entitled De Väinämöinen (About Väinämöinen; 1827). Using the procedure that had been pioneered by his advisor, Lönnrot sought to gather together and synthesize everything that had previously been collected from folk singers and published concerning that hero. The following year, 1828, he traveled throughout the relatively remote region of Karelia collecting material he hoped would contribute a heightened appreciation of the Finnish past, which he published in Kantele taikka Suomen kansan sekä wanhoja että nykyisempiä runoja ja lauluja (The Kantele, or Old and Later Poems and Songs of the Finnish People; 1829–31). With the publication of this volume, Lönnrot and a group of friends who shared his commitment to establish a more rigorous sense of Finnish national identity founded the Suomen [Suomalaisen] Kirjallisuunden Seura (Finnish Literature Society), which endures down to today. The society played an immediate and important role in encouraging Lönnrot to continue his collecting by occasionally financing his work and most importantly, though, by publishing the results. Lönnrot’s most significant and productive collecting trips began in 1832 and continued every year until 1840. The 1832 excursion was particularly fateful, though, because Lönnrot for the first time crossed over into Russian East Karelia. Although that region was culturally one with Finnish Karelia, its long history as part of the Russian sphere of political and religious influence was decisive. Orthodox clerics had been more tolerant of ancient customs than their Catholic and later Protestant brothers in the west. In consequence, the long narrative poems that were known previously only on the basis of relatively disjointed fragments emerged in arresting richness. The work Zachris Topelius had already suggested the productivity of this region. A paralyzed country doctor, he had invited traveling East Karelian peddlers to his home, where he transcribed longer epic sequences that he eventually published. East Karelia did indeed prove to be a rich and extensive mother-lode from which a significant part of the material that eventually went into Kalevala derived. Lönnrot had originally planned to publish the material as a fifth volume of Kantele but fortunately wrote to the Finnish Literature Society suggesting publication of the material grouped around individual heroes in a manner clearly reminiscent of his earlier dissertation. With this procedure in mind, he mined previous collections for materials about individual figures and in 1833 publish Runokokous Väinämöisestä (Collected Poems on Väinämöinen) consisting of sixteen poems in just more than 5000 lines which eventually became Alku-Kalevala (Proto-Kalevala). Continuing to gather new material to be integrated into an epic pattern centering on individual heros and eventually including material drawn from other collectors, Lönnrot in turn published Kalewala taikka Wanhoja Karjalan Runoja Suomen kansan muinaisista aijoista (Kalevala or Old Karelian Songs from the Ancient Times of the Finnish Nation; 1835) consisting of thirty-two poems of just over 12,000 lines and finally in 1849 the definitive version of Kalevala, which is sometimes known as Uuden Kalevalan (New Kalevala)

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but more typically simply recognized as the second edition of Kalevala. It consists of fifty poems totaling nearly 23,000 lines. Precisely what this wide-ranging poem is, however, continues to be a matter of discussion. In Lönnrot’s 1835 preface, he explained that the material he had collected was being organized aaround the great heroes he heard mentioned in various songs that he had collected with a view to producing a work that would be for the Finns what the works of Homer and Hesiod had been for the Greeks and the poems of the Edda for the Scandinavians. Even while reading the songs that had been previously collected, especially those collected by Ganander, I wondered whether songs about Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäninen and other of our memorable forefathers might not be found such that from them could also be assembled longer accounts, just as we see that the Greeks and Icelanders and others received songs from their forefathers. (Lönnrot, Kaelwala 1:iii)12

Lönnrot’s explicitly avowed purpose was to provide the Finnish nation with a foundational literary work upon which a sense of distinctive national identity could be established. In addition to the resounding articulation of this point in the preface, he frequently described the goals of his research in letters to various associates in terms of providing a cultural history for Finland that was comparable to that of other nations. He admirably succeeded without question in accomplishing that goal. It would be difficult to name another nation whose sense of its own historical identity is as broadly and deeply involved with any single secular work as is Finland’s with Kalevala. During the years that Finland was moving toward independence from Russia and countering the political implications of Pan-Slavism, the hewn and battered body of Lemminkäninen that his mother rakes from the waters of Tuonela, puts back together, and resuscitates (poems 14 and 15) was understood as a symbol of Finland, which similarly needed to be drawn together and revived with a sense of national independence. During the decades following the publication of Kalevala, its roots took firm hold and quickly became widely dispersed in the soil of Finnish day-to-day life with personal names as well as the names of streets, ships, businesses, and a wide range of other entities being drawn from the cycle of poems. Kalevala is in fact the foundation of a phenomenon that during the 1850s was characterized as Fennomani (Finnomania or, perhaps, more precisely Finnophilia) as evoked in the pamphlet by Emil von Qvanten, Fennomani och Skandinavism (Finnomania or Scandinavianism; 1855). With its growing popularity, it was, moreover, a particularly potent antidote to the various attempts at the Russification of Finland during the 1890s. With the ever more pervasive influence of Kalevala throughout Finland, there also arose a constantly expanding use of the Finnish language in all walks of life: in 1860 Finnish was granted equal status with Swedish throughout the country and by 1880 some university disciplines permitted instruction in Finnish. All of its cultural, social, and political influence notwithstanding, the question of just what Kalevala is still remains. During the last half of the nineteenth century, Finns tended to stress its origin in the collective voice of the ancient Finnish bards. Lönnrot on occasion raised his voice to declare in the clearest of terms that unlike The Poems of Ossian, Kalevala was a genuine expression of reliable folkloristic research on an ancient culture. While not diminishing the central role of Lönnrot’s collection of songs, charms, and incantations, contemporary research into the material he collected has made Lönnrot’s role in shaping that material even

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more prominent. Convinced that the material he collected spoke for a whole nation rather than an individual singer, Lönnrot became something of a singer of these epic songs himself in arranging lines and episodes, imposing a kind of order and epic character derived from his reading of Greek and Latin sources, and filling in himself where his informants failed him. The influence of Kalevala on subsequent Finnish literature has been immense. Juhana Henrik Erkko (1849–1906) drew subject matter from the Kalevala, most notably for his plays Aino (1893), Kullervo (1895), and Pohjolan häät (The Pohjla Wedding; 1902). Although important at the time — indeed Pohjolan häät was written for the dedication of the new National Theater — they are now mostly of literary-historical interest. Eino Leino, a far more accomplished and sophisticated writer and perhaps modern Finland’s most characteristic poet, made more creative use of Kalevala material. Written in terms that invite comparison with the aesthetics of Continental symbolist theater, Tuonelan joutsen (The Swan of Tuonela) offers a haunting portrayal of Kalevala’s domain of death evocatively using the vowel-rich resources of the Finnish language. Leino did not make further use of Kalevala for subject matter, but later having internalized its singular rhythms and resonances, published two volumes of poetry, Helkavirsiä (vol. 1 1903, vol. 2 1916), consisting of long narrative poems that evoke a highly personal mythological world that resonates with the vocabulary, cadences, and meter of Kalevala but never specifically draws it in. The import of Kalevala today does not maintain nor does it need the overtly political dimensions it once had, yet it has continued into the work of contemporary poets, most notably Paavo Haavikko, who has mentioned Kaksikymmentä ja yksi (Twenty-one), Rauta-aika (Age of Iron), and obviously Kullervo as being particularly indebted to Kalevala. The visual arts also were the recipient of numerous impulses emanating from Kalevala. Painters and sculptors alike — among whom J. Z. Blackstadius (1816–1898), R. W. Ekman (1808–1873), and C. E. Sjöstrand (1828–1906) were the earliest and most important — drew influence from the poem and portrayed many of the most dramatic and gripping scenes. By far the most prolific and influential painter, however, was Akseli Gallen-Kallela. He brought a particularly heroic sense to the scenes he represented and had a particular fondness for portraying Väinämöinen’s struggle with Louhi, the Mistress of the North in defense of the Sampo. Among his most important commissions were four frescoes he did for the Finnish pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exhibition, frescoes from the National Theater and the National Museum in Helsinki, and a decorated edition of Kalevala published in 1922. The impact of music related to Kalevala, however, has reached a much broader international audience. The first major composer to set about interpreting the epic musically was Robert Kajanus (1856–1933), whose composition Kullervo (1881) and Aino (1885) attracted appreciative attention; the first opera based on Kalevala was Oskar Merikanto’s Pohjan neiti (The Maid of Pohja; 1898), in the context of which Armis Launis’s opera Kullervo (1917) should also be mentioned. Without doubt, though, most important composer to have taken up Kalevala material was Jean Sibelius. As a young man, he encountered the music Kajanus with whom he became a close friend for the rest of his life. In addition to Sibelius’s well known Op. 7 Kullervo, Op. 22 Lemminkäis-sarja — from which the third movement Tuonelan joutsen (The Swan of Tuonela) is probably the best known — Op. 49 Pohjolan tytär (The Daughter of the Northland

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or sometimes erroneously Pohjolan’s Daughter), and Op. 112 Tapiola, numerous less familiar works also draw specifically on Kalevala. Contemporary Finnish composers have also been fascinated by the theme: Aulis Sallinen’s opera Kullervo, for which he wrote both the music and the libretto based though on a play by Aleksi Kivi, had its debut in Los Angeles in 1992 — on Kalevala day, February 28 — and in Finland on November of 1993; and Einojuhani Rautovaara, a student of Merikanto, is well known for his Sammon ryöstö (The Myth of the Sampo), a work for male choir, soloists, tape, and orchestra. The concept of a language- and literature-based identity that Kalevala so completely embodies had ramifications beyond the boarders of Finland, most directly, understandably, in Estonia, a country whose language and culture are very closely allied with that of Finland. In 1839, just four years after the publication of Lönnrot’s first version of Kalevala, Friedrich Robert Fählmann gave a lecture at Die gelehrte Ehstnische Gesellschaft (The Estonian Learned Society) in Dorpat in which he suggested that a similar project could be undertaken for Estonia centering on the son of Kalev — Kalevipoeg — a figure from the Estonian folk tradition. Like Lönnrot also a physician, he was responding to denigrating characterization of Estonia as a country without a history and hence without an independent destiny. The task of collecting the folk tales and assembling them into a more or less cohesive whole fell to Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald. In 1854, he presented the finished product, Kalevipoeg: Eesti rahva eepos (Kalevipoeg: Estonian National Epic), to the Estonian Learned Society, and it was published between 1857 and 1861 simultaneously in Estonian and German versions. The poem is organized into twenty cantos consisting of 19,000 lines. Its general proximity to Kalevala is obvious in the opening line, “Vanemuine, lend me your kantele!”13 (Kreutzwald 5). The kantele, a five-stringed harp — or perhaps a primitive zither — was plucked as accompaniment to the ancient songs and made famous in Lönnrot’s first publication of the material he had collected, Kantele taikka Suomen kansan sekä wanhoja että nykyisempiä runoja ja lauluja. References to Vanemuine and Ilmarine — Finnish: Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen — appear occasionally throughout the poem, and it contains some of the same narrative sequences as its Finnish predecessor. The closest point of contact, however, is in the eponymous hero Kalevipoeg — Kalev’s son — thus, evidently, the same figure as Kalevala’s Kullervo. The case of similarities, however, must not be overstated because Kalevipoeg is distinctly Estonian, and the characters that appear in both works have their own particular traits and functions in Kalevipoeg. It seems to me we should remain on our path and make out of ourselves what can be made. Let people say what they will about our nation, literature, and language bad or good; they are at least our very own.14 J. G. Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, “Brief 113”

Herder’s argument that the well-being of the body politic is contingent upon its full engagement with its own destiny embodied in the simplest and most unaffected voices resonating throughout the course of its history had particularly far-reaching implications in the Nordic region. Far from being understood narrowly as a mandate to refocus the attention of institutions associated with

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high culture, it became a charge to recover the national past but more importantly to recover languages from the brink of extinction that would come to serve entire nations as vehicles for day-to-day as well as formal and literary expression. The recovery of a past, of a language, and of a heritage literally implied the retrieval and reformulation of a national destiny. In varying degrees, the sense of national identity and pride that derived from the appropriation of a national language in which the past was inextricably encoded led to political realignments: in the case of Norway and Finland new sovereign and independent states and in the case of the Faeroes a heightened degree of independence and a long but still ongoing discussion about national sovereignty. Although Herder’s meditations on the elements necessary for national political well being originally centered on the German-speaking countries in the European heartland, it may well be that Scandinavia can lay claim to their most extensive and far-reaching implementation. Contemporary theorists — Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, for example, among many others — in recent decades have returned to many of Herder’s insights and elaborated them in terms of current cultural and political theory and post-colonial sensitivities. Although the debt to Herder is not always foremost in the minds of modern discussions of nationalism, his foundational presence can scarcely be denied. Although the political and cultural development of the nations in the Nordic region during the nineteenth century is a complex of often divergent factors, it is certainly a telling example of how romantic perceptions of the linguistic and literary foundations of national communalism can lead to dramatic and enduring political results. Notes 1. “Mittelst der Sprache wird eine Nation erzogen und gebildet; mittelst der Sprache wird sie Ordnung- und Ehrliebend, folgsam, gesittet, umgänglich, berühmt, fleißig und mächtig” (Herder 7:305 ). 2. “Min avsikt var att framställa en poetisk bild av det gamla nordiska hjältelivet. Det var icke Frithiof som individu, utan tidevarvet, för vars representant han antages, som jag ville måla…. I sagan förekommer mycket storartat och heroiskt, som gäller för all tider och därföre både kunde och borde bibehållas; men därjämte ett och annat rått, vildsint, barbariskt, som antingen borde helt och hållet avsöndras eller åtminstone mildras. Till en viss grad blev därföre nödvändigt att modernisera” (Tegnér 2:355)” 3. “Hohe, edle Sprache! großes, starkes Volk!” (Herder 2:556). 4. “Inter omnia monumenta veteris orbis Danici, qvæ tempus edax rerum nobis reliqvit, admirabile de Scyldingis Epos publici nunc juris factum eminet. Habemus enim hic irriguos fontes unde religionis poëseoqve notitia, et gentis nostræ rerum seculis III et IV gestarum series deduci possit” (298). 5. “Qvod autem ad Scyldingidem nostram attient, eam vere Danicam esse, nemo non ibit inficias, qvi observaverit auctorem rerum a Regibus hrodgaro, Beowulfo et Higelaco gestarum oculatum fuisse testem, et in Beowulfi exseqviis encomiasten adfuisse. Cecidit autem Beowulfus in Jutia anno æræ nostræ CCCXL. Igitur hercle miror Hickesium Anglosaxonibus tribuisse carmen, qvod vates Danus Appolinis hyperbororei igne calefactus fudit” (302). 6. “Eqvidem non bene meminit lingvam, qva ante Wilhelmum I. utebantur Angli, fuisse communem tribus septentrionis populis, qvi vocati uno nomine Dani, omnes ore eodem dialectice solummodo differente loqvebantur. Hujus si vel aliunde auctoritas nulla peti posset, plena sane hic in aprico cubat. Epos etenim hoc, qvale id nunc habemus, evidenter docet, idioma Anglosaxonicum esse revera Danicum, qvod Islandi extra solis vias fere jacentes hodiedum servant purum, et studiose colunt” (302). 7. “[…] det hellige Kors skal smelte sammen og blive Eet med Thors vældige Hammer!” (Oehlenschläger 25:147–8). 8. “Hat wohl ein Volk, zumal ein unkultiviertes Volk, etwas Lieberes als die Sprache seiner Väter? In ihr wohnet sein ganzer Gedankenreichtum an Tradition, Geschichte, Religion und Grundsätzen des Lebens, alle sein Herz und Seele.” (Herder 7:65).

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9. “Den gamle Snak om Bondesprogets Slethed og Styghed vil ikke længere finde noget Medhold hos de Sprogkyndige, da allerede en kun overfladisk Kundskab om de gamle Sprog er nok til at vise, at det netop er dette Bondesprog, som vi maae holde os til, hvis vi ville sætte nogen Priis paa Nationaliteten i Sproget. Det er saaledes at haabe, at Erkjendelsen af Sprogets rette Værd vil efterhaanden blive mere og mere alemindelig, og at selve Almuen vil derved ledes til at fatte mere Agtelse for Fædrenesproget og søge at holde samme vedlige” (Aasen 4). 10. “ei alene … et kosteligt Minde fra Forfædrene, og et tydeligt Mærke paa Folkets rette Stilling i Rækken af de beslægted Folkeslag, men … ogsaa … den eneste Taleskik, som passer tilfulde til Folkets Tanke og til Landets nedarved Sædvaner” (Aasen, Norsk Grammatik §399). 11. “Das sind Einmal alte Nationalstücke, die das Volk singt, und sang, woraus man also die Denkart des Volks, ihre Sprache der Empfindung kennen lernet” (Herder 2:557–8). 12. “Jo ainaki ajattelin ma ennen koottuja, liiatenki Ganaderin, runoja lukiessa, eikö niitä Wäinämöisestä, Ilmarisesta, Lemminkäisestä ja muista muisteltawista esiwanhemmistamme olisi mahtanut siksikin löytyä, että olisi heistä saanut pitempiäki kertoelmia, niinkun näemmä Greekalaisten, Islandilaisten ja muitten esiwanhempainsa runoja siksi saaneen” (Lönnrot, Kalewala I:III). 13. “Laena mulle kannelt, Vanemuine!” (Kreutzwald, 5). 14. Mich dünkt, wir bleiben auf unserm Wege, und machen aus uns, was sich machen läßt. Sage man über unsre Nation, Literatur und Sprache Böses und Gutes; sie sind einmal die Unsern.” (Herder 7:614).

References Bartholin, Thomas. 1689. Antiquitatum danicorum de causis contemptae a danis adhuc gentilibus mortis, libri tres: ex vetustis codicibus & monumentis hactenus ineditis congesti. Hafniae: Literis Joh. Phil. Bockenhoffer. Bjork, Robert E 1996. “Grímur Jónson Thorkelin’s Preface to the First Edition of Beowulf, 1815.” Scandinavian Studies 68.3: 291–320. Føroya kvæði: Corpus Carminum Færoensium. 1944–72. Eds. Sv. Grundtvig and J. Bloch. København: Munksgaard. Erkko, Juhana Henrik. 1893. Aino. Helsinki: Otava. ———. 1895. Kullervo. Helsink: Otava. ———. 1902. Pohjulan häät. Helsinki: Otava. Ganander, Christfrid. 1789 [1960]. Mythologia Fennica. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. ———. 1997. Nytt finskt lexicon. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Haavikko, Paavo. 1974. Kaksikymmentä ja yksi. Helsinki: Otava. ———. 1984. Rauta-aika. Helsinki: Otava. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1991. Johann Gottfried Herder Werke. Eds. Martin Bollacher et al. 10 vols. Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker 64. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Hickes, George. 1970. Linguarum veterum septentrionalium Thesaurus 2 vols. Oxford:1703–05. Rpt. Menston: Scolars Press; Hildesheim: Olms. Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhald. 1997. Kalevipoeg: Eesti rahva eepos. Talinn: Avita. Leino, Eino. 1999. Tuonelan joutsen: Sota valosta Väinämöisen kosinta Karjalan kuningas Helsinki : Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. ———. 1994. Helkavirsiä. Helsinki: Otava. Lönnrot, Elias. [1827]. De Väinämöine priscorum Fennorum numine, Åbo: Joh. Christoph. Frenckell & Filii. ———. 1829–31. Kantele taikka Suomen Kansan sekä Wanhoja että Nykyisempiä runoja ja lauluja. 4 vols. Helsinki: Wasenius: K. E. Holm. ———. 1835. Kalewala taikka Wanhoja Karjalan Runoja Suomen Kansan muinaisista ajoista. 2 vols. Helsinki: Frenckellin. ———. 1849. Kalevala [Uuden Kalevalan]. 2nd ed. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Lyngbye, Hans Christian, ed. and trans. 1822. Færøiske Qvæder om Sigurd Fofnerbsbane og hans Æt. Randers: Elmenhof.



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Magnus, Johannes. 1554. Gothorum Sveonumque historia. Romae: J. M. de Viottis. Mallet, Henri Paul. 1755. Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc, ou l’on traite de la religion dex loix, des mœurs et des usages des anciens Danois. Copenhague: Berling; 1787–88. 3rd rev. ed. Genèvre: Baude and Paris: Buisson; translated in 1770 as Northern Antiquities. Trans. Thomas Percy. London: T. Carnan. ———. Monumens de la mythologies et de la poesie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves. Copenhague: Philibert. Oehlenschläger, Adam. 1851. Digtervæker og Prosaiske Skrifter. 38 vols. Kiøbenhavn: Andr. Fred. Høsts Forlag. Porthan, Henrik Gabriel. 1983. [De Poësi Fennica.] Suomalaisesta runoudesta. Helsinki: SKS. Qvanten, Emil von. 1855. Fennomani och Skandinavism: Om Finnland och dess sednaste utveckling. Stockholm; another version appeared under the pseudonym Peder Särkilax with the title Fennomani och Skandinavism: Kunna Sverige och Finnland åter förenas. Stockholm: Haeggström. Rudbeck, Olaus. [1679] 1698. Atland eller Manheim. Upsala. Steffens, Henrik. 1905. Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger 1803. Ed. B. T. Dahl. København: Gyldendal Tegnér, Esaias. 1923. Samlade Skrifter. National Upplaga. 2 vols. Stockholm: Norstedt. Thorkelin, Grímur Jónson. 1815. De Danorum rebus gestis seculi III & IV: Poëma Danicum dialecto AngloSaxonica. Copenhagen: T. E. Rangel. Worm, Ole. 1636. Runir seu Danica litertura antiqvissima, vulgo Gothica dicta. Hafniae: Melchior Martzan Aasen, Ivar. 1848. Det norske Folkesprogs Grammatik. Kristiania: Werner. ———. 1850. Ordbog over det norske Folkesprog. Kristiania: Werner. Reprint 2000. Eds. Kristoffer Kruken and Terje Aarset. Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget. ———. 1853. Prøver af Landsmaalet i Norge. Christiania: Werner. ———. 1864. Norsk Grammatik. Christiania: Malling. Reprint 1965. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. ———. 1873. Norsk Ordbog med dansk Forklaring. Christiania: Malling



IV. Expansions in Space

Although an understanding of the west European cradle of romanticism — Germany, France, and Great Britain — is critical for grasping the tradition’s genesis and initial patterns of dissemination, the transformation and fulfillment of fundamentally romantic premises on the European periphery as well as the encounter with the foreign and even the exotic are crucial for fully acknowledging the breadth and diversity of the movement. The experience of the foreign as recorded in travel narratives appropriately complements the romantic validation of the local and indigenous throughout Europe. Travelers were able not only to extend their understanding by personal acquaintance with distant climes, but also to see native traits in terms of greater contrast. They were also famously able to disguise their critiques of oppressive practices at home under the pretense of describing foreign manners, customs, or political realities. Recognizing that changes in taste during the late eighteenth century gave a new impetus to travel for the sake of broadening one’s horizons, Mircea Anghelescu points out that travel accounts have much in common with novels, which themselves have often been cast in the form of depictions of journeys. Romantic travelers from Goethe, Heine, Lamartine, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, Nerval, Dumas, and Hugo through Karamzin, Golescu, Barit¸iu, Bolintineanu, Mesonero Romanos, and Bretón de los Herreros to Southey, Thackery, and Dickens are discussed in terms of the contrasting assumptions they brought to their peregrinations abroad and the impact that travel had upon their thinking in terms of balancing the competing demands of the local as opposed to the distant and exotic. It has often been conventional wisdom to view the literature of the western hemisphere — that of North and South America — in ways that tend to minimize its dependence on and interaction with European traditions. Countering this lamentable segregation, Joselyn M. Almeida examines how literary developments in the United States and in Latin America during the first half the nineteenth century engaged fundamentally romantic issues. Almeida takes a broad and encompassing view of the struggles for Latin American independence from Spain and aligns the revolutionary fervor that swept across the region beginning with the revolt of Túpac Amaru in 1781 with a broad-based transvaluation of social norms and conventions that embodies the spirit of romanticism. These revolutions not only sought political and cultural independence from Spanish colonial dominion but also validated the importance of divergent local and indigenous cultures. These histories, politically oriented documents of many kinds, and attempts at independent self-definition are all animated by the selfsame spirit that sustained struggles for local autonomy and individual agency in Europe ranging from the boisterous Tyrannenhaß of the Stürmer und Dränger through the varied calls for liberty in France to the summons to national liberation and unity in Greece, many sectors of eastern Europe, and parts of the Nordic region. S. P. S.



Romantic Travel Narratives MIRCEA ANGHELESCU University of Bucharest

Since seminal works of literature across the world and throughout time have often been formulated as initiatory journeys, literature has long had a special relationship with travel: Homer’s Odyssey, Camões’s Os Lusíadas, Fénelon’s Télémaque, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and many others. Even Don Quixote is the description of such a journey. On other occasions, the journey itself has inspired travelers to descriptions so dramatic and impassioned that belletristic literature rapidly has appropriated them as its own even though they were not initially conceived with that intent. Among these are Xenophon’s Anabasis, Marco Polo’s Milione, the Arabic Aja’ibu-l Hind, Stendhal’s and Journal d’Italie, which are all travel diaries or memoirs of high literary repute because of their narrative quality, their gripping sense of adventure, or their fascinating and colorful description. The long-standing tension between travel literature and belletristic literature that uses the pretext of travel has resulted in the intimate intertwining of the two domains, as man’s curiosity about the unusual or at least different has continued to grow. Influenced by the reading of other travel books as well as literature with travel as its subject, authors of travel narratives began paying ever more attention to descriptions and to elements of stylistic refinement, so their work began to be read not only as a source of information but also as entertainment. According to some, the decline of the narrative fiction in antiquity as well as the medieval chivalric romance goes hand in hand with increased interest in travel literature, which, in its turn, may have contributed to the development of the novel. “The journey has provided an example of the margin of the novel of another conception of the narrative: no longer an artistic fiction portraying the idealized behavior of disembodied heroes but of real settings meticulously described, or of true adventures where the extraordinary goes side by side with the trivial, … a style without affectation but with a familiar tone” (Chupeau 548).1 A shift in the readers’ interest to accounts of the unusual, which draw inspiration from the foreign rather than the mythological-historical imaginary occurred during the eighteenth century, a century throughout which interest in travel heightened significantly. The changes in taste, however, are not primarily a question of structure, but rather a matter of a growing emphasis on descriptions of other settings. The fact that the picture becomes more and more colorful and its description more and more detailed does not essentially modify its quality. Ultimately the traveler realizes that his enterprise is fundamentally narrative and as such not far removed from the novel. When declaring his intention to allow the reader to share all the details of his journey in his famous Journey from London to Genua, the Italian-English Joseph Baretti begins by describing the people in the stagecoach by which he is traveling: “The coach contained six people; and all six proved agreeable company to each other, though collected by mere chance: three women on one side, and three men over against them. This begins to look like a novel”

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(Baretti 1, 4; emphasis added). But the proximity and even the interference of the two genres does not entirely transform the traveler, his sensitivities, or receptivity. The Grand Tour — travel to the Continent, particularly to France or Italy — was during the eighteenth century a regular part of the education of many young Englishmen. Some of the expeditions of the more adventurous or of those allegedly involved in diplomatic missions reached the far side of the Mediterranean, Egypt, Syria, or the coasts of the Black and Caspian Seas. Their descriptions of areas and peoples they visited are often vivid and interesting and awoke the curiosity of scientists and politicians who already saw Russia as a future European power. The tradition of this type of travel, so well illustrated by delightful books like Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy or Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, began to decline toward the end of the century, primarily because of a change in the identity of the traveler. The English penchant for travel was adopted on the Continent, and among the travelers heading south to pay ritual visits to the Swiss Alps or the open air museums of Italy were a growing numbers of Germans, French, and even — at the end of the century — Russians, among them the playwright, Denis Fonvizin. At the same time, the means of travel began to change in part as a result of the Napoleonic Wars or the obstacles they occasioned. The new mode of travel had already arisen when the first consul stepped on the deck of L’Orient ready to leave for Egypt. Knowledge of the new mechanism and incentive for travel did not come from the travelers themselves, since they were unaware of the changes. The reasons romantic heroes gave for leaving their homes effected a change of habits and tastes in a society which was itself changing. Chateaubriand’s René, for example, departs in order to escape the burden of a doomed and forbidden love; Mme de Staël’s Oswald flees from the woman who cannot be his, not to escape his pain, but to be consumed by it in a locale congenial to his feelings: “to travel is as one might say one of the saddest pleasures of life…. Oswald felt a doubling of his sadness while crossing Germany to reach Italy” (de Staël 1:655)2; and Byron’s Childe Harold, who “was sick at heart,” consumed by vices and dissipation, leaves because his homeland had become a prison for him: “Then loathed he in his native land to dwell/ Which seemed to him more lone than eremite’s sad cell” ([I:4:35–6] 2:9) Similarly, dark feelings and melancholy account for the journey to foreign shores of Panayotis Soutsos’s “traveler” (1831) to Naples, of Juliusz Słowacky’s hero traveling under a satanic hold (Podroz do ziemi swietej z Neapolu, 1836), and of D. Bolintineanu’s Conrad, a former revolutionary in his native Valachia, who now “Banned in his country aimlessly does roam/ Wherever a sweeter horizon seems to beckon” (Bolintineanu 2: 125).3 The search for love makes Eichendorff’s hero — enigmatic and eternally lost — head south, toward sunny Italy (Aus dem Leben eines Taugenicht; 1826). Whatever the concrete justification for the flight that constitutes the narrative line in each text — novel or poem — it arises from an almost unbearable feeling that leads the hero to take the road that opens before of him. The rationale is neither curiosity nor tradition (like the guilds that require aspiring masters to take an initiatory journey), but an impulse arising from the core of his being or a yearning difficult to elucidate in terms of rational or logical principles. Goethe is surely among the earliest European sojourner to travel and see so differently from those who preceded him. He draws the attention of the reader to the fact that his travel accounts are not the verbal equivalent of an album depicting places and things he can portray in terms of a simple

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description. The converse is rather the case. The author starts traveling under the imperious influence of childhood memories — some etchings of Rome hanging in his parents’ home — and an inexplicable urge to see those places becomes unbearably pressing. “At first I could no longer look at any Latin book, no drawing of an Italian region” (Goethe 11:98)4 that might recall unfulfilled passion. Arriving in Rome, he was overcome by a feeling of enchantment, almost of magic, of a spell that brought the frozen etchings of his childhood to life: “All the dreams of my youth I now see alive before me, the first copper engravings that I remember (my father had hung the views of Rome in a reception room) I see now in fact” (Goethe 11:126).5 The diffuse and inexplicable feeling that had fed his growing urge to visit Italy became clear only when he saw the realities of the Eternal City. It was as if Goethe had not just seen these monuments for the first time, but was seeing them again after a long time. The strong appeal he felt cannot be justified as mere curiosity or a temporary fixation, but rather only by the temptation to return to a place where it seemed he had once been. His relationship to the city came as a revelation rather than empirical knowledge: Had I not made the decision I am now carrying out, I would have gone completely to pieces: the eagerness for such a journey to see these objects with my own eyes had risen in my spirit. The historical knowledge did not lay claim on me: the things stood a hand’s width from me but separated by an impenetrable wall. It is now for me almost as heartening if I were seeing the things for the first time, but as if I were seeing them again. (Goethe 11:98–9)6

The irrepressible wish to travel to a certain place can be found in other writers of the period such as Karl Philipp Moritz. Upon seeing the English coast for the first time, he declares that the sight of “the happy shores of that country … has, for many years, been my most earnest wish, and whither I have so often in imagination transported myself” (Moritz 9). Finding himself in a situation for which he had longed, in 1811 Lamartine wrote: “All my life, the Orient had been the dream of my haunted days of autumn or winter in my native valley…. I needed to touch, to work in my hand a piece of this land” (Lamartine 1:14–5).7 The desire for intimate knowledge of something different from one’s quotidian experience and comparable to a past or ideal image justifies J. J. Ampère’s interest in the northern countries: “I always felt attracted to these countries, that seem so remote to us. I was curious to see this great and melancholy nature of the north, to contemplate, amid their deserts, these Germans, still pure, that Tacitus would almost recognize” (Ampère 54).8 The insistent need for experience and firsthand knowledge of a geographic locale emerges from a more general, uniquely modern aspiration to experience reality through the senses and to refer it to previous experience in order to determine the attitude toward it that best suits one’s personality. In short, man at the end of the eighteenth century began needing to differentiate the marks on the whole chain of his becoming, which Arthur Lovejoy called “a process of increasing diversification” in the perception of the world and which also constitutes, among other things, the foundation of the romantic sensibility (Lovejoy 296). Thus what interests Goethe the traveler as well as his contemporary reader was his own individual response to what he experienced — a landscape, a work of art, or a historical monument — which was fundamentally different from that of others but which remained in the background because personal experience can be interpreted in such divergent ways:

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Mircea Anghelescu I immensely enjoyed the opportunity to examine the wares gathered here, but the eagerness and impatience that always accompany me allow me no pause, and I hurry on my way. But I take consolation in the fact our statistical age all this has found its way into print and one can keep oneself well informed by occasional recourse to books. But now I am only interested in direct expressions, which no book or statistic could offer. (Goethe 11:25)9

Further on Goethe points out that “everything is instructive and meaningful. But dearest to me is that which I carry in my soul” (Goethe 11:165).10 A few years later, the reaction of a Russian traveler, Nikolai Karamzin, was not very different. In March 1790, the future historian of the Muscovite Empire arrived in Paris, the city that attracted the interest and admiration of the whole Western world. Perhaps in my attempt to describe Paris in writing … at least in its essential features, I should start — as the ancients used to say — with Leda’s eggs … translating from Julius Caesar, the first ancient writer who mentions Paris … talking to the scholarly dust of these authors … etc. But I think I can hear your answer: We can read Saint-Foix and his Essais sur Paris and learn everything you could tell us about the ancient history of Paris; you just tell us your impressions of the town and how it looks now, we do not ask for more. And so … leaving aside all that belongs to the past, I shall only speak of the present. (Karamzin 217–8)11

Thus already by the end of the eighteenth century, the reason for reading travel narratives could no longer be found in the search for information about other parts of the world, but only in the appreciation of their indirect reflection in the mirror of a particular personality. The reader no longer understands his reading in terms of an objective mediation of information, but rather primarily as the revelation of a sensibility that communicates and interprets unfamiliar experiences. With all the naivety characteristic of the age, Karamzin brought “canonical” reading on his travels in order to assess his reaction against the received interpretations of famous natural settings. He leaves Lausanne with La Nouvelle Héloise in hand and follows in the footsteps of Rousseau’s heroes in order to experience for himself their state of mind in the precise setting described in the book: “Stopping in the shadows of the chestnut trees in the park, I looked at the cliffs of Malery, from which Saint-Preux, in despair, wanted to throw himself in the lake and where he wrote to Julie” (Karamzin 150).12 In Weimar, he found a site “on the wild, dark banks of the small river that flows rapidly, where, surrounded by its babble, I sat on a mossy stone to read my first book by Fingal” (Karamzin 71).13 He also verifies what Rousseau said about the influence of high mountains on man’s thoughts and finds that he is right: “Here mortal man comes to understand his superior fate; he forgets his earthly fatherland and realizes that he is a citizen of the world” (Karamzin 134).14 Referring to the same subject a few years later, however, Chateaubriand contradicts Rousseau without naming him: “Unfortunately the spirit of man is independent of the atmospheres of locations; a heart laden with pain is no less heavy in the high places than in the valleys” (Chateaubriand 4:322).15 Sensible men are looking for a relation between the elevation of the spirit and that of the places. In the spirit of the perfect sincerity requiring a faithful narration of what is seen without inventing anything (as formulated in the foreword to Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem), the traveler cannot help but see in the ruins of ancient Greece through which he has so often walked the shadow of a past that he expects to come to life at any moment out of the darkness of ages.

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The hill on whose foot I found myself resembled the hill on which the city of Sparta had stood …. As soon as I reached the peak, the sun rose behind the Menelaus Mountains. How beautiful the spectacle was! But how sad, too…. A mixture of admiration and pain arrested my walk and my thoughts; all around me, the silence lay deep; I wanted at least to make the echo speak in places in which human voice no longer resounded. I cried with all my might: Leonidas! No ruin echoed this great name, and Sparta itself seemed to have forgotten it!” (Chateaubriand 69)16

Although full of scholarly quotations and archeological considerations, his book is far from a pedantic memoir. Chateaubriand advisedly recommends that it be read as an account of the impressions he experienced and collected in the immediacy of his surroundings: “I shall give account of my journey and my emotions in Athens, day by day and hour by hour …. Once again, this Itinerary should be seen much less as a voyage, but rather as the memories of one year of my life” (Chateaubriand 85).17 The realization that a personal response to the past and not just the past per se is important follows from the fact that in the course of time the object of historical admiration changed. Instead of Greek and Roman antiquities, eventually medieval ruins awakened the same sentiment. The patriotic feelings of the scholar had not yet emerged but followed later as can be deduced from the fact that one of the first admirers of the French ruins of Normandy was a foreigner, a Dane, Hector Frederik Janson Estrup (1794–1846), who exclaims in 1819: “Splendid ruins! Why does one then go to Italy to contemplate the remains of antiquity? … How the ruins of Christian temples surpass the beauty of the pagan temples!” (Estrup 61).18 Just one step separates this attitude from that of Stendhal or Victor Hugo, who on 16 August, 1835, wrote to his wife: “I have seen Rouen. Tell Boulanger that I have seen Rouen. He will understand what that means. I have seen everything…. The ministry of justice, the GrosHorologe, Saint Ouen, Saint Maclou, … the fountains, the old sculptured houses, and the great cathedral” (Hugo 1076).19 This feeling of exhilaration of the traveler who discovers unimagined and previously ignored beauty in his domestic aesthetic tradition justifies an essentially cultural patriotism that can only be countered by a patriotism that is essentially sentimental and nostalgically colored by the memory of his native landscape. Karamzin, for instance, often takes the opportunity to remember his native land. “The flat country attracted me with its novelty. I remembered Russia, my dear homeland, and she seemed not so far away” (Karamzin 193).20 And to evoke the natural beauties not found outside Russia, he writes of feelings that inspire him to lyric flights seldom found in any other context: “Nowhere is spring so charming as in Russia. The shroud of snow of the winter tires the eye, the soul longs for a change and, suddenly, the loud voice of the skylark sounds in the air” (Karamzin 291).21 Another Russian traveler, the playwright Fonvizin, uses his trip at approximately the same time to learn “to be more indulgent toward those inadequacies that offended [him] in [his] own country” (Wilson 32). Many years later while studying economics in Germany, the Romanian George Barit¸iu found in the famous Rhine Valley only an opportunity to dedicate a hymn of praise to his native Transylvania and to its beauty from which he was separated: What more can I say about the Rhineland, which has already been described so enthusiastically by many others? Truly, it is very beautiful and has in itself something attractive that makes

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Mircea Anghelescu parting from it difficult; but for a Transylvanian, believe me, the Rhine with all its beauties can only make one love one’s homeland more fervently than ever before seeing the much-praised and acclaimed lands of the Rhine. For me, at least, the Rhine has no natural beauty that is not equaled or surpassed by those in my country. (Barit¸iu 49)22

The beauty of a landscape no longer depended on conformity to widely accepted aesthetic standards. The romantic appreciates nature in terms of the way it vibrates sympathetically with his own sensibility, and this harmony gives the impression of the romantic’s perfect accord with the infinite dimensions of nature. The beauty of nature thus becomes a state of mind. As Goethe says, “And now when it turns to evening, a few clouds rest on the mountain in the gentle breeze, in the sky more stand quietly than glide by, and right after sundown, the chirping of grasshoppers grows louder, one feels then at home in the world, and not as if passing through or an exile” (Goethe 11:26).23 The poet becomes inextricably integrated in the multifarious and resplendent aspects of nature and feels an expansive sense of exhilaration in surveying the workings of the natural world of which he has become an integral part. What had changed was not the inherent character of the landscape but rather the experience of the beholder who perceived more because his practiced intellect and a more richly receptive spirit were better able to observe and judge. Again Goethe was the first modern traveler to relate the beauty of the landscape to a work of art and to correlate the foremost features of the setting with the preeminent aspects of the soul. Not only can certain qualities of the natural landscape be better and more pregnantly defined by references to works of art (“the fragrance of the day that one only knows from the paintings and drawing of Claude [Lorrain] drifts across the earth” [Goethe 11:174]24), but nature itself is conceived as a work of art. This view leads to a state of mind conducive to the confluence of art and nature because the beauty of natural landscapes does not impede the development of the poetic sense but rather promotes it. The same conception arises both with references to the visual arts, as during Karamzin’s trip to Frankfurt, or to literary sources, as when the Russian traveler considers a stormy night worthy of Ossian’s lyre. A few years later, the outline of buildings in the distance seems to Chateaubriand to be drawn by the hand of a painter, “the towers and distant edifices appeared as faded sketches of a painting” (Chateaubriand 4:294),25 and the remains of calcified lava on the slopes of the Vesuvius appear to be those that inspired Dante’s terrible visions described in Inferno: “Dante had, perhaps, seen them when he painted in his Inferno these burning sands where eternal flames slowly descend in silence like snow in the Alps without wind” (Chateaubriand 4:298).26 From this juncture forward, the comparison of natural scenes with aesthetic representations became a commonplace among romantic travelers, and frequently the description of landscape details is replaced by a comparison or reference to a poetic text considered particularly apt to suggest the whole complexity and subtlety of the feelings aroused in the beholder’s heart. Heine follows this procedure in Die Harzreise: when climbing the Brocken, he cannot but think of the national tragedy Faust: Eine Tragödie. Heine’s text is a clear illustration of the way in which romantic travelers tended to replace the description of natural details with expressions of a vivid imagination. What began as a mere comparison was gradually transformed into a personification, and the travel accounts themselves finally became lyrical texts as is the case with the description of his journey through the Harz. Here, for example, he passes through a forest and describes a playful mountain brook, the Ilse: “The happiness, naïveté, and grace with which the Ilse rushes

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over the adventurously formed boulders that are found in its path is indescribable” (Heine 6:131).27 Gradually the description is transmuted into a personifying metaphor: “The Ilse is a princess, who laughing and radiantly runs down the mountain. How her white gown of foam gleams in the sun shine” (Heine 6:131).28 At the end, the river becomes the sweet voice of a flute in an eight-stanza poem: I am the Princess of Ilse And live in the Ilsenstein; Come along to my castle, We want to be blissfully happy. (Heine 6:132)29

But romantic travelers were not merely searching for the picturesque and sparsely populated places where their imagination could turn the bubbling mountain springs into a sweet voice or the Vesuvian rocks into the terrifying scenery of the Inferno. The landscape enriched by men’s presence and cities inhabited by a busy, diverse, and self-absorbed crowd began to capture the interest of travelers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were eager to learn about the ways of the people in places they were visiting. They were not just taken with accounts of exotic countries like Alexandre Dumas’s portrayal of Tunisia or Gérard de Nerval’s of Cairo, but also with descriptions of neighboring countries like the depiction by the Spanish traveler, Mesonero Romanos, of the Parisian population during his 1840 journey or that by Nerval of the Austrian capital where he tried recognize the distinguishing characteristics of different ethnic groups — Hungarians, Austrians, Valachians, or Croats — seen on the streets or in the taverns. But the romantic writer’s journey is also an endless source of observations of these peoples’ life and the colorful nuances of the sociality of the streets and markets. The descriptions of such a journey then became the actual reportage of more or less interesting case histories, some of which are sketched replete with extensive details while others are just mentioned. Such are Stendhal’s travels, where, alongside witty descriptions and observations, one can find many local stories: “the story of a poor maker of clogs named Maradin,” the story of a nun who built a nunnery, of a rich dandy, of an unhappy love affair of a young widow who kills herself when left by her lover, and of two lovers caught in bed (Stendhal 64–71, 178–87, 197–203, 211–13).30 And Stendhal is certain that these local low-life happenings, this gossip, and these tales, which do not always have great human significance, are what can mirror the specific time and place: “that which the fools wrongly understand by the term gossip is on the contrary the only story that well paints a country in this century of affectation” (Stendhal 174).31 These stories are not encountered in Paris, but in the provinces, which are truly representative of France: “You can spend twenty years in Paris and not know France; in Paris the foundation of all the stories is vague…. In your little town of ten thousand souls, on the contrary, you can … acquire an adequate certitude concerning most of the facts upon which you should base your judgment” (Stendhal 175).32 Nerval follows a similar procedure in his Voyage en Orient, and Dumas almost stifles the description of the journey proper by stories — either heard or read — which spring from any pretext and are usually found in one of his many parentheses. These anecdotes and digressions are introduced in the fashion of the well-known episodic Oriental stories: “During the first quarter. You don’t know what a quarter is, Madame? Let me explain to you, then….” or: “a

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chest, all in nacre and pearls, a chest five feet long and two feet wide, a real chest from the Arabian Nights. You remember of course, dear Madam: one of those chests which the sultans in Baghdad used” (Dumas 71, 164).33 The eastern European traveler also observes people and places, but he usually relates what he sees (as in Karamzin or Fonvizin’s letters) to what he left home but not without an acute and understandable feeling of guilt and inferiority usually mixed with a didactic purpose. The traveler from eastern Europe, moreover, adds study to the many other justifications for travel. Probably the most striking example is the Romanian boyar Dinicu Golescu, who in his Însemnare a ca˘la˘toriei mele (Notes on My Travel; 1826) describes his sojourns in Austria, Germany, northern Italy, and Switzerland and dwells particularly on the practical and organizational aspects of these countries. He often writes about the museums in Vienna, Dresden, and Milan in order to discuss the moral aspect of the paintings, which he praises and compares to the situation back home. Dinicu Golescu is, according to his own statements, an ignorant, uneducated boyar from eastern Europe, who lived in the darkness of the wilderness and in accordance with old barbarian custom abused the peasants on his estate in order to extract an ever greater income. But when he saw the wealth and order of the western countries, state institutions working for the benefit of the public, impartial justice (the emperor of Austria, it was claimed, lost a suit brought by his gardener because justice was on the gardener’s side), and the well-organized daily life — the cleanliness, the nightly supplying of cities in order not to disturb daily activities, cheaper transport using artificial canals, and other technical improvements — he changed and promised the reader that he would henceforward endeavor to implement what he saw. Dinicu Golescu’s travels in the west were real, but his travel accounts are not. Golescu was not in fact as uninformed as he claims, and documents attest not only to his charitable disposition before the journey, but also to enlightened motivations. Moreover, many of the episodes in the book are obviously fictional, e.g. the incident in which the English traveler asks him why he is taking notes in Greek and not in his own language. The reason was that — acquainted with Rousseau’s work — Golescu, the author of a general program for social, moral, and economic reform in his own country, was writing not only a travel book, but also a real philosophical novel like those popular during the previous century — Emile or Candide, for example. In so doing he was laying out the contours of an ideal world by means of fragmentary references to what he had seen (or wanted to see) on his journey across western Europe (Anghelescu 25–31). Like many other contemporaneous eastern European works promoting moral and social improvements (as Count Szechenyi’s in Hungary for instance), Golescu’s book is organized around edifying examples of the most varied aspects of a civilized state embodying justice, rational structures, and the consideration of the general interest rather than around a sequential recording of impressions. As in the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce by Abbot Barthélemy, a book translated into Greek and Romanian during the eighteenth century and widely disseminated, the reader of Golescu’s accounts is challenged by a travel narrative to consider the most appropriate forms of state institutions. Upon his return home, Golescu himself in fact launched an effective reform program precisely congruent with the issues and observations portrayed in the narration of his journey. Using the convention of seeing excellence in other countries in order to lend his own

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impulses the prestige of something directly experienced, Golescu is unknowingly following the road of unreserved admiration of everything foreign — the road of xenophilia — which most romantic playwrights ridiculed in fashion, manners, and language. In both the large and small countries of eastern Europe — Fonvizin in Russia, Alecsandri in Romania, Nágy Ferenc in Hungary — as well as in the west, the aping of foreign customs became standard vaudeville comedic fare: Franco-mania in English and Anglo-mania in France. This tendency represents the beginning of the collapse of a model afforded by the romantic journey in its first stages, a model eroded by its own excesses. The interest and admiration of anything new, unusual, or original, which is the basis of this kind of journey (ethnographism, costumbrismo, the local touch), began to acquire manneristic contours and gradually developed into the parody of its earliest manifestations. The idea of originality implying novelty and difference, as opposed to what is old and familiar, cannot be applied to a popular movement or orientation assimilating large groups of supporters. The romantic quest for original perceptions, characters, habits, or clothes soon degenerated into either a cliché or an aberration. The romantic traveler sought an itinerary of locales characterized by originality, a quality conspicuously absent from the earlier eighteenth-century journey to a large degree preoccupied with archaeological erudition. The romantic expedition therefore sought out the village, not the city; it ventured into the suburbs or the slums, not the trim and well-manicured center. It looked for lowly, impoverished areas, which are axiomatically traditional and closed to foreigners, not the prosperous, open and cosmopolitan precincts. It looked for the villager, the highlander, or the sailor, the man who lives secluded or in contempt of the law, not the urban dweller or the cosmopolitan bourgeois; the smuggler, the poacher, the forester, the hermit, the guide, but not the merchant, the intellectual, or the religious devotee. But all these characters upon whom the traveler casts a hurried and superficial glance have as a common denominator minimal relevance: once the first specimen of any particular category is found and described, all the subsequent descriptions are doomed to be redundant. Thus the “characteristic” scenes and characters, which repeat themselves to exhaustion in the descriptions of journeys during the first half of the century, devolve rapidly into clichés. Herein also lies the source of the legitimate grievances and justified dissatisfaction of these characters and peoples who saw themselves reflected in a mirror that diminishes and falsifies: “Diaries … that they call travel impressions, wherein every word is an error, every paragraph a dream, and every page an even worse affront against those same people whom the author, while traveling, went along praising with his genteel phrases, in order later to injure them with his pen … and to speak of that which they neither understand nor have studied nor observed” (Segovia 12).34 This practice also precipitates inevitable descriptive stereotypes that lapse into mannerisms, since an obligatory vocabulary ensues and a canonical group of details must be noted as Ramón de Mesonero Romanos pointed out with deft irony in his preface to the 1840 journey in France and Belgium: “The painter has placed before his view the most beautiful landscapes, the glistening air, the intoxicating sky, the waterfalls that dissolve into pearls, the green plains whose boundaries merge with the horizon, the high mountains that rise to lose themselves among the clouds, the rushing streams, serpents of silver” (Romanos 251).35 Subjected to and mediated by the increasingly homogenous and cliché-ridden passions and interests of European travelers, these countries — including Spain — yielded to the conventional modes of presentation. The journey, thus, becomes a matter of

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pedestrian and prosaic protocol here as well and yields the same results that invite ironic caricature. The satirical poet observes “la mania de viajar,” (the mania for travel) which has gone so far that Bretón de los Herreros observes that the Spaniard who does not travel is disparaged (Bretón de los Herreros 128).36 The ironic perspective on the whole did not need to wait for this relatively late moment, a time of devalorization of a discursive practice smothered by its own popularity: as early as the end of the eighteenth century among the English travelers, several examples of this depreciatory treatment of landscapes, nature, and people emerged, which more typically would have been cast in such a way as to attract admiration and interest. Robert Southey, for instance, sent letters from Spain, where he notices especially the unpleasant and uninteresting landscape, the dirt, and even the fact that he is annoyed by the country’s being inhabited by foreigners: “Other places attract the eye of the traveler, but Coruna takes his attention by the nose…. [T]he filth of the streets [is] so strange and so disgusting to an Englishman; but, what is most strange, is to hear a language which conveys to me only the melancholy reflections that I am in a land of strangers.” Even the usual invocation of the painter is used here ironically: “Oh, the misery of the night! I have been so flead, that a painter would find me an excellent subject for the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew!” (Southey 4–5). This disappointed attitude is more and more frequently part of the typical travel narrative, conforming to the expectations of readers accustomed to accepting the obligatory extension of descriptions of the picturesque, the original, and the unpredictable. The absurdity of expecting something unpredictable to happen is illustrated by the accounts of Berlioz’s travel in Germany. Traveling in 1843 from Frankfurt to Stuttgart, he was vexed by not finding anything worth relating, nothing picturesque, or even upsetting: “In traveling all around, I did not have any impressions at all that I can relate to you: not even the least romantic site to describe, no dark forest, no remote chapel, no raging torrent, no grand nocturnal sounds” (Berlioz 1:63).37 Gérard de Nerval had the same experience traveling in the highly praised landscape of Switzerland. He was profoundly disappointed by the impressions it made on him and the consequent frustration of his expectations. The landscape seemed to him a strident, counterfeit, and dull papier-maché setting: “I have told you how unworthy the city itself is of its fame and its marvelous location. I have looked for … all the medieval picturesqueness with which our opera set designers have poetically endowed it: all of that is nothing but a dream and an invention: in place of Constance imagine Pontoise” (Nerval 23).38 The traveler who is disappointed in his expectations always tends to notice the inconveniences and the lack of comfort of the journey. Full of false expectations, Adelbert von Chamisso set out on the Russian frigate Rurik in 1816 for a journey around the world. After his illusions were shattered, everything grew annoying: the ship seemed to be “a prison” or “a sarcophagus.” He was disturbed by being “cramped” and by the everyday “boredom,” even though he makes interesting observations about the fauna and nature in general on the islands he visits and about the languages of the indigenous population (Blamberger 38–9). Like Southey in Spain half a century earlier, Dickens had just as disenchanting an experiences on his trip through Italy, a country whose population he disliked along with the ever-present dirt. The contrast between what he had expected to see and what he saw can only be articulated in the ironic mode: “Their habitations are extremely filthy, and their usual occupation on a fine Sunday

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morning is to sit at their doors, hunting in each other’s head.” He observes even more acerbically: “The peasant women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly washing clothes in the public tanks, are in every stream and ditch, that one cannot help wondering, in the midst of all this dirt, who wears them when they are clean” (Dickens 59). Famous ruins lie before him but do not elicit any admiration, but rather evoke only a self-ironizing observation about the tourists who make such an effort to visit sites so void of interest to him: “For twelve miles, we went climbing on over an unbroken succession of mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin. Tombs and temples, overthrown and prostrate, small fragments of columns, friezes, pediments; great blocks of granite end marble; mouldering arches, grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a spacious city from lay strewn about us” (Dickens 206). Like everything “original,” exotic images are only impressive the first time they are seen. Thackeray notes: “The first day in the East is like that. After that there is nothing. The wonder is gone.” The friend with whom he is traveling is watching the shore of Smyrna from aboard the ship which had brought them there. He is watching with apathy and a distinct lack of interest because the miracle of this discovery had been exhausted the first time. “Smith looked at these wonders quite unmoved; and I was surprised at this apathy: but he had been at Smyrna before” (Thackeray 130–1). Educated with delusive reading at an impressionable age and attracted by the colorful descriptions of places which ignite the imagination, these travelers no longer experience Goethe’s revelation with regard to Rome. Since, on the contrary, their ingenuity is overtaxed by spectacular exaggerations and fairytale images from the Arabian Nights and similar fiction, reality proves disappointing since it is much inferior to their expectations: “If they love the odd and the picturesque, if they loved the Arabian Nights in their youth, let them book themselves on board one of the Peninsular and Oriental vessels, and try one dip into Constantinople or Smyrna. Walk into the bazaar and the east is unveiled to you …. The beauty of that poetry is, to me, that it was never too handsome; there is no fatigue of sublimity about it” (Thackeray 131). The fact that the real landscape is perceived as less than imagined is characteristic of the continuous overtaxing of the object of romantic interest and admiration. Even though at the beginning of the romantic era Goethe identifies with the scenery of Rome and William Beckford feels the impulse to leave his coach in order to bring offerings to the local gods as a sign of gratitude (Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, 1783), toward its end, the encounter with foreign reality is rather disappointing; and the attitude of the writer, like that of the intellectuals with whom he travels, leaves no room for doubt: “My sensation with regard to the Pyramids was that I had seen them before, then came a feeling of shame that the view of them should awaken no respect. Then I wanted (not really) to see whether my neighbors were any more enthusiastic than myself: Trinity College, Oxford, was busy with the cold ham; Downing Street was particularly attentive to a bunch of grapes …. But, the truth is, nobody was seriously moved” (Thackeray 228). After half a century, the capacity for observation had not changed much: Custine and Nerval were looking for new experiences and local color but did not find them, just as Ann Radcliffe had been similarly unsuccessful in 1784 in the Netherlands. Thackeray and Dickens bantered about the people and lamented finding nothing to admire in the still highly reputed places they visited, just as Southey had in 1798. During the 1840s, however, these accounts had

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a completely different meaning from those identical in form made before 1800. The new generation grounded its disappointment in the disparity between the world of imagination and the infinitely more modest experience of reality and not on the mere observation of certain differences as had their precursors. The outward expression of this disappointment became ironic, parodic, and fundamentally self-critical, but not contemptuous. In spite of their apparently conceited and unkind personalities, the observation by Dickens, Nerval, Thackeray, and Dumas are not different from those made by eastern travelers who went to the West in order to admire its accomplishments, among them the Romanian Dinicu Golescu and the Poles Fryderik Skarbek and Jozef Kraszewski. Their reactions express acceptance of a new community just beginning to assume its spiritual shape, albeit in a caustic way. The authors find that the world is truly divergent and people from diverse places are indeed different. They acknowledge this fact readily or reluctantly — but in the end accept it — thus revolutionizing the history of human contact. Dickens concludes Pictures from Italy with warm words of hope for the people of the country: “Let us part from Italy with all its miseries and wrong affectionately, in our admiration of the beauties, natural and artificial, of which it is full to overflowing, and in our tenderness towards a people naturally well-disposed, and patient, and sweettempered…. The good that was in them ever, is in them yet” (Dickens 262–3). Thackeray closes with the vision of people belonging to many religions, who are after all worshiping the same God, and the admonition: “Cavil not, you brother or sister if your neighbour’s voice is not like yours; only hope that his words are honest … and his heart humble and thankful” (Thackeray 255). Discovery and understanding of the other, however, are not just a fashion or the result of evolution in the field of literary study but are rather a necessity during the entirety of the epoch. This necessity revolutionized politics first and foremost and occasioned the birth of new institutions, among them the enormously influential French periodical, Revue des Deux-Mondes, whose first publication in 1823 was motivated by just the need to look to others and understand them. These are not the administrative theories of which France has the greatest need, it is practical administration. It is important to know well what takes place and has taken place among other people, not to adopt their institutions except those that would be able to apply themselves to our customs, to our character, to the progress of our light…. Such is the enormous gap that this review is destined fo fill…. After so many false books, the most original that can be published must be one that is true…. Politics as we understand them consist of the rights of the people and of the public rights. It deals with the powers which every country can have at its disposal, with its general and local institutions, … and with the public spirit, and with hate and with rational affections. In one word, with everything that constitutes the organization of the lives of people. (Revue des Deux-Mondes, 1:1–2; 1829)39

In their own way, the travel accounts written at the beginning of this century express the same need to understand and know the other, a process extending well beyond the compass of literature but one in which literature is profoundly implicated — a procedure that eventually bends back upon itself in that knowing the other results in self-knowledge as well. This perception, perhaps, explains why frequently the last place these romantic travelers discover is their own country. Stendhal traveled throughout France after having written his book about journeys to Italy; Mesonero Romanos stopped in Madrid after his trip to France and Belgium,

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and Thackeray records his trips to London and across England after having journeyed in France and the Orient.

Notes 1. “Le voyage a donné exemple, en marge du roman, d’une autre conception du récit: non plus une fiction artistique peignant les conduites idéalisées de héros désincarnés, mais des dehors réels et soigneusement décrits, des aventures véritables ou l’extraordinaire côtoie le trivial … un style sans recherche et un ton familier” (Chupeau 548). 2. “voyager est, quoi qu’on puisse dire, un des plus tristes plaisirs de la vie …. Oswald éprouva donc un redoublement de tristesse en traversant l’Allemagne pour se rendre en Italie” (de Staël 1:655). 3. “Proscris din a sa ¸tar˘a / Oriunde îi surîde un cer senin s¸i dulce” (D. Bolintineanu 2:125). 4. “Schon einige Jahre her dürft’ ich keinen lateinischen Autor ansehen, nichts betrachten, was mir ein Bild Italiens erneute” (Goethe 11:98). 5. “Alle Träume meiner Jugend seh’ ich nun lebendig, die ersten Kupferbilder, deren ich mich erinnere (mein Vater hatte Prospekte von Rom auf einem Vorsaale aufgehängt) seh’ ich nun in Wahrheit” (Goethe 11:126). 6. “Hätte ich nicht den Entschluß gefaßt, den ich jetzt ausführe, so wär’ ich rein zugrunde gegangen: zu einer solchen Reise war die Begierde, diese Gegenstände mit Augen zu sehen, in meinem Gemüt gestiegen. Die historische Kenntnis förderte mich nicht; die Dinge standen nur eine Hand breit von mir ab, aber durch eine undurchdringliche Mauer geschieden. Es ist mir auch jetzt nicht etwa zumute, als wenn ich die Sachen zum erstenmal sähe, sondern als ob ich sie wiedersähe” (Goethe 11:88). 7. “Toute ma vie, l’Orient avait été le rêve de mes jours de ténèbres dans les brumes d’automne et d’hiver dans ma vallée natale…. J’avais besoin de remuer, de pétrir dans mes mains un peu de cette terre” (Lamartine 1:14–5). 8. “Je m’étais toujours senti entraîné vers ces pays, qui nous semblent si reculés. J’étais curieux de voir cette grande et mélancolique nature du Nord, de contempler, au sein de leur déserts, ces Germains restés purs que reconnaîtrait presque Tacite” (Ampère 54). 9. “Ich hatte große Lust alle die Produkte zu beleuchten, die hier auf einmal zusammengefunden werden, doch der Trieb, die Unruhe, die hinter mir ist, laßt mich nicht rasten, und ich eile sogleich wieder fort. Dabei kann ich mich trösten, daß in unseren statistischen Zeiten dies alles wohl schon gedrückt ist und man sich gelegentlich davon aus Büchern unterrichten kann. Mir ist jetzt nur um die sinnlichen Eindrucke zu tun, die kein Buch, kein Bild gibt” (Goethe 11:25). 10. “Von vielen anderen Sachen sammelt’s sich auch um mich, und nichts Vergebliches oder Leeres, welches hier unmöglich wäre; alles unterrichtend und bedeutend. Am liebsten ist mir denn aber doch, was ich in der Seele mitnehme, und was, immer wachsend, sich immer vermehren kann” (Goethe 11:165). 11. “AD4>4 :4 b >"R"H\, 8"8 (@&@D4:4 )D,&>4,, F b4P 9,*Z … ? A,D,&,FH4 :4 >,8@H@DZb [sic] @` BZ:\` F4N !&H@D@& … ? a F:ZTJ @H&,H &"T: “;Z BD@R4H",< E,>H-KJ", ,(@ Essais sur Paris, 4 J2>",< &F, H@, RH@ HZ @FH4 A"D40"; F8"04 >"< H@:\8@, 8"8@& @> B@8"2":Fb H,$, & >Z>,T>,< F&@,< &4*,, 4 $@:,, >4R,(@ >, HD,$J,Z, JH,FZ ;,:\,D4, F 8@H@DZN @HR"b>>Z6 E,>-AD, N@H,: >42&,D(>JH\Fb & @2,D@, 4 @H8J*" B4F": @> 8 _:44” (Karamzin 150). 13. “)484,, 4>@< &F,:,>>@6” (Karamzin 134). 15. “Malheureusement l’âme de l’homme est indépendante de l’air et des sites; un cœur chargé de sa peine n’est pas moins pesant sur les hauts lieux que dans les valées” (Chateaubriand 4: 322). 16. “La colline au pied de laquelle je me trouvais étoit comme la colline de la citadelle de Sparte…. Comme j’arrivois

178

Mircea Anghelescu à son sommet, le soleil se levoit derrière les Monts Ménélaious. Quel beau spectacle! Mais qu’il étoit triste …. Un mélange d’admiration et de douleur arrêtoit mes pas et ma pensée; le silence étoit profond autour de moi; je voulus du moins faire parler l’echo dans les lieux ou la voix humaine ne se faisoit plus entendre, et je criai de toute ma force: Léonidas! Aucune ruine ne répeta ce grand nom, et Sparte même sembla l’avoir oublié!” (Chateaubriand 4: 69).

17. “Je rendrai compte de mes courses et de mes sentiments à Athènes, jour par jour et heure par heure …. Encore une fois, cet Itinéraire doit être regardé beaucoup moins comme un voyage, que comme les mémoires d’une année de ma vie” (Chateaubriand 4:85). 18. “Des ruines splendides! Pourquoi donc s’en va-t-on en Italie contempler les restes de l’Antiquité? … Combien les ruines des temples chrétiens ne dépassent-elles pas en beauté celles des temples paiens!” (Estrup 61). 19. “J’ai vu Rouen. Dis à Boulanger que J’ai vu Rouen. Il comprendra tout ce qu’il ya dans ce mot…. J’ai vu tout…. Le palais de justice, le Gros-Horloge, Saint-Ouen, Saint-Maclou, … les fontaines, les vieilles maisons sculptées et l’enorme cathédrale” (Hugo 1076). 20. “%4* B:@F8@6 2,@&. a &FB@4: C@FF4`, :`$,2>@, @H,R,FH&@, 4 , 8"2":@F\, RH@ @>" J0, >, *":,8@” (Karamzin 193). 21. “=@ >4(*, &,F>" >, 4,P JH@4,; *JT" 0,:",H B,D,Z, 4 2&@>8@6 (@:@F 0"&@D@>8" D"2*",HFb >" &ZF@H, &@2*JT>@6” (Karamzin 291). 22. “Ce s˘a-t¸i mai însemn despre ¸tinuturile rhenane, pe care alt¸ii ni le descriu cu atîta entuziasm? Ce e drept, ele sunt foarte frumoase s¸i au în sine ceva atr˘ag˘ator, încît nu-t¸i vine us¸or s˘a despart¸i de ele; îns˘a pentru un transilv˘anean, crede-m˘a, Rhinul cu toate frumuset¸ile sale nu poate face mai mult decît fusese aceea mai nainte de a privi l˘audatele s¸i descîntatele plaiuri rhenane. Cel put¸in pentru mine Rhinul n-are nici o frumuset¸e natural˘a c˘areia asemenea sau mai fermec˘atoare s˘a nu fi aflat în scumpa mea patrie” (Barit¸iu 49). 23. “Und nun, wenn es Abend wird, bei der milden Luft wenige Wolken an den Bergen ruhen, am Himmel mehr stehen als ziehen, und gleich nach Sonnenuntergang das Geschrille der Heuschrecken laut zu werden anfängt, da fühlt man sich doch einmal in der Welt zu Hause und nicht wie geborgt oder im Exil” (Goethe 11:26). 24. “Über die Erde schwebt ein Duft des Tages über, den man nur aus Gemälden und Zeichnungen des Claude kennt” (Goethe 11:174). 25. “Les clochers et les édifices lointains paroissent comme ébauches effacées d’un peintre” (Chateaubriand 4:294). 26. “Le Dante les avoit peut-être vus lorsqu’il a peint dans son Enfer ces sables brûlants ou les flammes éternelles descendent lentement en silence, comme di neve in Alpe senza vento” (Chateaubriand 4:298). 27. “Es ist unbeschreibbar, mit welcher Fröhlichkeit, Naivität und Anmuth die Ilse sich hinunter stürzt über die abentheuerlich gebildeten Felsstücke, die sie in ihrem Laufe findet” (Heine 6:131). 28. “Die Ilse ist eine Prinzessinn, die lachend und blühend den Berg hinab läuft. Wie blinkt im Sonnenschein ihr weißes Schaumgewand!” (Heine 6:131). 29. “Ich bin die Prinzessin Ilse, / Und wohne im Ilsenstein; / Komm mit nach meinem Schlosse, / Wir wollen selig seyn.” (Heine 6:132). 30. “L’histoire d’un pauvre ouvrier de sabots nommé Marandin” (Stendhal 64–71, 178–87, 197–03, 211–3). 31. “Ce que les sots méprisent sous le nom de commérages est, au contraire, la seule histoire qui, dans ce siècle d’affectation, peigne bien un pays” (Stendhal 174). 32. “Vous passeriez vingt ans à Paris, que vous ne connaîtrez pas la France; à Paris les bases de tous les récits sont vagues …. Dans votre petite ville de dix mille âmes, au contraire, vous pouvez … acquérir une certitude suffisante à l’égard de la plupart des faits sur lesquels vous devez baser votre jugement” (Stendhal 175). 33. “Pendant le premier quart. Vous ne savez pas ce que c’est un quart, Madame? Permettez-moi de vous l’expliquer.” Or “Un coffre, tout en nacre et en écaille, un coffre de cinq pieds de long sur deux de large, véritable coffre des Mille et un nuits. Vous vous rappelez, madame: un de ces coffres à l’aide desquels les sultans de Baghdad” (Dumas 71, 164). 34. “Diarios … que ellos llaman impresiones de viajes, en donde cada palabra es un error, cada párrafo un sueño, y cada pagina tal vez mas grávido contra aquellos mismos pueblos a quienes el escritor mientras viajaba iba adulando con sus frases cortesanas, para luego injuriar los con a pluma … y de hablar de lo que no entienden ni han estudiado, ni han observado” (Segovia 12).

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35. “El pintor ha puesto delante de su vista los más bellos paisajes, la atmósfera brillante, el cielo nacardo, la cascada que se deshace en perlas, la verde pradera cuyo límites se confunden con el horizonte; la elevada montaña que va a perderse entre las nubes; el arroyo veloz, serpiente de plata” (Mesonero Romanos 251). 36. “El español que no viaja se denigra” (Bretón de los Herreros 5:128). 37. “En la parcourant, je n’ai point eu d’impressions que je puisse vous raconter: pas la moindre site romantique à décrire, pas de forêt sombre, pas de chapelle isolée, point de torrent, pas de grand bruit nocturne” (Berlioz 1:63). 38. “Je t’ai dit combien, en approchant, on trouvait ensuite la ville elle-même indigne de sa renommée et de sa situation merveilleuse. J’ai cherché … tout ce moyen-âge pittoresque dont l’avaient douée poétiquement nos décorateurs d’opéra: eh bien, tout cela n’était que rêve et qu’invention: à la place de Constance, imaginons Pontoise” (Nerval 23). 39. “Ce ne sont pas les théories administratives dont la France a le plus besoin, c’est l’administration pratique. Il importe donc de bien connaître ce qui se passe ou ce qui s’est passé chez les autres peuples, afin de n’adopter de leur institutions que ce qui pourrait s’appliquer à nos mœurs, à notre caractère, aux progrès de nos lumières …. Telle est l’immense lacune que cette revue est destinée à remplir …. Après tant de livres faux, le livre le plus original qu’on puisse publier doit être un livre vrai …. La politique, comme nous l’entendons … se compose du droit des gens et du droit publique, elle s’occupe … des forces dont chaque pays peut disposer, de ses institutions générales et locales … de l’esprit public, des haines et des affectations nationales; en un mot, de tout ce qui constitue l’organisation et la vie des peuples” (Revue des Deux-Mondes 1:1–2).

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Goethe, J. W. von. 1982. Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Erich Trunz. 14 vols. Hamburg: dtv. Heine, Heinrich. 1973–96. Heinrich Heine: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke. Ed. Manfred Windfuhr. 16 vols. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. Hugo, Victor. 1967. Œuvres complètes. Vol. 5. Édition chronologique publiée sous la direction de Jean Massin. Paris: Le Club français de livre. Karamzin, N. ;. 1984. A4F\