Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770-1840 (Classical Presences)

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter CLASSICAL PRESENCES The texts, ideas, images, and ...

Author: Constanze Guthenke

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter

CLASSICAL PRESENCES The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Placing Modern Greece The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770–1840

¨ THENKE C O N S TA N Z E G U

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Constanze Gu¨thenke 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–923185–0 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Gertrude Niemann

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Acknowledgments This book is about the relationship between the ideal and the materially real, and it has now travelled across four countries and two continents. Eva HoVman, in her biographical essay Lost in Translation, recounts how she was always considered bookish, but how that made her, by her reckoning at least, always less of an idealist and more of a literalist: she knew books were real. Of the places and people who made this book real, my gratitude goes Wrst to my academic advisers in England, who met my interests with curiosity, tolerance, and a great deal of knowledge. In Cambridge, at the very beginning, Nicholas Boyle, Simon Jarvis, and David Holton let German aesthetics and Modern Greece meet. In Oxford, David Constantine, Jim Reed, and Peter Mackridge gave me encouragement and skills in generous measure, which I am profoundly grateful for. Christopher Robinson and Jeremy Adler examined the D.Phil. out of which this book grew, and they pointed me in the right directions. In 2002 I moved on to the New World, and back to an old Weld. My colleagues in Princeton, both in Classics and in Hellenic Studies, took in a wanderer and made sure I knew and know myself at home and in a real place at every step. I hope they know how much of a diVerence they have made to me. Books also need real money. Without the Wnancial assistance of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, the Alexander S. Onassis Public BeneWt Foundation, and Oriel College, Oxford, the sojourns of this book would have been nigh impossible. Grants from Princeton University and the Stanley J. Seeger Fund for Hellenic Studies helped to see new developments, changes, and revisions through, and a sabbatical leave spent at King’s College, Cambridge, gave me both familiar and new ground to stand on. Earlier versions of parts of Chapters 3 and 4 were published in the collection Cultural History and Literary Imagination: German Literature, History, and the Nation, edited by D. Midgley and Ch. Emden (Bern, 2002), and in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies 21/2 (2003). I would like to thank Peter Lang

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publishers and Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to use that material. There have been readers too. Jim Porter oVered a critical eye and his support when it was really wanted; Peter Brown knows the value of thinking in terms of the shape of things; Dimitri Gondicas believed in the shape. Hilary O’Shea and her staV at Oxford University Press have been a treat to work with, and an anonymous reader for OUP encouraged me to stake out territory more clearly. Finally, my family and my friends have given me the love that has sustained me throughout. The eighteenth-century Ottoman poet Sü eyh Galip says it much better than I can: ‘Who comes from the city of friendship wise j will know the true source of our merchandise.’ They know who they are, and how truly and superbly present they are to me, even if some are far away. Lastly, this book is dedicated to my grandmother. While she has never been to Greece, or America, she has been a model for creating realities in many other ways.

Contents Note on Translations and Transliterations

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Introduction: Realizing the Ideal 1. The Form of Greek Landscape 2. ‘I love this land of Greece above all else. It has the colour of my heart’: The Greek Landscape of the German Soul 3. Nature in Arms: German Philhellenism, its Literature, and the Greek War of Independence 4. The Ambivalence of Nature: Poetry for the New Greek State 5. Between Idyll and Abyss: The Greek Land, as seen from the Ionian Islands Epilogue

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191 241

Bibliography Index

247 271

44 93 140

Note on Translations and Transliterations All translations from German and Greek texts (and the little French and Italian there is) are mine, unless otherwise indicated. The translation from Sü eyh Galip’s Beauty and Truth quoted in the Acknowledgments is from Victoria Holbrook’s edition of the work (New York, 2005). The transliteration of Greek is notoriously unstable ground: I have used known English spelling for proper names and places where available, and otherwise tried to be as consistent as possible.

Introduction Realizing the Ideal In a letter to his brother in January 1799, Friedrich Ho¨lderlin resorts to a bold, oddly strained metaphor that seems somewhat dislodged from the auratic reverence he usually reserves for Greece: ‘I, too, with all good intentions can only stumble behind those singular [Greek] people in everything I do and say, and often I do it all the more clumsily and out of tune, because I, like the geese, stand Xat-footed in the waters of modernity, Xapping my powerless wings up towards the Greek sky.’1 The modern individual and artist, aspiring toward Greece, is grounded in a stagnant puddle. Ho¨lderlin’s impotent geese sit plumply against the famous Greek sky that Winckelmann had turned into the pivot of Hellenism only a few decades earlier. The metaphor may be as clumsy as the geese it describes; but the longing it expresses is not only that of Ho¨lderlin, nor is it an accident that he should choose an image from the world of nature to describe the relation of the modern writer to the land that stands in part, or in its entirety, for Greek culture. Even now, Ho¨lderlin’s vision of Greece, like that of many of his German contemporaries, is still often subsumed under the slogan of the ‘tyranny of Greece over Germany’: the term, from Eliza Butler’s well-known 1935 book of that name, focuses on Hellenism as a potentially dangerous idealism centred around the notion of Greek 1 ‘Auch ich mit allem guten Willen, tappe mit meinem Thun und Denken diesen einzigen Menschen in der Welt nur nach, und bin in dem, was ich treibe und sage, oft nur umso ungeschikter und ungereimter, weil ich, wie die Ga¨nse mit platten Fu¨ßen im modernen Wasser stehe, und unma¨chtig zum griechischen Himmel emporXu¨gle.’ Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Sa¨mtliche Werke, ed. F. Beissner (Stuttgart, 1946– ), vi. 307.

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Introduction

spirit, dangerous because it leads, or historically led, to a distorted view of reality.2 Butler’s work, while often quoted, is seldom read in detail these days, but her style betrays the fundamental part the spatial imagination of Greece has played in European Hellenism. As for the impact of Greece on German writers, and the high personal cost this inXuence comes at, she complains that ‘the ideal ‘‘Hellas’’ of their dreams had very little in common with either ancient or modern Greece. None of them ever visited the country; . . . Had they seen with their own eyes its wild, titanic landscapes and experienced its sometimes menacing moods, they would perhaps have recognized that tragic element in Greek poetry and thought which they resolutely ignored and eliminated from their conception of the golden age of Greece’ (pp. x–xi). While the dark, titanic, menacing Greek reality probably owes more to her knowledge of Byron and the visual arts than to a lack of German realism, she continues to present the situation of German thinkers through an even more remarkable vignette: with humankind like children marooned on a big island, so she imagines, some are busy digging and building sandcastles, while others are looking out across the waves. Those children on the edge of the sea, for Butler, are the Germans, ‘taking the island as a symbol for the world and the ocean for an unknown absolute power’; because of this ‘dangerous idealism’, they Wnd themselves exposed and ‘at the mercy of ideas’ (pp. 3–4). Actively subverting two images, that of Odysseus taken hostage on the island of Calypso, and that of Goethe’s Iphigenia, ‘das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchend’ (‘seeking the land of the Greeks with my soul’), she stages her Germans on a grotesque playground of the human condition, that nonetheless is reminiscent of a Greek setting: the world of islands, the deWning sea, a mild climate, and an unspoken assumption that the environment is signiWcant in itself, as much as it lends itself to Wgurative use.

2 Written in 1935, her study of the strongly canonical tradition of German Hellenism was an appropriate and timely critique, laying bare the sinister link between claims to cultural and political supremacy and an actual inversion of freedom in their name. Important as it was, her analysis does not explain fully the particular place which Greece, ancient or modern, occupied in the process and in the practice of German literature.

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Since then, the pull, or tyranny, of Greek nature over representations of and writings on Greece has clearly not abated. The oYcial information material of the Athens Olympic Committee, for example, includes a section on the visual identity of the 2004 Summer Games: the Wrst item mentioned is a colour-scheme designed to reXect the natural colours of Greece: earthy tones, sea- and skyblue, a particular quality of light. But quite beyond the Olympics and the visual culture of the tourism industry, the same observation holds true: of the aspects of Hellenism and of the attributes of Greece, the natural features of Greece are probably among the most unquestioned and those most resilient to critical re-examination. Although the constructed character of space and place are by and large acknowledged in recent critical approaches to landscape, mapping, cultural geography and its literature, the use of nature imagery and the expectations and mechanisms applying to this use have, especially when it comes to evaluating Romantic Hellenism, taken the place of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘purloined letter’: they are the object hidden in plain view. This study, therefore, takes issue with one of the most lasting features of Hellenism: its fascination with Greece’s materiality, not as it opposes but as it is inseparable from its ideality. ‘Idealism’, as an attitude towards Greece, I suggest, does not preclude attention to the material aspects of the land of Greece; quite on the contrary, the sheer placeness and ostensible presence has for a long time played a functional part in imagining Greece and in seeing positive value in that act of imagination. To suggest contact with the real as a powerful corrective to the idealizing tendencies, as Butler implies for Germany, is therefore beside the point. Not only are the Romantic and Idealist attitudes she suspects not free from engagement with historical, political, and geographical realities; but, more importantly, the materiality against which modern Greece was and sometimes still is placed, is actively part and parcel of what makes for its idealization in the Wrst instance. There has been remarkable tenacity to single out Greece, ancient or modern, for the enduring character of its natural features; its particularity of place, at the same time, was and continues to be thought extraordinarily suitable to embody universal concepts. One such concept was that of freedom, or emancipation, and it was during the heyday of European Hellenism in the eighteenth and nineteenth

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centuries that the place of Greece came to stand as a material symbol, yet with a share of the unattainable that matched the dynamic workings of the Romantic symbol. Michael Herzfeld, writing on the workings of the external and internal perception of contemporary Greece, talks of iconicity, or ‘persuasive resemblance’, as an underestimated factor in anthropological Weldwork and in anthropological theory alike; one of the examples he uses is the resemblance between Greece, that is, the Greek nation, and its nature, in other words, the seeming naturalness of Greece and the argumentative force derived from it. Such a type of iconic equation he treats as ‘one of the semiotic processes most resistant to analysis, and a prime ‘‘back-grounder’’ of itself ’;3 that is to say, the ‘naturalness’ that is one half of the equation feeds into the unspoken assumption that further analysis is superXuous. What I suggest in this present study, therefore, is an analysis in terms of the enabling, and partly disabling, logic of aesthetic perception and representation of nature, as landscape and physical environment, as it was current from the late eighteenth century and as it was particularly eVective with regard to representing Greece, both outside and inside of what became the new Greek nation state. While John Berger famously described landscape as ‘a way of seeing’,4 we ought to consider such a way of seeing also as a historically formed category, especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at a time when Hellenism and the valuation of nature as a central aesthetic and social term constantly merge and reXect each other. I am interested in singling out the historical aesthetics, making the aesthetic an important part of representation alongside historical, social, and political factors, which is in line with its role at the time, and which also accords with calls for considering representation as a historical factor.5 Given the recent interest in space and place as a category relevant to Modern Greek Studies, my hope is that, beyond acknowledging the workability, or attractiveness, of place as a fashionable category of analysis now, it is possible and indeed desirable to explain the particular, and apparently still lasting, success of its imagery in the period in 3 Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State (London, 1996), 99. 4 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, 1972). 5 e.g. by Luisa Passerini, ‘History and Semoitics’, Historein, 1 (1999), 11–36.

Introduction

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question. This is a period where the seemingly simple statement that nature is natural is often made, yet nature is precisely not ever meant to be ‘simply’ natural; in fact it is highly ambiguously so. It is the signiWcance and the relative instability of nature, coupled with the promise and value it was aVorded, that also makes it functional in the framework of Hellenism. The argument I put forward about aesthetic representation of Greece is, broadly speaking, the following: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a key period of attention to Greece ancient and modern across Europe, are, as is well known, preoccupied with the complex, estranged relation of man (or, by extension, artist, scholar, or society) vis-a`-vis nature. Such estrangement from nature Wnds a parallel feeling of separation from the past. At the same time both kinds of estrangement are understood to be conditions of modernity and of its possibilities to express itself. Greece, as a material, physical, present place, is the intersection of those trends and discourses; it is a place where questions about unity can be articulated: whether unity is understood in a political sense, that of temporal continuity, that of subjectivity, or that of representation. Materiality infused with meaning becomes the lens through which Greece is viewed, while nature imagery is prominently used to include the spectator in the act of observation. The result is an authority of nature that has reverberations and consequences to this day. At the same time, it is an authority that demands distance and that ‘runs’, so to speak, on the ambivalence of that nature. Like a visually ambiguous Wgure, it can foreground disunity or disillusionment as much as correspondence or continuity, progress as much as violent onrush. Ho¨lderlin’s Xapping is powered by the same practice of perception as the pronouncement by the Greek poet A. R. Rangavis in 1867, that ‘[the Greek’s] nationality is a spring of exhaustless waters; it may run concealed under mountains of oppression, as certain rivers of his own country disappear for miles beneath the surface, to break forth at last, as they do, with undiminished force and freshness. If these waters be pent up, they will inevitably overXow their banks, and deluge the land which they would otherwise fructify and adorn.’6 Romantic aesthetics develops with great energy and a sense 6 A. R. Rangavis, Greece: Her Progress and Present Position (New York, 1867), 156.

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Introduction

of motion the questions that arise from modernity and its palpable eVects. The attachment to material places or persons, however, that encourages self-reXection in the Wrst place, is both ordering and destabilizing. If we look closely at this practice of perception, it becomes clear that the encounter with the land of Greece is not only expressed through, but conditioned by the trajectory of realizing or materializing the ideal. What is more, this is an undertaking that in Romantic aesthetics is fundamentally related to the dynamic of the symbol. As a place full of material remnants of its cultural past, and occupying a territory that was (politically and historically) not yet Wxed, Greece was ostensibly blessed with a natural environment that was thought essential to its historical character. It was past and present, and yet it was incomplete. As a material metaphor it was meaningful, and, being particular, it pointed beyond itself to the universal. This, in turn, is a structure shared with the main preoccupations of Romanticism and its forms of representation. In the Wrst chapter, I will treat more fully this enabling form of Hellenism and the crucial part representation of Greek nature plays in it—Hellenism understood as an umbrella term that includes the valuation of, especially ancient, Greek culture; political and cultural Philhellenism, that is, the external support of modern Greece as an independent national and cultural entity, and neo-Hellenism, that is, the valuation of modern Greece from outside and from within. Before doing that, I would like to situate and justify my approach and its scope more clearly within the critical study of landscape in literature and literary representations. In Welds as diverse as literature, cultural and historical studies, art history, geography, anthropology, and archaeology there is wide agreement now that landscape is both selective and relative to an observer and hence to be interpreted as such.7 Landscape, so the 7 e.g. Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford, 1999); Barbara Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Providence, RI, 1993); C. S. Bourassa, The Aesthetics of Landscape (London, 1991); Daniel Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Cambridge, 1984; 2nd rev. edn., Madison, Wisc., 1998); id. and Stephen Daniels (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge, 1988); Chris Fitter, Poetry, Space, Landscape (Cambridge, 1995); Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon (eds.), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (Oxford, 1995); along similar lines, Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places,

Introduction

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consensus has it, represents a section of the natural world perceived according to certain human patterns, intentions, and discourses, and in turn responding to them. In other words, the critiquing of representation, and its particular link to materiality and spatiality as an organizing experience, has arrived in disciplines studying hitherto ‘hard’ realities, and has made their ways of seeing as much subject to critique and analysis as speciWcally literary or artistic representations already are.8 Given the interdependence of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’,9 landscape is just as much part of that process where both concepts, as constructs, mutually shape and transform each other. As a sign system indicative of social organization and processes, landscape is even best understood as a process itself,10 involved in the shaping of individual or social identity and its power relations.11 Theories of biological determinism and habitat have, since the 1970s,12 been modiWed in favour of analysing the epistemological frameworks that account for our ‘cognitive mappings’,13 and the cultural-historical conditions in Paths and Monuments (Oxford, 1994); more literary, Joseph Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, 1995); rich in material, although somewhat impressionistic, is Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1996). For a summary of approaches, see Richard Muir, Approaches to Landscape (London, 1998), esp. 212–70; for a summary of literary studies, Barbara Korte, ‘Sehweisen literarischer Landschaft. Ein Literaturbericht’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 44/3 (1994), 255–65. 8 Sara Blair, ‘Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary’, American Literary History, 10/3 (1998), 544–67. 9 ‘Culture is said to be one of the two or three most complex words in the English language, and the term which is sometimes considered to be its opposite—nature—is commonly accorded the accolade of being the most complex of all;’ Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford, 2000), 1, with reference to Raymond Williams, ‘Ideas of Nature’, in J. Benthall (ed.), Ecology, the Shaping Enquiry (London, 1972), 147–64. 10 Eric Hirsch, ‘Landscape: Between Place and Space’, in Hirsch and O’Hanlon, Anthopology of Landscape, 1–30, 22 f. 11 e.g. W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago, 1994); Martin Warnke, Political Landscape: The Art History of Europe (London, 1994). G. Rose, Feminism and Geography (Cambridge, 1993), similarly approaches the interpretation of speciWc landscapes through an investigation of the social power structures and the relation of culture and society at work in each case, drawing on theoretical tenets of a Marxist-humanist tradition. 12 Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London, 1975; 2nd, rev. edn., 1996) and The Poetry of Habitat (Hull, 1978). 13 On cognitive mapping, see T. McNamara, ‘Mental Representation of Spatial Relations’, Cognitive Psychology, 18 (1986), 87–121; R. M. Kitchin, ‘Cognitive Maps: What Are They and Why Study Them?’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 14 (1994), 1–19.

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Introduction

which representations of landscape are produced. It was in those Welds that the study of place received new critical impetus, mainly from a shared interest in the ‘articulation of space as a social product, one that masks the conditions of its own formation’:14 the result was a new wave of cultural geography, drawing on Marxist cultural critique, French (post-)structuralism, English political economy, post-colonial theory, and insights from sociology, urban studies, and cultural studies, while art history contributed the concept of iconography, that is, the theoretical and historical study of pictorial symbols, and the focus on landscape as a ‘way of seeing’.15 Cosgrove and Daniels, for example, developed the notion of landscape as a ‘cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolizing surroundings’.16 The present study, though not concerned with visual representations of Greece and a speciWcally art-historical approach,17 relies to no lesser degree on the contextual interpretation of the symbolic imagery as a hermeneutic principle. The notion of the symbolic value or function, however, is not self-explanatory,18 and it is most certainly not so within the all-out reXective context of Romanticism. We need to question the changing meaning of what a ‘symbolic relation’ is in the Wrst place, so as to evaluate the semantic range of a particular landscape and the ways it is historically represented. Recent work on ‘ethno-symbolism’ as a method of studying nationalism and its forms of representation, likewise, is a good step forward, but it does not usually ask or explain what the expectations connected with the possibility of symbolic representation actually are 14 Blair, ‘Cultural Geography’, 544. 15 Cosgrove popularized the expression for landscape research in his seminal study on the public paintings of Early Modern Italian city-states, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984). The phrase is originally that of Erwin Panofsky, reused by Berger, whose emphasis on social and economic factors shaping the perception of landscape as ideological, is shared by Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973). 16 ‘Introduction: Iconography and Landscape’, in Cosgrove and Daniels, Iconography, 2. 17 As done, for example, in Christoph H. Heilmann, and Erika Ro¨diger-Diruf (eds.), Landschaft als Geschichte: Carl Rottmann 1797–1850, Hofmaler Ko¨nig Ludwig I, (Munich, 1998); Richard Stoneman, A Luminous Land: Artists Discover Greece (Los Angeles, 1998); Fani-Maria Tsigakou, The Rediscovery of Greece: Travellers and Painters of the Romantic Era (London, 1981). 18 Cosgrove hints as much in the introduction to the second, revised edition of Social Formation (1998).

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at any given time.19 When attention is directed to the verbal representations of landscape, the concepts of image and symbol should themselves be part of the context that is under scrutiny. The notion of a symbolic relation, even if the constructed character of space is duly stressed, is still often used in too unquestioning a way: a symbolic relation, like metaphor, does not simply equal the correspondence of signiWer and signiWed; rather, it tends to imply the more complex relation of parts to wholes. Interestingly, it is recent work on the language of archaeology that seems to be most aware of this aspect of symbolic place, and it is an eVect that goes well with a more general retraining of the scholarly eye on landscape as both material and Wgurative.20 In the wake of the critical rediscovery of the construction, ideologically or cognitively, of many ‘objective’ realities, notes of warning have also been sounded not to underestimate the resistance, or ‘weight’, which the material world, despite its malleable ‘thingness’, quite literally exerts.21 Post-modern ‘culturalism’, so the cautioning goes, cannot evade material reality and the experience of nature by claiming that, as a concept, nature is cultural.22 The growing Weld of ‘ecocriticism’ in literary criticism, which studies the representation of nature as a factor shaping human attitudes to the environment and their direct impact on it, is one area that has particularly insisted on instilling the study of (almost exclusively British) Romanticism again with a sense of the importance of material nature, and of the relative and generative ‘strangeness’ of the natural world inherent in Idealism.23 19 e.g. as presented in A. D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Cambridge, 2001); or the contributions in Nations and Nationalism 10/1–2 (2004). 20 e.g. Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford, 1999); Rosemary Joyce, The Languages of Archaeology: Dialogue, Narrative and Writing (Oxford, 2002). 21 A discussion comparable to that about the place and ‘weight’ of material nature is that of the role of the body in gender studies; see, with admirable clarity, Toril Moi, ‘What is a Woman? Sex, Gender, and the Body in Feminist Theory’, in What is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford, 1999), 3–120. 22 e.g. Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Oxford, 1995); Kenneth Olwig, ‘Recovering the Substantive Meaning of Landscape’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 86/4 (1996), 630–53. 23 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Boston, 1995); The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, Mass., 2005).

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Introduction

The aim of this study, then, is to heed and combine two of the avenues suggested by recent work on landscape. Looking at the speciWc aesthetics of Romantic Hellenism from within means to reintegrate the generative aspect of materiality into an investigation of Idealist and Romantic artistic representation; a notion of perception and representation, moreover, that fundamentally builds on the mutual constructive inXuence of the subject and the phenomenal world, which studies of landscape have so recently (re-)discovered. Within Modern Greek Studies, too, place and space have become concepts of critical leverage. Artemis Leontis, for example, in her innovative study of mainly late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek writing on Greek place, relies on precepts of post-modern geography to recapture space as a category of constant reinvestment, and to make space visible above or against history.24 While the recent critical fashion for placeness has itself come under justiWed criticism for its evasion of history, for trying to revert the prioritizing of temporality over spatiality, thereby replacing one ideology with another,25 the representation of Greece is a particularly interesting case: here, place has taken up a very speciWc position across time, in the sense of providing a crucial and signiWcant environment for what is considered essential about Greece, especially with regard to its history or historicity. The frisson of an unchanging space (horizontal, stable) in relation to history (vertical, changing), both aVecting each other and making each other visible, has been part of the logic of Hellenism since the eighteenth century. The materiality of Greece, as an indicator of the past, and the subsequent question of its territorial reality especially around and after 1821, rendered verbal and literary representations of the Greek land appropriately expressive of the tension between real and ideal;26 24 Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Ithaca, NY, 1995). 25 Roberto M. Dainotto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Ithaca, NY, 2000). 26 If I mention only verbal representations, it is not because the same pattern would not also apply to visual representations. I simply restrict myself here to the literary sphere, as I feel that the analysis of visual images would require a diVerent set of categories and tools of interpretation. For the fact that this tension is not only fundamental to Romanticism but has particular purchase in the history of what is considered ‘classical’, see James Porter, ‘The Materiality of Classical Studies’, Parallax, 9/4 (2003), 64–74.

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Greece is not merely an ideal as an ‘ab-sense’, to use Vangelis Calotychos’s recent term, or a somewhat empty transcendence.27 Quite on the contrary, the thrill of materiality, speciWc to its historical period and its aesthetic preoccupations and assumptions, keeps the preoccupation going and infuses Greece with meaning. Pace Calotychos’s pun, Greece ‘matters’ enormously.28 A few more words are necessary here on the terminology and understanding of Hellenism and Romanticism respectively. Jennifer Wallace, in her reconsideration of the Romantic Hellenism of Shelley, has made a good case for the structural interdependence of classical and modern Greece in respect of their literary and political perception.29 For that same reason, I here use the term Hellenism, as mentioned above, as a shorthand to include the positive investment of ancient Greece as a cultural system, the political Philhellenism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the imagination of modern Greece, or neo-Hellenism, both outside and within Greece. This is not meant to suggest that modern Greece has to be viewed, inevitably, through the lens of antiquity; instead, it suggests that representations of contemporary Greece, and critical approaches to it, have owed (and still owe) much to the structural position that suspends Greece between its own antiquity and any given observer’s modernity. While classical Hellenism denoted a cultural deWnition of the self, based on the positive evaluation of Greek antiquity and its ideals of beauty and freedom in their relevance for modernity, historical Philhellenism, as an extension, included the concern with ‘returning’ such positive evaluation to the modern-day Greeks in support of their political, national, and cultural emancipation. There was, however, a strong interplay of both phenomena, across Europe and especially so in Germany, coming to a head around 1821. This is not the place to consider Hellenism through the phenomenon of hellenizing or classicizing literature, that is, as deWned by the literary staging of classical artistic forms or motives or ancient settings. Hellenism, rather than Classicism, could become the paradigm of a certain ‘applied’ modernity that was able or willing to integrate in 27 Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (Oxford, 2004). 28 Ibid. 32. 29 Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke, 1997).

12

Introduction

new forms what it considered its deWning past (not excluding the allure of ancient models). Aesthetic and political (Phil-)Hellenisms were equally concerned with issues of autonomy, which means that the manifestations of political Philhellenism were strongly coloured by the position in which aesthetic Hellenism had come to hold the land of Greece for observation. Chapter 3 will look at the eVects of political Philhellenism upon literary production, still shaped by the images of a modern Greek landscape that had been part of Hellenism before the events of 1821. Here, too, Germany is a particularly instructive case. ‘Germany’ itself is a shorthand, as the German nation state proper did not come into existence before 1871, which makes the confrontation with a new Greek nation state all the more pronounced, seeing that the dynamic of Hellenism banked on the versatility, or ambivalence, of the organicist language it employed. The ‘naturalness’ of Greek culture, ancient and modern, promised translation and threatened instability alike, to the extent that natural development could include degeneration as much as progress and assimilation. The classical Hellenism of Germany, although particularly strong, was not an isolated phenomenon in the European context, nor was it restricted to a rareWed intellectual pursuit. Its eVects and its transformation into institutionalized forms were particularly strong and long-lasting, even if it is imperative to remember the oppositional, emancipatory direction of a small in-group it Wrst possessed. As Suzanne Marchand diagnoses it, the development of Germany’s national self-identiWcation with the Greeks, precisely in its explicit rejection of the culture of Augustan ‘neo-classicism’, did create a new complex of ideas and ambitions. The singling out of Greece and its rhetorical elevation above Rome were distinctly the product of late Enlightenment social and political conditions, and the extraordinary group of inXuential intellectuals who shaped this fetish cast a long shadow over German cultural developments in the two centuries to follow.30

For this overall small ‘extraordinary’ circle of intellectuals in the late eighteenth century, classical scholarship and humanist Bildung as a means of self-transformation oVered a twist to the old canon of 30 Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, 1996), 4.

Introduction

13

subjects. While it did not change the reliance on state employment for the learned professions, there began all the same its move toward institutional establishment. The promise of cultural identity bestowed by a shared Hellenism could give that group, faced with an undeWned role in a quickly diVerentiating social system, an edge: in terms of individual or group identiWcation, this was an edge in an environment where the place of the intellectual was disputed; in terms of national identity, it was also the edge over the neighbours, particularly France.31 With the increasing establishment of the educational ideas of the neo-humanists, most prominently in the restructuring of the school curriculum and the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1809 under Wilhelm von Humboldt, Bildung (meaning Hellenic Bildung) was set on its successful course to become a characteristic of the educated middle classes. And yet, the marginal, precarious position of the intellectual lingered on (not least in the self-perception of the Romantics), fuelled by their attention to the modern subject position in philosophy, aesthetics, and political thought. It is this forceful sense of novelty, of revisiting the meaning and workings of nature, self, knowledge, art, or history, that had a centre in German thought of the late eighteenth century. With the reception of German thought by the English Romantics, or the wave of translations and adaptations of Goethe’s Werther across Europe a decade earlier, there was an eVect far beyond the conWnes of the country that did in fact not yet exist as a uniWed nation. When Terry Pinkard states that ‘from its inception, [idealist philosophy] was controversial, always hard to understand and almost always described as German’, he points to an important factor that is valid also for the notion of Hellenism and Philhellenism.32 Even if the enthusiasm for Greece seems less forbidding and more popular than Idealist thought, the bias Pinkard describes attaches itself to German 31 On the genesis of the intellectual and writer within the cultural nation, see Bernhard Giesen, Intellectuals and the German Nation: Collective Identity in an Axial Age (Cambridge, 1998), 80–102; on classical scholarship more fully Marchand, Down from Olympus, 1–74; Ingo Gildenhard, ‘Philologia perennis? Classical Scholarship and Functional DiVerentiation’, in id. and Martin Ru¨hl (eds.), Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politics in Germany in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wilamowitz (London, 2003), 161–204. 32 Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge, 2002), 2.

14

Introduction

Grecophilia too, which seems to this day respectfully invoked as easily as it is knowingly looked down upon. The question whether German Idealist thought is easily subsumed under German or, for that matter, European Romanticism is another question. For the purposes of the present study I am factually doing that for the following reasons. The concerns expressed in German philosophical aesthetics laid the basis for those of Romanticism and its eVect on Hellenism, as I will show in Chapter 1. Moreover, even if the tendencies of later eighteenth-century writing can justiWably be divided into strands such as those of Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang) or Sentimentality (EmpWndsamkeit), I agree with Virgil Nemoianu’s deWnition that such ‘pre-romantic’ elements are ‘best understood as a series of accretions, of complementary or opposing features grafted onto the predominant eighteenth-century model even while modifying it’.33 The same goes for late Romanticism as a reassessment and modiWcation of the elements of Romantic aesthetics. What seems most important to me though is that those strands, which certainly deserve diVerentiation, were ascribed to ‘German Romanticism’ from outside Germany early on and with lasting consequences. Paradigmatic is the example of Mme de Stae¨l’s De l’Allemagne (1810/13) and the eVect her account (considered ‘unFrench’ by her censors) had on various literary scenes (England, France, Italy, Greece) in their perception of ‘canonical’ Romantic works.34 To be named, Romanticism needed to be communicated. The dynamics of communication are the fabric of Romanticism. If the world is conWgured as a magniWcent cipher or chiVre, a secret language (as Novalis would have it; see Chapters 1 and 5), it is communication that aims to make this chiVre, this writing of the map visible. The parallel and mutually convertible realms of exterior and interior match that: the journey towards the interior delights in and despairs over the same logic as journeying on the outside. At the 33 Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 23. 34 John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Stae¨l’s ‘De l’Allemagne’, 1810–1813 (Cambridge, 1994); Lilian Furst, ‘Mme de Stae¨l’s De L’Allemagne: A Misleading Intermediary’, in The Contours of European Romanticism (London, 1979), 56–73; on the prehistory of Stae¨l’s version of Germany, David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago, 1993), 84–103.

Introduction

15

same time, the nature of images and the relations implied is the very content of Romanticism. The image as a manifestation of something beyond itself is one of its main concerns, and it is deliberate that the boundaries between image and actual object, as much as the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, life and art, exterior and interior, are Xuid ones. Yet Romanticism is fundamentally propelled by reXection. The desire of pinpointing, of realizing and grounding a new reality, is balanced by the reXective act that Wlls manifestations with extensive, excessive meaning, that creates desire, and that renders its fulWlment inWnitely deferred. The fact that Hellenism and Romanticism are so often, and often uncritically, paired together is not only a question of historiography. What both have in common is their programmatic self-understanding as movements, making movement one of their constitutive elements. Romanticism was preoccupied with the perplexing question of unity, and it crystallized as a concept, across Europe, through mutual observation and description, as much as by self-deWnition. In the process, the claim to the transgressing and unifying potential of Romantic production became a condition for staking out national and individual variance. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is a period of increased nationalization, but also one of awareness and examination of how those individual units are linked. The grand theme of unity and disunity (which reappears as a core theme of political Philhellenism), and of relative dependence, is therefore not just played out on the political stage, but is essential to the preoccupation of the two movements with their own structure. Ostensibly universal, yet deWned through particularity, Romanticism and Hellenism are based on relations. And again, nature imagery has a prominent part in visualizing their momentum. How this is prominent in the language responding to the Greek War of Independence I will show especially in Chapter 3. Fortunately, Romanticism, like its nature and landscapes, is these days studied as deliberately universal and connective, but also programmatically insisting on particular, national or individual manifestations.35 I therefore suggest to 35 e.g. Gregory Maertz (ed.), Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature (Albany, NY, 1998); Angela Esterhammer (ed.), Romantic Poetry (Amsterdam, 2002); Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago, 2003).

16

Introduction

do the same with Hellenism, and to begin by looking at the case of (modern) Greece, where the relation both to Hellenism and to Romanticism is a prominent and contentious issue throughout the nineteenth century. How is Romantic Hellenism received in Greece? What does it mean to inhabit the excessively meaningful reference point of Hellenism and to write from and about it? One consequence is the strong ambivalence towards Greek landscape that emerges from the writings of the early nation-state period, an ambivalence that is maybe also directed towards the project of modernity as a whole. Artemis Leontis and Stathis Gourgouris have each recently argued for an understanding of Hellenism as a project, and a topographical one at that, in which the site of Greece has to be produced.36 To enlist authors challenged to write from within that place of Greece allows not only a new take on the problematic imagery of Greece, but it also gives a new dimension to the study of Hellenism as a trans-national movement whose assumptions and structural tensions repay attention. How to measure and conceptualize that interaction then, especially when bearing in mind the persistent notion, suggested and agonized over in Greek writing, of an inXuencing Romanticism? Goethe had his own characteristically curt answer to the puzzle of inXuence and movement: ‘The all-in-all foolishness of pre- and postoccupations, of plagiarisms and half-quotations seems to me so clear and yet so triXing. If something is in the air and if the time asks for it, the same can originate in a hundred heads at once without anyone having to borrow from anyone else.’37 Responsiveness to ‘something in the air’ is exactly part of the imagery that I am out to catch. We are dealing with a time suVused and saturated with nature imagery, which is indeed ‘in the air’, although I am far from claiming Goethe’s imagery as a suYcient model to explain the literary tendencies and appropriations of Romantic aesthetic patterns. What needs to be done is to take such programmatic statements seriously, insofar as 36 Leontis, Topographies; Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996). 37 ‘Die sa¨mtlichen Narrheiten von Pra¨- und Postokkupationen, von Plagiaten und Halbentwendungen sind mir so klar und erscheinen mir la¨ppisch. Denn was in der Luft ist und was die Zeit fordert, das kann in hundert Ko¨pfen auf einmal entspringen, ohne daß einer dem andern abborgt.’ Letter to Zelter, 7 Nov. 1816; Sa¨mtliche Werke, 35 (Frankfurt, 1999), 58.

Introduction

17

they reveal strategies of self-positioning, backgrounding their structural assumptions. It has certainly been recognized that Greek responses to European discursive models, be they literary, political, or institutional, were not smooth; in the chapter on Athenian Romanticism I will comment on older scholarly evaluations of such transfers that have operated in terms of derivation and imitation. While rebarbative reception has, in the meantime, been reread as resistance, with a view to the diVerent function those imports fulWl, ‘resistance’ leaves a broad range of meaning. Who or what does the resisting? Jusdanis rightly speaks of the imported models of national literary culture, and of literature as an institution, that do not function like their European counterparts, and that ‘are resisted’:38 but what to make of that passive voice here? Are they deliberately resisted by individual Greek writers? Or is there, more likely in the case he makes, a resistance, or obstruction, caused by the framework of the resisted model, too? Shannan Peckham has examined such resistance in terms of the instability of the nation as a category open to constant reworkings, ‘emphasizing nationalism’s internal tensions and . . . the often discordant political visions that it contains’.39 By looking at the aesthetics of Romantic Hellenism in relation to representing landscape and physical surroundings, I hope to show that unstable categories do not only have social-political signiWcance, aVecting among other things the institutions of literary practice and production, but that the European, Romantic representation of the Greek land aVects the relative stability (or instability) of the very imagery with which the literature of the new state operated—and which still has purchase in images of contemporary Greece now. Representations of Greece by way of its characteristic nature and environment are the point of communication between Greece and Europe. Whether it is successful communication, however, depends on how 38 Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis, 1991), p. xii; in The Necessary Nation (Princeton, 2001), Jusdanis integrates an account of the Greek rebarbative perceptions of belatedness and progress into a larger critical defence of nationalism as a necessary force of modernization. 39 Robert S. Peckham, National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece (London and New York, 2001), p. x.

18

Introduction

we evaluate how much, or how little, the structure of representing Greece makes possible its own translation. In preview, then, what are the elements that make up the matrix for the imagination of Greek nature? SpeciWc localities, often ancient, function as symbolic markers; the description of general climatic and geographical conditions that are given explanatory force in the interpretation of cultural development and aesthetic experience; lastly Greek landscape, determined by temporality yet indicating continuity (as a form of unity), able to reXect and shape the disposition of the artist per se and in relation to society. From here two aspects of the relation between landscape and its ‘recipients’ evolve: the perception and description of speciWc landscape has implications for the author and artist, while the landscape is also considered proper to its Greek inhabitants who are invested with a particular aYnity to their natural environment. On the one hand, this second aspect accounts for descriptions of supporting nature as acting in accordance with its inhabitants, a central feature in the poetry surrounding the Greek War of Independence; on the other hand this implies an image of Greek poetry, rooted within that natural environment, as an immediate and free response to nature. In practice, this ostensibly close link between the Greeks and their natural environment falls out in the appropriation of modes of folk literature both outside and in Greece. As a consequence, in Greek writing, certainly of the Wrst decade after the achievement of independence, there is much less emphasis on the references to classical antiquity, even while the theme of revival and regeneration is essential. To this end a reservoir of imagery is in use, partly familiar from European philhellenic and Romantic writing, that elaborates the Romantic correspondence of the individual and his particular (Greek) environment and that inevitably results in ambiguity. The use of some of the philhellenic motives by writers of the Wrst decade of Greek statehood (such as Alexandros Rizos Rangavis or Panagiotis Soutsos) is complex, but they, too, cannot avoid the necessary split into a Greek antiquity and a European modernity, which leaves Greece in a limbo, trying to stake a claim to both sides. A writer like Dionysios Solomos, on the other hand, while silent on classical antiquity, ostensibly treats of speciWc Greek localities; but he does so by relying on an interpretation of the Romantic symbol that seems to render the representation of the Greek land impossible altogether.

Introduction

19

The aim of this study is not simply to investigate the aesthetic representation of nature; but to examine a particular historical situation when nature, aesthetics, and writing about Greece come together to make modern Greece highly functional within Romantic representation. It is also to show the boundaries and, by way of those boundaries, the workings of Romantic representation (and representation of Romantic writing) when it comes to the translation of Romantic images of Greece to Greek writing itself, taking shape in the new state. In that sense, Greek Romanticism can stand as a corrective to the inherent dynamics of Romanticism, as it shows the structural place of Greece within that system, through the problematic relationship which Greek intellectuals had with Greek geography. With such an approach, we may be able to go beyond explanatory models of nostalgia or common idealism or ‘tyranny’, whether as a model for German Hellenism, or for the transformation of European literary and cultural trends in Greece. Instead, I believe the issue of how to attach the ideal to a speciWc place can be the key to the discourses on antiquity, modernity, emancipation, subjectivity, and art, as they combined in literary representations of Greece, in the sense of explaining why they formed such a powerful mesh and how they also became hostage (if one wants to stay with the imagery of tyranny and freedom) to the logic that linked those strands. My hope is to end up with a more complex view on Hellenism that is at the same time able to explain some of its recurring features better than as arising out of habit, a somewhat elusive ‘Germanness’ or a very generally deWned Romanticism, which is still often invoked to denote idealization of a more or less detrimental degree. The trope of attraction by and disillusionment with Greece, which I am sure often translated into real experience too, is structurally keyed to the mode of imagining and representing Greece as a place. The vision of Greece, Idealist rather than ideal, cannot function without the pull of materiality. When Greece, in the nineteenth century, becomes characterized by its meaningful material nature, its tyranny, in consequence, could not be but fragile. It was, after all, Ho¨lderlin’s waters of modernity, reXecting the Greek sky, that were keeping the geese grounded, rather than the towering sky overwhelming them.

1 The Form of Greek Landscape Nature, Klingsohr replied, is to our feeling mind what a body is to the light. It absorbs it; it reXects it in peculiar colours. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen

When, in the spring of 1821, uprisings across the part of the Ottoman Empire hitherto known as ‘Turkey in Europe’ sent ripples of sympathy across the Western world, provoking calls for the liberation of Greece, the light of Hellenism had indeed come to hit on an indubitably material bulk. The expanse of Greek territory, all of a sudden, appeared potential and fact alike, producing peculiar colours before the minds of its observers. With the insurrections of the Greek Orthodox population in 1821 the body of Greece, its material extent, moved to the foreground. A cause and an object for reXection it had been already, but now, by its physical presence and promise, it acquired an extra weight that demanded response. One of the initial questions guiding this study was whether the advent of Greece as a territorial, and eventually political, entity, a decidedly modern, present Greece, wrought a change in the representation of modern Greece as a topos of Hellenism in the decades before 1821. What this study argues is that we see an intensiWcation of aesthetic vocabulary, which owes its form and dynamic structure to idealist Romanticism that invested images of nature, and of Greek nature in particular, with authority and with a particular propensity to signify freedom and emancipation of the self; a gain, however, that is of necessity interlocked with alienation from this material ‘body’. To stay with Novalis’s image, liberating potential is inscribed in the body of Greek nature, which then throws the light back onto the viewer.

The Form of Greek Landscape

21

The body of Greece had, until then, largely been made up of the manifestations of what was considered classical civilization, in other words the bulk of its works of art, material or textual. This by no means excluded attention to the physical aspects of Greece, ancient or modern. Travel to Greece, that is, the acquaintance with its geographical and natural conditions, had been on the increase throughout the eighteenth century, although not everywhere in equal measure (on which see more in Chapter 2 below). By the end of that century, the ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’, the intellectual controversy that had dominated discussions on the nature of imitation, especially in France and Germany, for nearly a hundred years after Charles Perrault’s treatise of that name, had factually come to a conclusion: against the normative standing of classical forms and art works, the position of the ‘moderns’ had prevailed; its basis was the historicizing argument that ancient and modern art belonged in the Wrst instance to their respective proper spheres.1 Despite the military metaphor and the ardency of the debate, the victory did not so much imply a disregard for ancient models, as a shift in their claims to absoluteness. Released from their function as exclusive models, the manifestations of Greek nature and culture could now shine in a new, even authoritative, light of distance. The attention to the material remains of Greece and to its natural features further underlined the play with proximity and distance that had outlasted the Querelle, which left in its wake a newly smouldering question: not only whether imitation of ancient models was desirable but whether such a bridging of a historical and necessary gap was actually possible. Novalis’s quotation points the way to the key artistic concerns of the time that framed the image of Greece: for one, the intense attention to the task of representing reality and to the artistic process itself, vis-a`-vis nature. Nature is understood to reXect feeling and to provoke reXection, a reXective moment that is relevant to artistic perception as much as to rational and historical understanding. These related strands of individuality, modernity, and nature, I will argue in this chapter, converge particularly strongly on the place of Greece, which, within Romantic logic, would relate to its ancient 1 Charles Perrault, Paralle`le des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences, ed. and introd. H.-R. Jauss (Munich, 1964).

22


past as represented nature relates to its pre-modern experience. ReXection is bought at the cost of distance from nature, and Greece, while encouraging reXection and modernity, is at the same time distinguished by its elusive promise of reality, presence, and naturalness. In other words, it is the very presence, or the expectation of modern Greece as a physically speciWc and yet highly signiWcant location that gives it the structural position it has in Romantic Hellenism. Hellenism, as it is understood in this study, relies on including in its horizon a modern, contemporaneous Greece, to uphold the structure of this horizon, and it is thrilled by the very fact of its materiality. The aim is to explain this Romantic Hellenism from within, to unravel the grammar of its language, and to look at the representations of Greece, which are themselves historically constructed and aesthetically functional in a very speciWc way. The repertoire of Hellenism is not exhausted with reference to the familiar monuments. Consequently, this is not a study about the fascination with ancient works of art and the classical sites. Nor is it a study concentrating on the inevitably constructed (and in many ways constructive) character of mapping. For these Welds there are insightful studies.2 On a spatial scale, the present study inhabits a middle ground: that of the ‘surrounding’ nature, the highly signiWcant environment of the artefacts, the physical and aesthetic landscapes that Wll out the map, and that are thought to reveal the privileged relationship of Greece to its nature, a relationship that carries interpretive authority and political legitimacy alike. In other words, the following analyses of contemporary Greece represented are less about reaYrming space and place as an inevitable and desirable category in Modern Greek Studies, than they are about investigating historically speciWc ways of cognitive mapping, and the structural position given to Greek place within them. Some time in the mid-eighteenth century landscape becomes a powerful item in the aesthetic vocabulary, even if this is not the ‘original’ point of landscape experience, but rather a late stage of its

2 On the rediscovery of classical sites, e.g. Tsigakou, The Rediscovery of Greece; on mapping, Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism.


23

much longer epistemic history.3 The perceived link between the visible and the invisible, in other words, material reality pointing beyond itself, is nothing new: it can be found in antiquity, and there is a long tradition of postulating an ideational aspect behind the reality of the objective world (as, for example, in the pastoral mode and its prehistory). Similarly, nature has been given anthropomorphic attributes from the earliest descriptions onward (be it in Homeric epic, the biblical psalms, or the ancient Near Eastern tradition). In fact, personiWcation has probably been one of the most frequently employed metaphorical strategies in the description of landscape, or physical environment, altogether.4 In addition, nature has been perceived as good or bad, congenial or threatening, in a succession of predominant patterns of thought.5 What changes in the modern period? ‘At some point in the beginning of the seventeenth century’, Barbara StaVord suggests, ‘a profound conviction was coherently voiced that something really is out there and that art and language were to be used to get beyond imitation . . . in order to grapple with real things. This conscious rejection of certain established mental constructions became part of the larger Enlightenment struggle to avoid the conventionality of verbal and visual languages in pursuit of an unmediated nature.’6 Along similar lines, images of the individual in relation to their environment, natural or social, are part of what Norbert Elias famously called the (long-drawn-out) ‘civilizing process’: the modern era of deWning reality increasingly 3 Cosgrove, Social Formation, for example, centres his seminal study of social formation and symbolic landscape around Renaissance Italy; I also follow Ruth Groh in her claim that although the paradigmatic shift in the aesthetic perception of nature is located in the late eighteenth century, this turning-point is part of an (aesthetic) perception of nature according to alternating criteria which existed already in pre-modern societies (Ruth and Dieter Groh, Weltbild und Naturaneignung: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur I (Frankfurt/M., 1996), ch. 2); see also Kenneth Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (Madison, Wisc., 2002). 4 Petra Raymond, Von der Landschaft im Kopf zur Landschaft aus Sprache: die Romantisierung der Alpen in den Reiseschilderungen und die Literarisierung des Gebirges in der Erza¨hlprosa der Goethezeit (Tu¨bingen, 1993), 260 V. 5 Ruth and Dieter Groh, Die Außenwelt der Innenwelt: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur II (Frankfurt/M., 1996), 96–107. 6 B. StaVord, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 1.

24


in terms of individual experience.7 By the same token, as soon as an act of reXection is the basis of viewing immediate nature, that immediacy, while still exerting a pull, recedes. Landscape itself belongs to the vocabulary of that European artistic debate, which at least for a while favored natural beauty, albeit in the form of artistic representation, over artistic beauty derived from the imitation of ancient models. Originating from the medieval term indicating a region or territory in general, and often used in an administrative context, landscape came to denote a ‘viewed section of nature’, synonymous with the artistic representation of a region or a section of it, in particular the landscape painting.8 By the mid-eighteenth century the term was established, and by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century it was part of the language of the educated classes. As a consequence, the terms of landscape and nature would not only signify the artwork or an abstract concept, but would apply equally to its physical external referent.9 Greece, in turn, was then becoming a privileged topos of freedom to the same extent and with the same complexity that the concept of nature had been changing to a ‘term denoting emancipation’.10 As opposed to the variety of meanings nature could take on until the seventeenth century, each meaning clearly deWned by opposing nature to something else (e.g. grace or free will), nature becomes increasingly and explicitly reviewed as a free-standing term during the eighteenth century. This is contemporary with the growing historicizing of man in relation to nature. Emancipation is now understood as denoting either a return to a natural state or, alternatively, a progressive overcoming of it. ‘Nature’ becomes an essentially ambivalent concept, part of a dialectic where emancipation is, in Robert Spaemann’s words, ‘the (natural) emancipation from nature towards nature’.11 7 Norbert Elias, U¨ber den Prozeß der Zivilisation (Basel, 1939). 8 Rainer Gruenter, ‘Landschaft: Bemerkungen zur Wort- und Bedeutungsgeschichte’, in A. Ritter (ed.), Landschaft und Raum in der Erza¨hlkunst (Darmstadt, 1975), 192–207. 9 Kenneth Olwig, ‘Sexual Cosmology: Nation and Landscape at the Conceptual Interstices of Nature and Culture, or: What does Landscape Really Mean?’, in Bender, Landscape, 319. 10 Robert Spaemann, ‘Genetisches zum NaturbegriV des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Archiv fu¨r BegriVsgeschichte, 11/1 (1967), 59–74. 11 Spaemann, ‘Genetisches’, 62.


25

Through the awareness of being separate from nature, the sign system of nature opens up to be read. While nature can denote the physical, material world, in the tradition, still strongly felt, of empiricism, the new concept is also accompanied by the attention that accumulated around the Weld of aesthetic theory, that is to say, around the link between sense perception, the imagination, beauty, and morality.12 Like freedom, nature becomes one of the terms discussed in its moral, aesthetic, political, and material dimensions, and, crucially, often several of these aspects are evoked together, reinforcing and challenging each other’s elasticity.

T H E VA LU E O F G R E E C E We can now begin to see, returning to Novalis’s dictum, what was particular about the light that fell on Greece, and its reXection. Who watched Greece, and why? What distinguishes Greece from other ‘historical’ landscapes, from England, Italy, or Germany itself? For one, there is the peak of artistic, political, and natural harmony that Greece was thought to have reached in its classical past. One such ‘classic’ instance of this inXuential view is, of course, the historicizing account of ancient art oVered by Winckelmann: ‘Regarding the constitution and government of Greece, it is liberty that is the most noble reason of its superiority in art. Liberty had always held her seat in this country, even near the throne of kings—whose rule was paternal—before the increasing light of reason had let its inhabitants taste the sweetness of complete freedom.’13 Not insigniWcantly, Winckelmann goes on to describe the quality of freedom in a plethora of nature images built over a series of spatial metaphors: ¨ sthetik as a 12 Alexander Baumgarten, in his Aesthetica (1750), was the Wrst to use A term not merely pertaining to the senses or sense perception, but to refer to the criticism of taste, a theory of free arts, and the notion of beauty. For the ‘success’ of the term and its instant dissipation see e.g. Hans Reiss, ‘The ‘‘Naturalization’’ of the ¨ sthetik’’ in Eighteenth-century German: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and term ‘‘A His Impact’, Modern Language Review, 89/3 (1994), 645–58. 13 Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, Schriften und Nachlaß, iv, ed. M. Kunze (Mainz, 2002), bk. iv, p. 18.

26


The thinking of the entire people, like a noble branch rising from a healthy stock, was elevated with freedom; just as the mind of a man accustomed to reXection usually rises higher on an open plain (im freien Felde), on the open road or on the top of a building, rather than in a cramped chamber and in any conWned space; so, also, the manner of thinking among the Greeks must have been very diVerent from that of other nations living under domination. . . . The same freedom which gave birth to great events, political changes, and jealousy among the Greeks, planted, as it were, in that same act the seeds of noble and elevated sentiments; just as the sight of the boundless expanse of the sea, and the crashing of noble waves against the rocky shore broadens our view and lifts the mind above lesser matters, so it was impossible to think ignoble thoughts in the present of such great deeds and men. The Greeks in their heyday were thinking beings.14

That imagery constructs a space where above and beyond the line of organic growth there is opened a second, higher trajectory of cultured and intellectual advance (just as a man-made building rises above the plain ground), arising from reXection of that vista and resulting in liberty; it is peculiar to the Greeks and yet open-ended (planting the seeds) beyond their own decline (political changes and jealousy), and just so Greece itself can be perceived as the manifestation of a spiritual ideal that is historically superseded yet relevant for modernity (including that of Germany). History is re-imagined in complex spatial terms, in a framework that devotes ample room, quite literally, to nature, landscape, and environment both as a cause and as a means of its representation. The tension of viewing antiquity both as gone and as a model, or catalyst, of regeneration is a paradox that has been part of the positive view of antiquity at least since the Renaissance.15 What distinguishes the late eighteenth century is that this pattern is becoming a focus of anxiety, a cornerstone of philosophical speculation and a cross-current of the language and imagery of what it means to speak about nature and its authority. A split had also emerged in the perception of classical antiquity, meaning a stronger emphasis than before on the distinction between Greece and Rome. As is well known, that diVerentiation went hand in hand 14 Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst, iv. 19. 15 See e.g. Gregor Vogt-Spira, ‘Warum Vergil statt Homer? Der fru¨hneuzeitliche Vorzugsstreit zwischen Homer und Vergil im Spannungsfeld von Autorita¨t und Historisierung’, Poetica, 34/3–4 (2002), 323–44.


27

with a new polarization, cultural and geographical, in which Germany identiWed strongly with a purely Greek and, so the assumption went, more purely spiritual and ‘idealizing’ heritage, whereas the French were professing a strong aYnity, not least political, with the Roman tradition of republic and, later, empire. With a change of this kind intertwining with the issue of artistic representation, questions of cultural allegiance were coupled with the issue of national identity (itself another item that, like the aesthetic, formally inhabited a problematic middle ground: that between the individual and humankind). Winckelmann’s initial plea for the imitation of Greek art, in Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art in Painting and Sculpture (Gedanken u¨ber die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, 1756), was able, it would appear, to exert its seminal inXuence over the following decades because it had the potential to connect in the image and material of classical Greece emerging theories of historical progress, of a national spirit, and the related concept of the cultivation or Bildung of the individual.16 Compared to his History of Ancient Art (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums), which appeared eight years later in 1764, Winckelmann’s Gedanken was the manifesto that enjoyed a truly enthusiastic reception and proved to be the more popular of the two by far. And yet, the early plea for imitation of the ideal of beauty expressed in Greek art, Wrst formed under the Greek sky, already spells out the ambivalence at the core of Winckelmann’s inXuential postulate. Greece is portrayed as a historically and environmentally deWned unit—Greek antiquity in this period usually implying the period of Athenian supremacy between the Persian wars and its gradual decline until the defeat to Macedonian hegemony and the time of Alexander the Great, that is, from the early Wfth to the fourth century bc. The Greek ideal or spirit, though, is an entity transcending historical restriction: it can be newly re-created 16 For the European prehistory and afterlife of Winckelmann’s position, see Norbert Miller, ‘Europaïscher Philhellenismus zwischen Winckelmann und Byron’, in Propylaën Geschichte der Literatur, iv, ed. Erika Wischer (Frankfurt/M., 1988), 315–66; also the collections J. J. Winckelmann, 1717–1768, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Hamburg, 1986) and Griechenland als Ideal. Winckelmann und seine Rezeption in Deutschland, ed. Ludwig Uhlig (Tu¨bingen, 1988). On the national aspect, Renate Stauf, ‘Germanenmythos und Griechenmythos als nationale Identita¨tsmythen bei Mo¨ser und Winckelmann’, in Arminius und die Varusschlacht: Geschichte-Mythos-Literatur, ed. Rainer Wiegels and Winfried Woesler (Paderborn, 1995), 309–26.

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today. Still, the temporary acme of Greek artistic production (in Wfthcentury Athens) is thought to depend upon the singular coincidence of environmental and socio-political factors: artistic beauty can be achieved as an all-encompassing way of life, since it is couched in the moral and political freedom granted by a republican constitution. In this sense Winckelmann’s writings certainly constitute ‘the moment at which history, culture, modernity, and the political life of a nation are Wrst articulated in relation to each other’.17 Nearly a decade later, the Geschichte der Kunst treads far more carefully, not only charting the decline of the Greek spirit but also the failure to imitate and revive that same spirit in later periods. Winckelmann’s doubts regarding the possibility of imitation, and his strong sense of Greek antiquity as a Wnite past, failed to provoke the same echo as his earlier optimistic revivalism, without, however, being able to suppress in the long run the seeds of disillusionment already implied in his earlier account. The deWning feature of the search for continuity in the case of Greece is also its strong sense of a rift: the claim to continuity is counterbalanced by the insight that the Greek ideal is of necessity superseded. The primacy put on historicity and its recognition increases the value of continuity, which is in turn framed (or, at times, unhinged) by the notion of progress. Greece not only clearly had a history, but one that seemed to exemplify the momentous, perfect balance of human reason and beautiful self-realization, if Winckelmann was to be believed. Bildung, itself a programme of self-transformation or self-direction (note the dynamic metaphor), aligned itself smoothly with the study or understanding of antiquity. Bildung or cultivation of the human individual through and towards the comprehensive employment of reason had been a key concern already since the early Enlightenment and it continued to be developed as a central issue; human reason is understood to perceive historicity and make sense of history; history, in turn, conforms and bears witness to the development of human reason.18 Another of the great ‘visualizers’ of this new historicism, like Winckelmann, is Herder, who speaks of history as ‘an animated geography of times and peoples’.19 For 17 David Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford, 2000), 18. 18 On the historicizing of reason, e.g. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 3. 19 ‘Von der Annehmlichkeit, Nu¨tzlichkeit und Notwendigkeit der Geographie’, Sa¨mmtliche Werke (SWS), ed. Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols. (Berlin, 1877–1913), xxx. 102.


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Herder in particular, discussing the experience of history, an understanding of the past is possible because of the organic and analogous relationship between the natural and the human worlds, both of which can be analysed by a shared set of natural or ostensibly scientiWc laws.20 In this unifying relation of the part to the whole, the present can discern itself in relation to the past, as the object and in the act of historical consciousness. The act of recognizing historical processes and progress mirrors the positive development of the subject. The study of a historical epoch has an implied positive value; hence, to chart cultural continuity between the positively valued ancient culture and the contemporary bearers of this heritage becomes a desirable act per se.21 Charting the history of mankind means charting Bildung as it manifests itself in individual epochs, under the relevant geographical and climatic inXuences and with regard to individual nations and societies. In Herder’s accounts on the philosophy of history, Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Man (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784) and his earlier This, too, a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Man (Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 1774), Greece is the cultural stage analogous to the age of maturing youth. Yet Herder is adamant, like Winckelmann before him, that Greece is also one of the prime examples of a culture or nation containing the entire circle of Bildung, its growth, maturity, and decline, in its history, enabling the reader to comprehend and thus advance the progress of history.22 20 See H. B. Nisbet, Herder and ScientiWc Thought (Cambridge, 1970) or id., ‘Goethes und Herders Geschichtsdenken’, in Goethe-Jahrbuch, 110 (1993), 115–33. 21 Herder’s historical thought is crucial, not only because of its paradigmatic character for the period, but also for the impact it would continue to have, together with his often too-sweepingly generalized views on national language and national diVerence, across Europe, particularly so on the incipient nationalisms of eastern and south-eastern Europe, even if his inXuence became more strongly felt only from the mid-nineteenth century on. Herder’s work was introduced into Greek letters in 1816, when the literary journal Ermis o Logios (printed in Vienna) published an excerpt from his ‘Nemesis’; but it was only with the historiographical writings of the midand late-nineteenth century that increased notice was taken of his work. See K. Th. Dimaras, ‘ˇ J. G. Herder ŒÆØ ÆæıÆ ı ØÆ æø ı ººØŒ Æ’, in ˝ ººØŒ ˜ØÆøØ (Athens, 1977), 283–99. 22 Herder makes use of the full etymological range of the term; Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Bildung’, in Otto Brunner et al. (eds.), Geschichtliche GrundbegriVe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1972–97), i. 508–51; also,

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The material remains of Greece detectable today, even if by necessity only fragmentary, are not indicators of an impending revival, but provide the material links that render Greece’s past credible and save it from the fate of a dream landscape and literary artiWce: Take a look at Greece now; you will not Wnd the ancient Greeks any more, nor their land. Were it not for the traces of their language which they still speak, were it not for the ruins of their mentality which you can still see, or of their art, their cities, or at least their ancient rivers and mountains, you would be made to believe that ancient Greece was presented to you as a Wction, an island of Calypso or of Alcinous.23

It is because of the material fragments of Greek thought, art, architecture, and nature that Greece can be positioned and understood. At the same time the insight that those fragments are precisely that— fragments—is part of the process of historical understanding which in turn advances the process and progress of individual development and perfection. Overall, Greece is thus always marked by an element of the irrecoverable inscribed in it. A lost completeness predestines it as ultimately ‘contemporary’, in the sense of an inevitable alienation from nature, which distinguishes modernity. Schiller formulates this same sense in his evocative dichotomy between the naive and the sentimental both as categories of experience and modes of artistic expression: it is natural scenes and landscapes that can produce the longing for a lost natural state, which embodies the modern sentimental and moral stance, as he posits it in the opening lines of his essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795): There are moments in our lives when we dedicate a kind of love and tender respect to nature in plants, minerals, animals and landscapes, as well as to human nature in children, in the customs of country folk, and to the primitive world . . . simply because it is nature . . . . They are what we were; they are what Reinhard Koselleck, ‘Zur anthropologischen und semantischen Struktur der Bildung’, in Bildungsbu¨rgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, 4 vols. (Stuttgart, 1985–92), ii, ed. Reinhard Koselleck, 11–46. 23 ‘Betrachtet Griechenland jetzt; ihr Wndet die alten Griechen, ja oft ihr Land nicht mehr. Spra¨chen sie nicht noch einen Rest ihrer Sprache, sa¨het ihr nicht noch Tru¨mmer ihrer Denkart, ihrer Kunst, ihrer Sta¨dte, oder wenigstens ihrer alten Flu¨sse und Berge; so mu¨ßtet ihr glauben, das alte Griechenland sei euch als eine Insel der Kalypso oder des Alcinous vorgedichtet worden.’ Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, bk. 13, in Werke, ed. Martin Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt/M., 1989), vi. 568.


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we should once again become. We were nature just as they, and our culture, by means of reason and freedom, should lead us back to nature.24

Landscape and nature, as soon as we actively attribute a naive character to them, that is, make them an object of our observation, are in fact already a modern cultural phenomenon, and that insight has the potential to guide modernity onwards to a return to nature on a higher, synthesized level. Yet even if Schiller applies naive and sentimental as tendencies on a sliding scale that can reappear in any period or writer, the naive relation to nature is for him still more intact in the time (and Wgure) of Homer.25 Likewise, the writers of antiquity are not unqualiWedly naive. Euripides to him is representative of a shift to a feeling for nature, rather than a natural feeling, similar to the one that characterizes the modern French fashion for the ‘natural’ shortly before Schiller writes. By the same token, our necessarily modern experience of seeking nature out of a sense of displacement from it is analogous to our attitude towards the ancients altogether: [s]ince, then, the Greek had not lost nature in his humanity, he could not be surprised by her outside it either and thus feel a pressing need for objects in which he might Wnd her again. . . . whereas we, not at one with ourselves and unhappy in our experience of mankind, possess no more urgent need than to escape from it and cast from our view so unsuccessful a form. The feeling of which we here speak is therefore not that which the ancients possessed; it is rather identical with that which we have for the ancients.26 24 ‘Es gibt Augenblicke in unserm Leben, wo wir der Natur in PXanzen, Mineralen, Tieren, Landschaften, sowie der menschlichen Natur in Kindern, in den Sitten des Landvolks und der Urwelt . . . bloß weil sie Natur ist, eine Art von Liebe und von ru¨hrender Achtung widmen. . . . Sie sind was wir waren; sie sind, was wir wieder werden sollen. Wir waren Natur wie sie, und unsere Kultur soll uns, auf dem Wege ¨ ber naive und sentimender Vernunft und der Freiheit, zur Natur zuru¨ckfu¨hren.’ ‘U talische Dichtung’, in Werke: Nationalausgabe, xx (Weimar, 1962), 413. I am in the following quoting from the English translation by Elias, in German Aesthetics and Literary Criticism, vol. 3, ed. Barry Nisbet (Cambridge, 1985), 179–230. 25 Ibid. 431 (tr. Elias, p. 190). 26 ‘da also der Grieche die Natur in der Menschheit nicht verloren hatte, so konnte er, ausserhalb dieser, auch nicht von ihr u¨berrascht werden, und so kein dringendes Bedu¨rfnis nach Gegensta¨nden haben, in denen er sie wiederfand. . . . wenn wir, uneinig mit uns selbst, und unglu¨cklich in unsern Erfahrungen von Menschheit, kein dringenderes Interesse haben, als aus derselben herauszuXiehen, und eine so mislungene Form aus unsern Augen zu ru¨cken. Das Gefu¨hl, von dem hier die Rede ist, ist also nicht das, was die Alten hatten; es ist vielmehr einerlei mit demjenigen, welches wir fu¨r die Alten haben.’ Ibid. 431.

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Our feeling towards nature stands in the same relation as our feeling towards the ancients, according both the place of a sought-after object. A landscape such as that of modern Greece, which contains to a certain extent the traces and conditions of these past times, is thus especially suited to induce (and in turn mirror) reXection in its observer and the artist representing it, and in the period under consideration here the potential of the Greek landscape to aVect and develop the consciousness of its viewer can become its predominant function. The ‘Greek cause’ was thus essentially always the cause of the spectator.

RO MANTIC LANDSCAPES AND ROMANTIC SYMB OLS These features of Greece, I suggest, bear great resemblance to the characteristics and function of nature imagery as it is developed in Romantic writing and thinking. Let me Wrst of all attempt to outline how its nature and nature imagery could be said to be signiWcant. Let me explain also how, with the advent of Kantian philosophy on the European scene, the question of subjectivity vis-a`-vis nature was rearranged around a new axis; Romanticism, in engagement with that rearrangement, lets us arrive at the ‘Romantic landscape’, usually taken to mean nature as the ‘objective correlative’ of a speaking or writing subject, and at its twin feature, the Romantic symbol. Both of these are regularly mentioned in reference to Hellenism and descriptions of Greece, yet without suYcient attention to the way they correlate all too well with (and in turn generate) what are thought to be the distinctive features of Greece: its historical antiquity, its fragmented reality, and its naturalness. How do we arrive at the Romantic character of landscapes? Georg Simmel claimed that: ‘To view a piece of land and everything on it as landscape means to view only a section of nature as a unity—which is an alienating step away from the notion of nature.’27 Although Simmel’s sociological interest is in the alienation of modern society 27 Georg Simmel, ‘Philosophie der Landschaft’, in Bru¨cke und Tu¨r: Essays des Philosophen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst, und Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1957), 142.


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and social processes in the early twentieth century, the precariousness of this alienation is already keenly felt a century earlier. Take, for example, Schiller’s plea for a programme of aesthetic education. He approaches the dualism of nature (the phenomenal world) and freedom (the realm of ideas and reason) by isolating the subjective reXexive moment as the initial moment of recognizing the gap as well as the Wrst step toward overcoming it. For him, the experience and representation of ordered nature can reveal freedom, just like any moral action: As long as man, in that Wrst physical state, is merely a passive recipient of the world of sense, i.e. does no more than feel, he is still completely One with that world; . . . Only when, at the aesthetic stage, he puts it outside himself, or contemplates it, does his personality diVerentiate itself from it . . . Contemplation (or reXection) is the Wrst liberal relation which man establishes with the universe around him.28

He too calls for the combination of the seemingly incompatible elements of sensuousness and rationality in the experience of the beautiful, that is, in his terms, through an act of aesthetic education. Although man must exist in a sensual world, ‘there can,’ he says, ‘in a single word, no longer be any question of how he is to pass from Beauty to Truth, since the latter is potentially contained in the former, but only a question of how he is to clear a way for himself from common reality to aesthetic reality’.29 If ‘Romantic’ is usually taken to imply a surpassing and modiWcation of reality, it is instructive to look at the function of Romantic landscape imagery in terms of the relation between reality and the ideal, a relation essentially predicated on that between subject and object and the way they constitute or produce reality. Freedom indicates the possibility of diVerence from a determining nature. This is the concern, for example, also of Kant’s critical attempt to relate nature (the phenomenal world of the senses) and freedom (the world of reason, intellect, and morality), especially so in his analysis of aesthetic judgements in the Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790). What is so crucial about his account is the still indispensable role that the material continues to play ¨ ber die a¨sthetische Erziehung des Menschen’ (1795), in 28 Friedrich Schiller, ‘U Werke, xx. 394 (25th letter). 29 Ibid. 398.

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when it comes to judgements of taste, beauty, and value. Given the reliance of most Romantic thought on the Kantian precedent, one way or another, this establishes a Wrm legacy for the necessity to have a material ground for what is ideal, especially when it comes to viewing nature. As opposed to earlier empiricist positions on the matter of taste and beauty, Kant upgrades and relocates aesthetic judgements to the space between (universal) reason and nature, that is, senses, as its opposite. He links his analysis of aesthetic judgements or judgements of taste with that of cognitive judgements or judgements of understanding (which, too, occupy a middle ground: that between understanding and reason) (bk. 2, para. 23). What both types of judgement share, by analogy, is that they can mediate between the universal and the particular, either subsuming the particular under the universal or reXecting on it. Their ‘territory’ (ibid.), in Kant’s wording, lies between the phenomenal and the ideal, just as nature imagery will continue to operate between the metaphorical and the material. Such judgements, even if their structuring principle has no proper Weld of objects as its territory, may have a ground with a certain appropriate character. The complex nature of the term ‘nature’ becomes obvious again if we consider that for Kant it can denote both the opposite of reason and morality and the phenomenal world from which he almost exclusively takes his examples of the beautiful and the sublime. When we judge something as beautiful, according to Kant, it is because of a disinterested and purposeless judgement, wherein also lies its freedom. Moreover, it bespeaks the free interplay of the faculties of reason and imagination that engage to achieve such judgement. Freedom is identiWed not by its empirical component, but, in its function, by its spiritual and moral independence, as freedom is related to the conditions of cognition. In short, individual freedom is furthered in the act of cognition and the employment of reason. Kant’s focus on the cognitive processes of the subject lets him postulate a formal analogy between acts of reasoned cognition and acts of aesthetic perception and aesthetic judgement. In Frances Ferguson’s words: ‘Our pleasure in nature and our scientiWc knowledge of it are alike important for identifying not reality but reality production.’30 Clearly, we then Wnd 30 Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (Baltimore, 1992), 11.


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repeated the link between aesthetics and autonomy. It is Kant’s contention that art, that is, the aesthetic, bridges the ‘great abyss’ (another spatial, even picturesque, metaphor!) between freedom and nature, between the super-sensible and the phenomenal worlds.31 In formal terms, this is a little like Wolfgang Iser’s deWnition of the Wctive, as that which gives substance to the ideal while transcending the real.32 What is more, freedom, as a rational idea, can only be represented in a symbolic, aesthetic fashion, by an investment in the beautiful, which Kant captures in the phrase of ‘beauty as a symbol of morality’.33 Even if Kant appears to show little interest in the beauty of artistic objects or, for that matter, in the threat of language failing representation, his account was absolutely seminal for Romanticism, not only in Germany. This exposition of Kant’s view on aesthetic judgement and practice has hopefully shown how necessarily symbolic representation of what is foundational for our subjectivity (i.e. ideas such as freedom) is a pattern that characterizes our aesthetic relation with the world, especially vis-a`-vis nature and beautiful nature. His aesthetics holds a middle ground in a network of tightly spun analogies, redeWning beauty and aesthetic judgement as functionally new and important. And just as Kant relies on examples from nature to gain insights into the structure (and its analogues) of representation, so this study proposes to look at nature imagery of Greece as a topos of freedom likewise for its enabling qualities: the aim is to explain the persistence and structural dynamic of that imagery. It is precisely this identiWcation of a formal process and the necessary role given to representation 31 Kant, introduction to Critique of Judgement, sec. ix. 32 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, 1993), 3 f. 33 Critique of Judgement, sec. 59. He in fact operates here with two concepts of freedom: moral freedom as a concept of pure reason (Vernunftidee) and, taken functionally, the free interplay of the faculties of reason and imagination. It is by virtue of this second sense that this free play of the faculties constituting aesthetic judgements can serve as a symbol of moral freedom. Just as an empirical concept can be (re)presented through an example, and intellectual concepts through what Kant calls a schema, concepts of pure reason, such as freedom, have no adequate form of presentation: the necessarily indirect route is through the symbol. Beauty, in the sense of a beautiful object, can be just such a symbol of the idea of freedom. By the same token, and by another analogy, artistic beauty symbolizes, or represents, an aesthetic idea that cannot otherwise be rendered intelligible.

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that provides such a useful tool for reading the imagery of Hellenism from within, as it highlights the ‘match’ between the attributes of Greek nature and the workings of its imagery as representation. The inXuence of Kant’s account of beauty has been enormous, ‘partly because of its ability to mean everything to everyone’34—and it maybe is no coincidence that the scope of Kant’s account of beauty sounds not so diVerent from Schlegel’s pronouncement on antiquity, that ‘everyone so far has been able to Wnd in the ancients what they needed or wanted: especially themselves’.35 The post-Kantian undertaking, in any case, arises from a growing unease with the neat dualism on which Kant had based his aesthetics. Schiller, as we saw, approached the dualism of nature and freedom calling for a practice of aesthetic education. This attitude points the way towards assuming a progressively aesthetic way to view and produce reality and an increasingly central position of the autonomous work of art. The problem of the embodiment of the abstract, of course, remains, precisely in the question of the representation of the ideal and of whether there are images of real objects and places, which can adequately capture the ideas behind them. Images of nature continue to be given a crucial position in these deliberations. ‘There are two ways’, according to Schiller, ‘in which inanimate nature can become a symbol of human nature: as representation of sensation or as representation of ideas’:36 quite apart from stressing the symbolic value of material nature, it is worth pointing out, this comment also betrays the level of attention he, like Kant, grants to nature and natural beauty in the Wrst place.37 Images of the natural world, therefore, signify: they express ideas. The sign system of nature can be read, while emancipation rests in the awareness of the correspondence between the natural world and its reader that enables him to do so.38 The result is a striving towards 34 Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford, 1995), 92. 35 Athenaeum Fragments, no. 151. ¨ ber Matthissons Gedichte’ (1794), in Werke, xxii. 265–83. 36 ‘U 37 See also Sheila Maria Benn, Pre-Romantic Attitudes to Landscape in the Writings of Friedrich Schiller (New York, 1991), who undertakes to re-evaluate Schiller’s alleged hostility towards nature. 38 For the concept of a Natursprache, a natural language, taken up with new vigour by Romanticism, see Axel Goodbody, Natursprache: Ein dichtungstheoretisches Konzept der Romantik und seine Wiederaufnahme in der modernen Naturlyrik (Neumu¨nster, 1984).


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an image of nature that mirrors the metaphysical processes of the knowing subject.39 The assumed correspondence, though, remains based on an analogy, which presupposes an initial rift, not a full identity. Beauty as a symbol, on its way to the Romantic symbol, is powered and stalled in equal parts by unattainable unity, and it is this same pattern that we will Wnd underlying almost all descriptions of contemporary Greece in the period in question here. In Romantic aesthetics, the focus on the boundaries between Innenwelt and Außenwelt generally intensiWes, just as the rift on which those boundaries are predicated. While the nature of their relationship is reinterpreted, new ways are explored to show their interrelation. The famous ‘romanticizing of the world’ of Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum fragment no. 216, is an undertaking that, although or because not merely literary, puts the aesthetic as a reality producer centre stage. Romantic Seelenlandschaften—landscapes of the soul—make visual the experience of the conscious ‘I’, an experience that is both creative or spontaneous and responsive.40 As the ‘objective correlative’ they are not merely tools, but are instead part of a two-way relationship. The creative, conscious subject and the phenomenal world are thought organically linked. To Novalis, ‘the soul is seated where the inner world and the outer world touch’, the ‘I’ is its intersection.41 Images of personiWed nature, of a human landscape, remain a strong element in the catalogue of Romantic nature imagery, not so much as established Wgures of speech as because they express the fact that nature is conceived of as an extension of the thinking and feeling subject and vice versa. Early Romanticism focuses on the unity of the natural and spiritual worlds and the assumed absolute identity and unity prior to all subject–object divisions, and perceives the subject as grounded in a world whose structure it shares. In this mutual relation, reality becomes malleable. The result of this peculiar bond is a de-framing of images, and recurring patterns of transgression that inform the Romantic vision.42 Brentano’s question: ‘Does the world create me, 39 ‘Das Bewußtsein des Betrachters geht hinaus in die Natur, um sich dort selbst in Gestalt einer Landschaft wiederzuWnden’, Alexander Kupfer, Die ku¨nstlichen Paradiese. Rausch und Realita¨t seit der Romantik (Stuttgart, 1996), 180. 40 See also Pinkard, German Philosophy, 137 V. 41 Novalis, Blu¨thenstaub, in Schriften, ed. Richard Samuel and Paul Kluckhohn (Stuttgart, 1960–88), ii. 419. 42 Heinrich Hillmann, Bildlichkeit der Deutschen Romantik (Frankfurt/M., 1971), 15 V.

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or do not I create it?’ is not merely rhetorical;43 it is paradigmatic for the excitement and also the insecurity intimated in that relation. The absolute unity, however, between subject and world remains unrealized (or lost), since it would be without an object, so to speak; it can only be represented symbolically: in the work of art.44 The Romantic symbol, activated by the assumed original identity of the intellectual and the sensuous, rests on a principle of constant deferral. Nature is a sign system, and in the images of nature making up the Romantic landscape the dynamic of the sign is transformed into an environment marked by disappearance of boundaries. Just as the spiritual (rational, moral, etc.) is something transcending phenomenal reality, the representation of landscape obeys the same inherent process. At the same time, there is a painful awareness of the ambiguity of such a dynamic: the inWnite or the absolute and the images to grasp it can never be quite reached, as they are always already transcended; the progressive and boundless forward search is accompanied by a parallel consciousness of stagnation, together with a fear of instability or alienation.45 The awareness of limits leads either to enclosure within the conWnes of the horizon or, alternatively, the inWnite void outside it.46 To control the totalizing relation between subject and object, between interior and exterior, both aesthetic perception and artistic representation, as aspects of the imagination, are seen to shape the external world and the individual in equal measure; according to a principle of analogy and correspondence, nature is part of a cross-projection that enables it to function as a symbol. Somewhat perfunctory statements such as ‘we 43 Clemens Brentano, Godwi, in Werke, ed. Friedhelm Kemp, 4 vols. (Munich, 1963–8), ii. 218. ¨ sthetik (Frankfurt/M., 44 See Manfred Frank, Einfu¨hrung in die fru¨hromantische A 1989), 151. 45 Alice Kuzniar, ‘The Vanishing Canvas: Notes on German Romantic Landscape Aesthetics’, German Studies Review, 11/3 (1988), 359–76, argues for such an extreme with regard to painting. She speaks of the ‘paradox of nonrepresentation’ and the ‘eVacement of the natural referent in landscape painting’, with particular reference to the Jena Romantics and Novalis, and concludes that ‘For the Romantics, the ideal landscape painting would be the blank canvas, one that points to the absence of what it depicts’ (p. 359). 46 Albrecht Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts: Grenze und Grenzu¨berschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern (Frankfurt/M., 1990), 193–241, distinguishes ‘utopian Xight’ and ‘the return of the border’ as the two poles of an oscillating movement.


39

may observe that the common feat of the Romantic nature poets was to read meaning into the landscape’47 must gain in complexity when landscape is acknowledged not only as a mere tool and carrier of any chosen meaning, but as obeying an inherent dynamic structure. The awareness of the fragile ontological status of nature is especially manifest in its perception and representation as landscape: it displays the same medial qualities as the work of art, in that it partakes in reality and imagination as a second reality, which renders its status inherently unstable.48 The direction is that of expansion, yet the stress is increasingly on the awareness of fragmentation and the absence of totality, especially as early and then high Romanticism pass. Against the backdrop of this forceful logic, the value attributed to fragmentation and to the necessary oscillation between the part and the whole expressed in the symbol becomes particularly pertinent in images of the Greek land, in more than one way. As a site, it merges the real and authentic with the ideal or symbolic. In its representation, on the German as much as on the Greek side, we can therefore single out three ways in which the land of Greece became signiWcant: as nature it refers to the relation between man and the world around him, which is one of correspondence. Secondly, as landscape, it introduces an aesthetic element that shows up the artistic process and a related process of emancipation. Thirdly, as locality, Greece oVers speciWc, historic, material sites, whose survival is a mark of continuity and authenticity, which is given a positive value. Its historicity allows emancipation, while at the same time it promises presence. Greece becomes paradigmatic for a state of fragmentation while alluding to a preserved ‘naturalness’ that distinguishes it from its Western European spectators. It provides a powerful material symbol, a topos, which stimulates and contains speculation, beyond its geographical limits. As a material symbol it displays at the same time the workings of the symbolic relation that is prevalent in 47 W. K. Wimsatt, ‘The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery’, in M. H. Abrams (ed.), English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1960), 25–36, 31. They may be perfunctory, but they certainly still have currency in writings on Romantic Hellenism. 48 ‘This core of the Romantic model and purest form—the possible–impossible expansion of the self to a seamless identiWcation with the universe—is unstable and explosive’, Nemoianu, Taming of Romanticism, 27.

40


Romantic writing: a dynamic relation of insuYciency, longing, and elusiveness, which renders disappointment a structurally necessary component, rather than an expression of tyrannical or myopic idealism. Within this structure the threat of violence is never absent though: be it as images of violent nature or, eventually, in the spectre of political disunity those images attach themselves to, which will, especially after 1821, become a central concern of Philhellenism, in European literature in general and in Greek writing in particular (see Chapters 4 and 5). Romanticism entails an understanding of the aesthetic representation of physical reality that makes the present land of Greece a privileged object, since both, the act of representation and the object of Greece, conform to a shared strategy of deWning the modern individual. This is a highly self-reXective strategy that is built on a rift: that between the subject and the object in order to represent symbolically on the one hand; and that between the ancient past and the present on the other hand. This rift is understood as the condition of a potentially liberating or emancipatory modernity. Physical nature, materiality, landscape as represented nature, form the intersecting point where the tension caused by this rift is expressed, be it in strictly literary, that is, Wctive texts, in travel accounts, or in historical and scholarly writing. The term ‘Romantic Hellenism’, often used broadly to gloss the full spectrum of writing from Winckelmann to Byron and the late Romantic French travellers on to Nietzsche and Freud, I therefore take to mean an awareness of Greece, ancient and by implication also modern, that has its foundations in the logic of an idealist Romanticism and its modes of representation; a Romanticism whose concerns appear particularly well mirrored in its relation to Greece and the images chosen to grasp its enabling nature. Characteristic of Romantic Hellenism is its appreciation of Greek antiquity as part of an understanding of modernity: in the sense of an understanding of a fundamental distance of modern individual, society and artist from nature. Nature becomes a function of emancipation, even if a headily ambivalent one, and of progress and liberation. The pattern is matched on the artistic plane: consciousness of aesthetic distance (and subsequent longing) becomes part of a strategy to claim autonomy for the artistic and aesthetic process.


41

Understanding the present alienated situation implies the understanding and ultimately the integration of the past. The past state is irrecoverable, but can maybe be synthesized on a higher level. This longing is shadowed in the concept of the symbol that of necessity represents the meaningfulness of the whole through only a part. ‘Modern’ is seen in opposition to two notions: that of the complete or harmonious or not fragmented, which is its lost origin and in an altered shape its driving goal, and, secondly, that of the past or ancient, especially at a time when artistic debate redeWned or at least still remembered the normative character of ancient models. The diVerence from the past becomes the condition of modernity, and it is the artists, and the philosophers who give art a prominent function in their philosophical understanding, who feel this bestows on them a privileged position. Here Greece enters. For a start, the distance of Greece is a quite literal one, in its geographical sense, and Johannes Fabian has famously shown for anthropology how spatial and temporal distance conspire to make an object of study attractive and meaningful.49 As a place, Greece bears the marks of the past, but it is also displaced from it. It needs to be categorized as modern, but at the same time it has the privilege of material ‘sameness’ that makes it a place of hope for revival. But just as separation is the very condition of modern art, and just as the understanding of Greece as separate from its ancient civilization distinguishes its modern spectator, visitor, or writer, so is a contemporary, non-classical Greece necessarily excluded both from its past and also from Western modernity. Greece is supposed to bear the traces of decline and revival at the same time. It is privileged by nature but it is a nature that also indicates diVerence, distance, loss, and violence. Greece needs, aesthetically and structurally, to remain in that suspended state, since the rift is the condition of modernity—the signiWcance given to Greece’s material state makes sure that that gap is kept open. Let me close with two then-contemporary deWnitions of the Romantic, to add to my shape of the Romantic Greek landscape. Goethe’s deWnition of the Romantic in (any) landscape combines most of the constitutive elements mentioned so far: ‘The so-called 49 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983).

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‘‘romantic’’ feature of a region is a calm sense of the sublime in the form of the past, or, what is the same, of solitude, absence, or seclusion.’50 It is an aesthetic based on the heritage of the sublime, which arises in the awareness of the past and connects to the experience of solitude and absence. Although most of his experience of a ‘romantic region’ is abstracted from that of travelling in the Alps, the elements he identiWes also informed the aesthetic perception and representation of the Greek land in Germany. Friedrich Schlegel, glossing the term ‘romantic’, points to its double-meaning as both generic and historical; the romantic was a historical genre as well as, more importantly, a still valid literary attribute that should not be missing from any literary work: ‘The diVerence is that the romantic is not so much only a genre but rather an element of poetry, which can be more or less dominant but must never be entirely absent.’51 Similarly, we can say that Greece was understood as both a past culture and a present potential of normative value, surpassing history, an attribute that must likewise never be missing from representations of the contemporary, physical face of Greece. The bone that is inevitably picked in discussions of German Hellenism is that so few of the German Hellenists actually travelled to gain Wrst-hand experience of the place. That there were some powerful socio-historical reasons that made actual contact with Greece less feasible than in other countries is an issue I will discuss at the beginning of the next chapter. What I hope to have shown, however, is how the experience of Greek nature in mediated form was considered beneWcial already. The mediation, in fact, as it pointed to its shadow of immediacy, was what mattered, whether one wants to call that a particularly philosophical case of sour grapes or not. What does mediation in this case actually involve? How are images of Greece actually mediated? What are its channels? If we look at the literary representation of Greece, it would appear that it is reliance on 50 ‘Das sogenannte Romantische einer Gegend ist ein stilles Gefu¨hl des Erhabenen unter der Form der Vergangenheit oder, was gleich lautet, der Einsamkeit, Abwesenheit, Abgeschiedenheit.’ J. W. Goethe, ‘Maximen und ReXexionen’, in Werke, ed. Erich Trunz (Hamburg, 1948–64), xii. 488. 51 ‘Nur mit dem Unterschiede, daß das Romantische nicht sowohl eine Gattung ist als ein Element der Poesie, das mehr oder minder herrschen und zuru¨cktreten, aber nie ganz fehlen darf.’ ‘Gespra¨ch u¨ber die Poesie’ (1800), in Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich, 1956), 324.


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‘real contact’ in mediated form, borrowed or Wctionalized, that is the staple of German contact. In other words, cross-referencing, open or covert, to other accounts and pre-existing images, which refuses to let go of a measure of immediacy though. By the logic of approaching the ideal in the real, actual contact should probably only intensify the pattern. In the case of the very few who travelled (and there were some), it probably did. It certainly did for the readers and writers of travel literature, who are the topic of the next chapter.

2 ‘I love this land of Greece above all else. It has the colour of my heart’: The Greek Landscape of the German Soul One of the actual objects that brought direct and indirect vision together around 1800 was the Claude glass, so named after the sixteenth-century painter Claude Lorrain and the particular hue his landscapes seemed to communicate. The Claude glass, a small, portable, and slightly convex tinted mirror, that was mainly popularized by travellers and visual artists as a seeing and sketching aid, was to be used on site, and it created slightly reduced reXections with a softened edge and a lowered colour key, that could then serve as models for drawings and paintings.1 The structure of this protophotographic device meant, of course, that being on site, standing in and opposite the landscape that was seen, was a precondition; at the same time, the vision had to be indirect, through a mirror, with the onlooker not so much seeing through a lens, as actively looking away from the scene and, obliquely, into the mirror. Aside from the place which such a mechanism had in Grand Tour itineraries and travel to the South, it is worth stressing that the necessary entanglement with materiality operates along similar lines as we Wnd in the preoccupations with Greece: not only, or not so much the artiWciality of vision, but the fact that at the basis of most representations is an awareness of their material condition that is indispensable to the view, and shaped by it in return. Like the landscape images drawn 1 For a history of the object, Arnaud Maillet, The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art (New York, 2004).

Greek Landscape of the German Soul

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from a Claude glass, the representations of Greece, too, tend to hide their structure while creating an eVect of greater immediacy. Just as the social and intellectual context for viewing Greece changed during the late eighteenth century, so Greece itself as an object did not stand still either. Next to the diVerent forms and uses of Hellenism as a cultural programme, awareness was growing of the geo-political position of contemporary Greece too. Greece as a political entity did of course not yet exist other than as a part of the Ottoman Empire, and it was in the late eighteenth century still best referred to by its cartographic term of ‘Turkey in Europe’. Within the adminsitrative order of the Ottoman Empire, that separated its domains by religious aYliation, most of modern-day Greece belonged to the millet-i rum, that is, the Christian Orthodox (‘Roman’ or rum) community. Criteria for the political identiWcation of individual and community raised questions of great relevance and with ample scope for dissent both in Europe and in the area that would become the Greek nation; but to its European onlookers the Greek peninsula, peopled by Orthodox Christians, was in the late eighteenth century relevant Wrst and foremost for its strategic importance in the European balance of power. In 1770 the Peloponnese had become the site of a series of insurrections, as a buVer during the war that Catherine the Great’s Russia led against the Ottoman Empire (1768–74). This is not to suggest Realpolitik as a simple explanation for Greece’s increasing visibility on a European political map, or to belittle the signiWcance attributed to Greece for its ancient heritage by the Western European or the Russian side;2 quite on the contrary, the discursive use that was made of Greece’s potential in that context might help to explain the distance between expectations and results on the side of all those who participated. The prospect of Russian support for insurrection, by the ‘saviours’ from the North, had activated Greek hopes for a reinvigorated, independent pursuit of Orthodoxy (in its Byzantine territorial extension) and it had triggered local uprisings against Turkish rule, although to little avail. The insurrections were put down quickly and, despite a victory of the Russian Xeet near Çesüme, the result was little more than Turkish reprisals and a 2 On Catherine’s Enlightenment hopes for establishing Russia as a new Byzantium as well as a part of Europe, see Larry WolV, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994), 195–234.

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reinforcement of the status quo. In Germany, the echo of such political unrest was not a widely and publicly resounding one, as it would be during the 1821 War of Independence, but it reverberated suYciently in smaller intellectual circles where it merged with an increasing academic interest in contemporary Greece, propagated mainly by scholars and university teachers. The political hopes expressed for the future of Greece, and its input into the discussion of ideas of liberty were, in the decades following the unsuccessful 1770 uprising, accompanied by keen, if not always accurate, attention to the geographical and physical conditions of the country.3 Travel accounts, mainly by French and British authors, in this context acquired an extra cache of translators and a growing readership. One of the literary texts that worked the appealing legacy of travel literature into its fabric is Friedrich Ho¨lderlin’s novel Hyperion oder Der Eremit in Griechenland (1797–9), in which the diVerent strands are brought together that contribute to the imagination of Greece at the turn of the nineteenth century. In this key text, topographical descriptions of Greece, some of them relying on travel literature, are used to Wt a personal philosophy of identity, which uses the sharp relief of modernity against antiquity to chart the progress of the individual as both artist and political being. Ho¨lderlin relies on the data, but also on the artistic aspect, of travel accounts, or rather, of travel imagery of Greece, to fashion for the Wrst time a deliberately (and painfully) modern Greece whose terrain is seen and experienced through the eyes of an equally inescapably modern Greek character: that of Hyperion, who himself shoulders the legacy, the potential, and the responsibility of the traveller. I preface the look at Ho¨lderlin’s own contribution to the image of Greece with a prehistory of some of the topoi he uses, such as the logic of travel accounts or the motif of climate, which feed into the logic of Hyperion’s material Greece and which give to the peculiarity of German Greece a greater depth than that presumed by the catchphrase of the ‘tyranny of Greece over Germany’. 3 Gerhard Grimm, on the basis of catalogues of printed books between 1750 and 1830, argues that university teaching (due to the increased mobility of both teachers and students after the reduction of universities post-1800) served as the main carrier of information, with writings on ‘Landeskunde’ as its medium: ‘Griechenland in Forschung und Lehre an den deutschen Universita¨ten vor dem Ausbruch des griechischen Unabha¨ngigkeitskrieges’, Institute of Balkan Studies Symposium (1985), 29–46.


47

TH E LEGAC Y OF TH E TRAV ELL ERS: CLIMATE, CULTURE, AND CONTINUITY It would be impossible to characterize period travel accounts without reference to the pervasive argument that geographical and climatic conditions determine national character. This approach can claim a long history reaching back to antiquity—Winckelmann prominently and repeatedly quotes Hippocrates as one source for his account of environmental eVects—and it is certainly not limited to Greece; but it is here that it has enjoyed a particularly lasting success.4 Of course, it was Winckelmann himself who put into circulation one of the soon-to-befavourite sound-bites of European Hellenism: his famous dictum ‘Good taste . . . began its formation Wrst under the Greek sky’5 acquired a status of ready-made quotation on any aspect of either Greece or European Hellenism, that has long outgrown its centrality to Winckelmann’s own argument.6 Still, his writings are suVused with images of nature, and they remain paradigmatic for the success of postulating a certain immediacy of Greek culture in relation to its natural environment, a recurring key motif in the imagination of modern Greece. The eVort to establish a systematic connection between the climatic and geographical environment on the one hand and a set of national characteristics on the other is best seen in echoing relation to slightly earlier French accounts of cultural history such as those of Montesquieu, G. L. L. BuVon, or Jean-Baptiste Dubos.7 According to 4 The theme is recurrent from Herodotus to recent literary criticism, and it is alive and well. Eratosthenis Kapsomenos, ˇ ºø ŒÆØ ¯ººØŒ ºØØ ØŒ Ææ (Athens, 1998), 32 f., 57, for example, makes use of an unquestioned concept of Mediterranean nature as an interpretive tool for the ‘Mediterranean sensibility’ of Solomos; it is characterized by its balance, mildness, and beauty, and its ability to unify men when it makes them aware of their autonomy. For a diVerent, and more innovative, approach, Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London, 2000), 94–118, who argues for the impact of climatic events on the production of poetry. 5 Winckelmann, Gedanken u¨ber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, ed. Ludwig Uhlig (Stuttgart, 1969), 1. 6 Lepenies speaks of the air of compromise that characterizes Winckelmann’s 1755 text: ‘Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Kunst- und Naturgeschichte im achtzehnten Jahrhundert’, in T. Gaehtgens (ed.), J. J. Winckelmann, 1717–1768 (Hamburg, 1986), 221–37. 7 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (1748), pt. III; Dubos, Re´Xexions critiques sur la poe´sie et sur la peinture (1719). These accounts in turn, of course, owe much to the corpus of Hippocratic writings on climatic inXuences, e.g. Airs, Water, Places.

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those, the Greek cultural area, past and present, and the European West are to be interpreted in terms of their relative location, as in the received Aristotelian model of three climatic zones. Aristotle, relying on established character categories of North and South, had classiWed political characteristics along geographical analogy, setting the rough, unrestrained and violent sense of freedom of the Northern zones against the Southern indolence and willingness to be enslaved;8 Greece in this scheme, avoiding either form of excess, stood for the possibility of free development, and a stable political order to boot. And yet, how far does Greece stretch in this pattern? French thinkers investing in the theory of climate followed the Renaissance tendency to designate the entire area of the ‘Romania’ (the heartland of the Latin West, including France) as the temperate zone; German scholars, entering the debate a little later, in the second half of the eighteenth century, and especially concerned with the respective positions of France and Germany, extended the argument along similar lines, drawing on the notion of central Western Europe as potentially bridging the gap between the balanced yet superseded Mediterranean South, and the North as the fount of freedom.9 Kant, for example, in his Lectures on Physical Geography (1765),10 followed BuVon’s axiom of the three climatic zones and located Germany Wrmly in the middle of the temperate zone, which proves the Xexible and in fact supra-geographical, or certainly supra-territorial, nature of this system of classiWcation. Herder’s works on universal history in the 1770s Wnally integrated the imagery and the speculations on the relevance of climate into a complex notion of reXective historical understanding, as outlined above; relying on the formative eVect of geographical factors, they chart the position and development of Greece through the imagery of human age. The cultural stage of the ancient Greek civilization (which is the only time and place of Greek history that is reached by the arch of Herder’s spotlight) is the analogue to the age of maturing youth, the period of ‘youth and bridal bloom’, 8 Aristotle, Politics 7. 7. 9 See Gonthier-Louis Fink, ‘Von Winckelmann bis Herder: Die deutsche Klimatheorie in europaïscher Perspektive’, in Gerhard Sauder (ed.), Johann Gottfried Herder 1744–1803 (Hamburg, 1987), 156–76; Peter Szondi, Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie ¨ sthetik der Goethezeit (Frankfurt/M., 1974), 25 f. I. Antike und Moderne in der A 10 Published in 1802, by F. T. Rink, as Physische Geographie.


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of ‘the dream of the young man and the fancy tales of the maiden’.11 It is Greece’s particular location and varied geographical set-up as a country largely composed of coastal areas and islands that to his mind had a beneWcial eVect on cultural exchange and cultural inXuences from and into Greece. At the same time, it is the natural environment itself that is seen to have fostered the natural progression of Greece’s geographically highly secluded parts towards political and cultural maturity: ‘The land of so many separate parts sheltered some tribes in their valleys, others by their coast or on their island, so that out of the long years of youthful activity, which the scattered tribes and kingdoms enjoyed, grew the grand and free mentality of the Greek Muse.’12 Herder, like the majority of those making a plea for the Greek heritage in Germany, never visited Greece himself; still, he was not only contributing to the state of historical theory, but was also well read in contemporary travel accounts circulating in Europe. Travel writings, such as those Herder mentions in the Ideen alone, include those of Cornelis de Bruyn, Richard Chandler, the Comte de Choiseul-GouYer, H. A. O. Reichard, J. H. von Riedesel, and James Stuart.13 Whether commenting on Greece ancient or modern, therefore, a historical model dominates his account of place, explicating the historicity of the setting in terms of its relative permanence.

TRAVEL ACCOUNTS AND IMAGINARY TRAVEL This is not the place to introduce systematically the range and character of travel accounts of Greece, the majority of them English or French, with only a few in German.14 Still, even a limited sample 11 Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, in SWS v. 495, 497. 12 ‘Im vielgeteilten Lande schu¨tzte diesen Stamm sein Tal, jenen seine Ku¨ste und Insel und so erwuchs aus der langen jugendlichen Regsamkeit zerstreuter Sta¨mme und Ko¨nigreiche die große freie Denkart der Griechischen Muse.’ Ideen, bk. 13, in Werke, vi. 521. 13 Hans-Wolf Ja¨ger, ‘Herder als Leser von Reiseliteratur’, in Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Wolf Ja¨ger (eds.), Reisen im 18. Jahrhundert. Neue Untersuchungen (Heidelberg, 1986), 181–95. 14 For in-depth studies, see e.g. Helen Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, The Eve of the Greek Revival: British Travellers’ Perceptions of Early Nineteenth Century Greece (London,

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can highlight the origin, function, and dissemination of some of the imagery steadily employed in the representation of Greece. DiVerent as the accounts are in style and intention, particularly before the increase in actual travel from the 1800s onwards, they share the fascination with the actual, and therefore telling, location of classical culture and the survival of the material environment once home to an ancient civilization. Most European travel accounts regarding Greece rested on the now familiar pattern of comparison between the contemporary scene and the past, with Greece’s material presence opening up the issue of continuity. A writer and traveller like Robert Wood, in Ruins of Palmyra (1753), or in his slightly later Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer with a Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade (London, 1769 and 1775), widely read in Germany and translated into German in 1773,15 proceeded by matching contemporary locality to Homeric description, in what he called his own ‘poetical geography’: classical ground not only makes us always relish the poet, or historian more, but sometimes helps us to understand them better. Where we thought the present state of the country was the best comment on an antient author, we made our draftsman take a view, or make a plan of it. This sort of entertainment we extended to poetical geography, and spent a fortnight with great pleasure, in making a map of the Scamandrian plain, with Homer in our hands.16

His argument that the understanding of classical literature is enhanced by the knowledge and description of the actual locale also proved to be a powerful impetus for contemporary Homeric scholarship across Europe (notably on C. G. Heyne and subsequently 1990); Olga Augustinos, French Odysseys: Greece in French Travel Literature from the Renaissance to the Romantic Era (Baltimore, 1994); Richard Bechtle, Studien zum Griechenlandbild deutscher Reisender (Esslingen, 1959); David Constantine, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge, 1984); Iulia Chatzipanagioti, ‘ ‘‘Graecia Mendax’’: Das Bild der Griechen in der franzo¨sischen Reiseliteratur des 18. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur Fremdwahrnehmungs- und Stereotypenforschung’, doctoral dissertation, Vienna (1997); Robert Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993). 15 Circulated initially by J. D. Michaelis and C. G. Heyne in scholarly and literary circles in Go¨ttingen, it was read by Herder and Goethe amongst others. See Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, 73 V. 16 Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmore, in the desart (London, 1753), 3.


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A. F. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum). In Germany, though, it would appear to have been the scholarly interest, the theory of outside observation, that outweighed, yet included in its structure, the desire for literal ‘theory’: for going there to watch. By European standards, and particularly with respect to Greece and the Levant, German travellers were rather conspicuous by their absence. Between 1700 and 1810, nineteen German works were published which concerned themselves with areas of the Ottoman Empire, especially Greece. Out of the nineteen only twelve were the result of ‘autopsy’, of the writer’s own travel and seeing with his own eyes. For the same period and area there are, by comparison, Wftythree French and forty-four English publications.17 Certain sociocultural factors may explain the imbalance. Germany was not one of the strongest trading partners of the Ottoman Empire. Nor was Germany as involved in colonial undertakings and policies in the East, aVecting relations with the Sublime Porte and ambassadorial business, as were England and France. Thirdly, Germany lacked the kind of social system that would have encouraged a travel ideal along the lines of the aristocratic Grand Tour and at the same time would have provided the sources of enlightened patronage to facilitate extended scholarly travel.18 Still, there was an increasing fascination among the German educated class with travel and travel literature; particularly within the, itself rather fragmentary, network of the German principalities, travel proved a successful means to establish a network of intellectual contact. Travels to France and Switzerland were valued, trips to England were a particular favourite with the liberally inclined, Italy was an increasingly popular destination, and commercial ties with Eastern Europe made travel in this area not uncommon.19 An interest in travel writing on Greece there was, though, particularly after the events of 1770, and it is diYcult to 17 Numbers are taken from the database of travel literature prepared by Chatzipanagioti-Sangmeister, referred to in her article ‘Friedrich Wilhelm Murhard (1778–1853) Ø ˆ æ Æ ÆØØ Æººı æ Æ’, in Asterios Argyriou et al. (eds.), ˇ ¯ººØŒ ˚ Æ Æ `Æº ŒÆØ ˜ 1453 –1981 (Athens, 1999), 207–21, 213; see also the catalogue of accounts in Loukia Droulia, On Travel Literature and Related Subjects: References and Approaches (Athens, 1993). 18 Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, 2. 19 See e.g. Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Werner Ja¨ger (eds.), Reise und soziale Realita¨t am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg, 1983).

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separate those travelling from those writing at home. The reservoir of travel accounts, together with literary and scholarly material published at home, formed, after all, part of a unique European network of texts providing reference material for each other.20 By the logic of the travel account, seeing material remains amounted to a ‘substantiation of the Ideal’;21 to identify certain geophysical constants allowed observers to localize and authenticate the past at the same time. Still, disappointment, or rather the threat of discontinuity, was never far in these comparisons, as it had to be for Greece to retain the dynamic of its place. In his Annotations to Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art, Winckelmann himself comments on contemporary Greece and the Greeks, and he does so in starkly unfavourable terms: barbarism has eliminated science, ignorance is covering the country. Monuments are either destroyed or exported. No traces of freedom are left. Entire islands, such as Samos, ‘lie fallow’; ‘the change and the sad look of the ground’ and the ‘restrained free movement of the wind across the uncultivated and overgrown banks’ show that ‘even the physical nature of the country has lost its erstwhile shape through neglect’.22 What survives, nonetheless, is the appeal of the landscape of Attica, and the beauty of the island Greeks in particular. On what testimony Winckelmann claims such expertise, however, becomes clear in a similar passage in his later History of Ancient Art: The most beautiful race among the Greeks, especially in regard to complexion, must have been beneath the skies of Ionia, in Asia Minor, according to the testimony of Hippocrates and Lucian . . . This province is also productive, even in the present day, of beautiful Bildungen, as appears from the statement of an observant traveller of the sixteenth century . . . For in this land, on account of its situation, and in the islands of the Archipelago, the sky is much clearer, and the temperature—which is intermediate between warm and cold—more constant and uniform than it is even in Greece.23 20 For examples of the textual cross-references in English and French accounts, see David Constantine, ‘The Question of Authenticity in Early Accounts of Greece’, in G. W. Clarke (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination (Cambridge, 1989), 1–22. 21 Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, 4. 22 Winckelmann, Gedanken, 82 f. 23 Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst, i. 3.13.


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His comments upon the manifest decline, visible not only in the ruins but in the landscape and its inhabitants, Winckelmann shares with many of the travellers. Even for Pierre Augustin Guys, who in his Voyage litte´raire de la Gre`ce ou lettres sur les Grecs anciens et modernes (1771) tries to compare the modern Greeks favourably to their ancestors, the temptation to portray them as a fragmented version of the past— ‘comme dans ces statues mutileés’ (i. 21)—is irresistible. Guys was well acquainted with Winckelmann’s writings, as is revealed by more than just his focus on statuesque beauty and the conditions of Wne art.24 The ambiguity of Winckelmann’s deliberations on the possibility of imitation of ancient art may Wnd an echo in the fragmented state of the scene oVered to Guys’s eyes and in some of the more negative traits of the present Greek character he describes in other sections; and yet, contemporary Greece becomes literally a living piece of art: ‘I recognize, under the same sky, the very same genius, which once produced the Painters and Poets; I see there the tableaux vivants and the animated models after whom talent could still work now with success’ (ii. 4). What emerges with particular force is the necessity of a supportive natural environment, a conducive climate;25 as the seat of genius, it can promote artistic sensibility, as it itself partakes of artistic qualities. In Greece, nature alone once created the Painters, Sculptors, Musicians and Poets, in a word all the men of genius who have spread such ećlat over this happy country. A lively and pleasant imagination, an active spirit, a Wne organization, a delicate taste and especially an extraordinary sensitivity, all these qualities combined under the most beautiful sky, in view of the most smiling landscapes, under a government most appropriate to develop, to extend and to increase the genius which, without freedom, has no resources: this is what happened to the Greeks and what we Wnd there. (i. 7–8)

Phrased this way, Greece, old and new, is the scene where natural conditions, viewed from a contemporary artistic perspective, can 24 Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, 147 V. Guys is known to have owned copies of Winckelmann’s works, and longer sections of the Voyage litte´raire (chs. 31–4) are devoted to the production of Greek art, closely corresponding to Winckelmann’s Gedanken. There is also evidence of correspondence between the two, although none of the letters have survived. (References in text are to volume/page numbers of the 1771 edition of the Voyage.) 25 Guys expresses his general approval of Montesquieu’s theory, despite minor corrections regarding Turkey, in the 30th letter of the Voyage litte´raire.

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only come to full fruition when combined with a socio-political environment that is distinguished by freedom and attention to the individual. As in Winckelmann, imagination and environment are thus dependent on each other in a productive fashion; moreover, they are regarded as a means to further social cohesion, as becomes clear when Guys gives the country’s physical condition as one reason for the patriotism of the ancients: ‘The beauty of the land and of the climate: since the local physique is not the weakest link which attaches us to our common mother’ (ii. 165).26 Guys’s account consists of a series of letters to his patron, a Monsieur M., which reveal the impact that the prospect of Greece supposedly has on him as its observer and on his act of quasi-artistic production in the form of travel writing; thus he writes of the liberty with which he can put his ideas on paper, inspired by an ‘enthousiasme grec’: ‘I throw my ideas on paper, I use the liberty you allow me to deliver to you my thoughts and my speculations. You will notice that the Greek enthusiasm makes me digress and carries me further than I should go. I have experienced it already’ (ii. 23). The same sentiment is repeated a little further down in the geographical metaphor of the writer losing himself in his reXections like a man in a Weld: ‘I have abandoned myself to my thoughts: I have strayed, without noticing, like a man who has entered a big meadow where one cannot distinguish a path in the soft grass which covers it; he takes a walk in every sense, he loses himself, he picks the Xowers he chances upon, he stops and he retraces his steps to Wnd the path he ought to take’ (ii. 42). What Guys thematizes here, beyond the playful tone and the stress on the ‘pleasure of carrying the mind back to scenes of antiquity’ (ii. 8), is the polyvalence of liberty as a condition, object, and eVect of artistic production, intimated through the prospect of Greece. What is also clear is that this is an enthusiasm and an eVect that attaches mainly and probably only to the visitor: the Greek people themselves, for better or worse, are tied, by virtue of such positively connoted continuity, to a ‘stability’ that makes their modernity, their losing themselves in a grassy Weld of reXection, highly unlikely. 26 The two other reasons which Guys adduces for the ancients’ patriotism are, notably, their natural inclination and their thorough education.


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This particular pairing of doubt about the restitution of a Greece in tatters with optimism that the Greek ground with its traces of the past has a beneWcial eVect on the traveller as a modern, reXective subject, is no less apparent in some of the rare German accounts. In line with the educational purposes acknowledged throughout most European travel accounts, German travellers paid particular attention to the advancement of Bildung gained in the experience of travel. A. L. Schlo¨zer, for example, academic and explorer, distinguished travelling for its own sake as the most valuable kind: ‘the journey is an end in itself, its aim is Humanita¨t.’27 One such account is the Wrst part of Fragments for the better Acquaintance with Today’s Greece, Collected on a Journey by J. L. S. Bartholdy in the Year 1803–1804 (Bruchstu¨cke zur na¨heren Kenntnis des heutigen Griechenlands, gesammelt auf einer Reise von J. L. S. Bartholdy—Im Jahre 1803–1804), published in Berlin in 1805.28 Throughout, Bartholdy prides himself on replacing the usual sweeping evaluation of the contemporary Greeks as a degenerate group of people fallen under the barbarian Ottoman yoke with a more careful account of their social history and geography; in the end, all the same, he joins the side of those stressing the decline and barrenness of the Greek land. SigniWcantly, he distinguishes the two camps of argument for and against a Greek cultural revival in terms of their characterization of the natural and agricultural state of Greece: the faction arguing for favourable conditions (largely French, according to Bartholdy) describe Greece’s rich soil and agrarian potential, whereas those predicting a negative future stress the rocky ground and the irreversible erosion of fertile soil. The author himself expresses his own Wnal evaluation through the image of the Greek landscape as a formerly densely wooded area, 27 A. L. Schlo¨zer, Vorlesungen u¨ber Land- und Seereisen, nach dem Kollegheft des stud. jur. E. F. Haupt (Go¨ttingen, 1962), 13, a series of lectures, which Schlo¨zer delivered regularly at the University of Go¨ttingen between 1772 and 1795. See also H. E. Bo¨deker, ‘Reisen: Bedeutung und Funktion fu¨r die deutsche Aufkla¨rungsgesellschaft’, in Griep and Ja¨ger, Reisen im 18. Jahrhundert, 91–110. 28 References in text are to page numbers of this edition. Although Bartholdy is little known today, he enjoyed a curious Greek afterlife in the novel Xouth the Ape, or The Morals of the Age (1848) by Iakovos Pitsipios. In Pitsipios’s social satire, a quite Wctional, yet allegedly Wercely anti-Greek Bartholdy commits murder in the Greek circles of Paris and is, for his sins, transformed into an ape. After many adventures, stretching as far as South America, he ends as pet-servant to an Athenian nouveau riche, by Pitsipios’s reckoning by far the worst punishment imaginable.

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which has subsequently been cut down and possesses hardly enough foundation to maintain its autonomous natural growth: To me, Greece seems like a once magniWcent forest full of the most ancient and rare trees. Those have all been cut down and all hope is lost that new trees can be grafted onto the old stumps. Moreover, it is precisely those wretched stumps that hamper new cultivation, although it is nothing short of impossible to uproot and remove them in order to plant a new plantation. How, and if at all, this new plantation is going to prosper lies in darkness, especially since now foreign kinds of wood will be made indigenous where nature herself once gave bountifully and freely. (p. 455)29

Bartholdy’s extended image of old stumps hindering new growth re-injects both metaphor and ambivalence (which usually goes with metaphor) into an agrarian economic debate that had literalized the importance of nature for discussing Greece, as if the interpretation of Greek nature as signiWcant formed the centre through which all talk of its conditions had to pass in regular circles. Greece, its past understood as a historical, social, and cultural unit, shifts with the Wgure of the ancient forest now cut down to a curiously unwieldy territory where history is eVectively dead nature. Indirectly, Bartholdy seems to bear out Niklas Luhmann’s observation that nature, as a means of justiWcation for social interaction, can easily function as a term of obstruction (‘SperrbegriV’).30 For Luhmann, who is interested in historical models of how social behaviour is explained, an argument from nature, as opposed to an argument from individual character, for example, stands in the way of increasing individualization. In Bartholdy’s case, environment, as real physical environment and as the past that shapes culture, halts free development, too. Future prospering is uncertain, and foreign grafts, made indigenous, may resuscitate the forest of Greek culture, literally 29 ‘Mir erscheint Griechenland wie ein ehemals herrlicher Wald, der voll der a¨ltesten und seltensten Baüme stand. Diese sind sa¨mmtlich gefa¨llt worden, und die HoVnung, frische Sta¨mme den alten Stu¨mpfen aufzusetzen, ist verloren. Ja es erschweren diese schlechten Stubben eben die neue Kultur, obgleich es nichts weniger als unmo¨glich ist, sie auszurotten und wegzuraümen, und eine neue Schonung anzulegen. Ob und wie diese nun gedeihen werde, liegt verborgen; zumal da man jetzt fremde Ho¨lzer einheimisch machen wird, wo zuvor die Natur alles freiwillig und freudig gab.’ 30 Niklas Luhmann, Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimita¨t (Frankfurt/M., 1982), 139.


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and metaphorically, but may just as well be rejected.31 Nature may be a means and a medium of cultural translation and communication, but ‘going native’, the import of foreign grafts, woods, or elements, is potentially, and structurally, obstructing development as much as the stumps of the past do. At the same time, he conWrms the still-beneWcial eVect of the material reality of the Greek soil upon the suYciently perceptive traveller—in other words, the current state of Greece, much as it obstructs its own future progress, enables somebody else’s. In a ‘Letter to My Brother’, which is attached to the published manuscript, Bartholdy conscientiously lists the items of classical literature and contemporary accounts he had studied in preparation for the journey, among them especially the one by Guys, and he states: ‘It is certainly no mere Wgment of the imagination that a certain feeling of sacredness takes hold of us when we stand on classical ground; and every man who values science, art, freedom, normativity, and originality cannot help but be overcome by it.’32 Despite the value attached to the immediate experience of Greece, the ultimate beneWciaries were therefore to be the writers and readers of travel accounts. Wood, in 1753, had still seemed doubtful whether the immediacy of travel could be translated: ‘The particular pleasure, it is true, which an imagination warmed upon the spot receives from those scenes of heroick actions, the traveller can only feel, nor is it to be communicated by description.’33 Yet the experience of Greek nature in mediated form could be equally beneWcial for the reader and writer of travel literature, even if their imagination was warmed in a cooler spot. As we saw, the comparison of Greece present, in its natural and material manifestations, with its past follows a pattern that represents and thereby stimulates the workings of the imagination 31 On the openness of organic imagery, in the context of German debates about the nation, to lend itself to arguments for purity as much as assimilation, see Brian Vick, ‘Greek Origins and Organic Metaphors: Ideals of Cultural Autonomy in Neohumanist Germany from Winckelmann to Curtius’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 63/3 (2002), 483–500. 32 ‘Daß sich unser auf klassischem Boden ein gewisses heiliges Gefu¨hl bema¨chtigt, ist wahrlich kein bloßes Hirngespinst, und jeder Mensch, dem Wissenschaft, dem Kunst, dem Freiheit, dem Gesetzlichkeit und Originalita¨t etwas gelten, muß mehr oder weniger in Griechenland davon ergriVen werden.’ Bartholdy, ‘Brief an meinen Bruder von meiner Reise nach Griechenland’, in Bruchstu¨cke, 77. 33 Wood, Ruins of Palmyra, 3.

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as a distinctly human, subjective and modern faculty. The imagination, in other words the aesthetic experience of Greece, was tightly bound up with concepts of freedom, which in turn rendered the experience particularly valued. With Greece, historical and artistic freedom is the subject-matter, located in the physical remains of the past, while the workings of the imagination implied a complementary free interplay of the mental faculties. With the increasing relevance given to the imagination as a subjective faculty, representation could compete with the place of autopsy. Yet what about the Wctional manifestations of the travel experience? While the particular materiality of Greece plays a part in giving rise to imagination and reXection, it is the Wctionalizing act that links the ‘realities’ and the ‘imaginary’ (to use Iser’s terms), transgressing the one while concretizing and giving material weight to the other, with the result of drawing attention to the workings of the imaginary.34 Whether it is in the travellers’ desire to comply with the taste of the audience or an educational intention to further Bildung, the Wctional and the authentic, as much as the past and the afterlife of the past, overlap in the tight network spun between and above the travel literature in circulation. One such model case is that of the Abbe´ Barthe´lemy’s Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Gre`ce (1788). An important numismatist and epigraphist and himself the translator of Wood’s accounts into French, Barthe´lemy’s work was a Wctive travel account, set in the Hellenistic period, informed by the current state of scholarship and by ancient precedent and facts compiled from ancient authors alike. Going through four editions until 1821, it would deserve mention for its sheer literary impact alone. An almost instant success across Europe, it triggered a vogue of romans grecs and was translated into several languages, including Modern Greek.35 The Wctional history of the young Scythian prince Anacharsis, unfolding over six volumes, follows his educational journey of nearly thirty years through the Greek world of the fourth century bc. Given his genealogy as Anacharsis the Younger, he recalls his namesake, also a Scythian traveller from the North, mentioned by Herodotus, whose Histories are themselves an exercise in 34 Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 2–21. 35 There were three partial (two by Georgios Sakellarios, and one by Rhigas Velistinlis) and one complete translation (by Chrysoverges Kouropalatis) into Greek between 1797 and 1819; see Augustinos, French Odysseys, 38 V.


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linking climate and relative North and South position to cultural development or stasis (the more extreme the geographical distance, the more static the society).36 Barthe´lemy’s, by extension, is a Greek land where historical signiWcance, physical beauty, and the cultivation of present society mirror each other, arranged in one extensive tableau vivant. Attention is lavished on pleasurable natural features, their tranquillity, colour, and luminescence; a benign climate provides an environment as fertile and prosperous as its society is cultivated; Greece, it is not wrong to say, becomes essentially ‘a graceful extension of French culture’.37 According to this contemporary ideal of simplicity which equates the natural with the quietly cultivated, ‘his sketches of Greek scenery were a perfect setting of his image of Greek civilization: smooth and unruZed surfaces, regular and symmetrical lines, and smiling valleys sheltered by majestic mountains.’38 Still, and despite the ostensibly unruZed equation, the spectre of Greek decline is not kept at bay here either: for Anacharsis the Younger returns to his northern homeland after the historical Greek–Macedonian battle at Chaironeia (338 bc), which he vocally considers tantamount to the defeat and demise of Greek liberty. The contemporary Greek nature of Barthe´lemy operative in the semi-Wctional Greece of Anacharsis the Younger, recalling the Greece of Herodotus, who gave History its name yet was treated for much of his afterlife as a Wctionalizing geographer, is underpinned, and in that sense necessarily undermined, by the very weight of the historiography of Greece as it was current in the eighteenth century (the decline of Greek liberty at the end of the fourth century)—as much as by the weight of literary tradition. As a scholar and collector Barthe´lemy was personal tutor to the Comte de Choiseul-GouYer, ambassador to the Sublime Porte from 1783 to 1791, where he made sure that he spawned his own literary genealogy. Choiseul-GouYer’s own Voyage pittoresque de la Gre`ce was published, in two parts, in 1782 (excerpts appearing from 1778) and 1809.39 His account, mainly concerned with the description of antiquities, nevertheless comments on the political present; certainly 36 For a comparison of the two Anacharses, see François Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece (Chicago, 2001). 37 Augustinos, French Odysseys, 39. 38 Ibid. 46. 39 For Choiseul-GouYer’s eventful political biography see ibid. 157–73.

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in the Wrst volume, where he expresses some pro-Greek sentiment in the form of hope for impending cultural revival, while he is equally aware of the disillusioning dichotomy between the past and the present. The Voyage Pittoresque was widely read in Germany and partially translated, by H. A. O. Reichard, in 1780 and 1782. One of its readers was Gerhard von Halem, a high civil servant at Oldenburg, poet, dramatist, and regular contributor to literary periodicals, such as H. Ch. Boie’s Museum. His little-known literary anthology of 1798, Blu¨then aus Tru¨mmern (Blossoms from Ruins), is also a combination of documentation, scholarly respectability, and a well-considered appeal to the imagination: essentially a compilation of von Halem’s own tales and dramatic scenes of contemporary Greece, as fashioned by him, it relies to a great extent on some of the travel accounts mentioned already. It is not entirely clear what motivated his choice,40 yet it is clear from his letters (his regular correspondents included, apart from H. Ch. Boie, the writer and translator of classical literature Friedrich Graf Stolberg, and the Homeric translator Wilhelm Voss) that he was well acquainted with those taking a strong interest in classical antiquity and travel literature alike.41 The overarching theme of Blu¨then aus Tru¨mmern is the promise of new cultural life arising before the eyes of the Greek traveller. The folding of the Wctive into the material gleaned from travel accounts, which themselves explore the fault-line between the factual and the workings of the imagination, runs alongside von Halem’s deliberate plea for the beneWts of the travels of the mind. In the process of imaginary travel, so the collection suggests, the cultural and political situation of Germany seeks to be reXected in the contemporary Greek land and its imagination. The perspective of the work’s introduction, therefore, is that of man in possession of his humanness, aVected by the aspect before him: Fresh bloom out of ruins; new life sprouting from decay; what more could nature oVer to move the man more deeply who contemplates his environment 40 Hardly any literature is available on Halem, who also took a strong documentaryWctional interest in the Middle Ages, and no literature at all on Blu¨then aus Tru¨mmern, to shed light on his choice of subject-matter. For some material, see L. W. C. von Halem, Gerhard Anton von Halems Selbstbiographie nebst einer Sammlung von Briefen an ihn (Oldenburg, 1840; repr. Bern, 1970). 41 Boie’s translation of Chandler’s Travels in Asia Minor was published in 1776, that of Chandler’s Travels in Greece one year later, in cooperation with Voss.


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in full awareness of his humanity? . . . It is a truly beautiful idyll that reality has oVered to the latest sentimental visitor to the islands of the archipelago [Choiseul-GouYer]. He grasped the scenery with love and thus represented in it also a Wtting image of the new contemporary Greece. Beautiful rejuvenating nature, irresistibly breaking through the ruins of the once cultivated (gebildet) Hellas, it preserves itself in its lovely ancient simplicity: thus is the character of this wondrous country and above all of this Weld of islands which the hand of an almighty power had gently sown across the wide open sea.42

Despite the reference to Choiseul-GouYer as his source, the use of literary terms such as Scene, Bild, and Idyll for the view presented to him as a sentimental spectator indicates the artistic quality of beautiful Greek nature. The transformation of Greece into an aesthetic object justiWes the involvement of the reader’s imagination and renders the immediate eVect, mediated in artistic representation, accessible to all of a similar sensibility: Often, when I had wandered long among the ruins of ancient Greek architecture and among the sheer number of broken marble architraves, cornices, and column drums, under the guidance of Tournefort, le Roy, ChoiseulGouYer, and Stuart, often I then rejoiced to see some people between the ruins. And how grateful was I to the travellers, Spon, Wheler, Guys, Chandler, Savary, and the others, that they had made those people still more familiar to me! With delight I recognized the features of the ancient Greek spirit in them, which had persevered, despite millenia of barbarity. It was my pleasure to collect those features, to paint little miniatures of the new Greece and to intensify the colour by making use of the entire palette aVorded by the oscillation of the modern Ottoman and the ancient Greek spirit. While the Fury of war was marching through the German fatherland

42 ‘Blu¨then aus Tru¨mmern; junges Leben, das aus Verwesung keimt; ist irgend etwas in der Natur, was inniger ru¨hre den Menschen, der, in vollem Gefu¨hle seiner Menschheit, sinnend um sich her schaut? . . . Wohl ist es ein scho¨nes Idyll, was die Wirklichkeit hier dem ju¨ngsten gefu¨hlvollen Besucher der Inseln des Archipelagus [Choiseul-GouYer] darbot. Mit Liebe faßte er die Scene auf, und gab uns in ihr zugleich ein treVendes Bild des neuen Griechenlandes. Sich verju¨ngende scho¨ne Natur, die durch die Tru¨mmer des einst gebildeten Hellas unaufhaltsam hervorbricht, und sich erha¨lt in lieblicher Ureinfalt, das ist der Charakter dieses merkwu¨rdigen Landes, und vor allem der Insel-Saat, welche die Hand der Allmacht mild in das weite Meer ausstreute’; Gerhard von Halem, Blu¨then aus Tru¨mmern (Bremen, 1798), 3 V. Further references in text are to page number of this edition.

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torching its prettiest pastures, I took Xight to Tempe. I kindly invite those of an equal mind to this valley of peace. (pp. 7 f.)43

In other words, Greek nature is essentially and ‘naturally’ predisposed to be translated into and communicated in aesthetic form. What is more, by presenting imaginary travels to Greece, in an act of artistic creation, as a valid alternative to war-torn Germany, Halem outlines clearly the pattern and the raison d’eˆtre whereby artistic production and aesthetic perception enable the individual to identify their own position within a political context. This relation between individual and national Bildung and the political situation of the present, negotiated against the backdrop of Greece as a literary setting, is even more pronounced in the Wrst dramatic fragment of the collection. ‘Der Pilger von Pathmos’ unfolds as a dialogue between Theobald, a hermit monk, and Koras, a young pilgrim stranded on the island of Patmos after a storm; in the exchange of life-stories that follows, the old Athenian monk tells of his former travels across Europe in search of the freedom gone from Greece. Encouraged by the example of the Maniots,44 yet doubtful because the insurrection of 1770, despite the Greek-Russian victory at Çesüme, has been abandoned, he now hopes for the ‘Xame of freedom’ to be rekindled and ‘through civic unity and action to perfect our ennoblement’ (p. 18). The young pilgrim, who appropriately reveals himself 43 ‘Oft, wenn ich unter Anleitung der Tournefort, le Roy, Choiseul-GouYer, und der Stuart lange unter den Tru¨mmern der alten Griechischen Baukunst, unter dieser Menge zerbrochener Marmor-Gesimse, Karnisse und Saülenfu¨ße umher gewandelt war, oft freute ich mich dann, wenn ich durch diese Tru¨mmer hie und da auch Menschen erblickte. Wie dankte ich daher den Reisenden, Spon, Wheler, Guys, Chandler, Savary und anderen, daß sie mir diese Menschen noch na¨her brachten! Denn mit Entzu¨cken erkannt ich in ihnen die Zu¨ge Alt-Griechischen Geistes, der sich erhielt trotz der Barbarey der Jahrtausende. Diese Zu¨ge zu sammeln, kleine Scenen aus dem neuen Griechenlande zu malen, und, zur Erho¨hung des Colorits, die mannigfaltigen Farben, welche wechselnd Neu-Osmanischer und Alt-Hellenischer Geist darboten, zu nutzen, das machte mir Freude. Wa¨hrend die Furie des Krieges ihre Fackel schwang, und die scho¨nsten Fluren des deutschen Vaterlandes verheerte, Xu¨chtete ich nach Tempe. Freundlich lade ich die Gleichfu¨hlenden zu mir ein in dies Thal des Friedens.’ 44 The Mani, the southernmost peninsula of the Peloponnese, was part of the ancient province of Laconia. That its inhabitants are descendants of the Spartans who Xed the Slav invasions in the seventh century is Wrst suggested by Constantine Porphyrogenitus (De administrando imperio) in the tenth century. Cf. Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1969), 119. The Mani was one of the areas heavily involved in the unsuccessful insurrection of 1770. See also below, Chapter 3.


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to be the son of a Maniot Wghter, recounts the vigil at his father’s tomb which led him to forgo the world and turn to a monastic existence. This would be little more than a familiar educational tale, if not that the natural setting is given a functional character: it is the scenery surrounding the Maniot’s grave that induces the memory of lost Greek freedom. The old monk eventually persuades Koras to follow the example of St John, whose living memorial is the island of Patmos, the material basis of the story, as a whole, and to return from there to the world. Again, the choice of Patmos is not accidental, and it tightens the network of signiWcant, generative, and entirely cultural landscapes. Von Halem’s sketch of transitional, activating landscapes draws on a common source with Ho¨lderlin’s Hyperion, namely Choiseul-GouYer’s account of his visit to Patmos. To Choiseul-GouYer his stay on the island was particularly memorable for an encounter with a monk, who approached him to enquire about the state of aVairs in Europe and, more precisely, the fate of Voltaire and Rousseau.45 Choiseul-GouYer’s monk proceeds to tell him of his studies in Italy and his subsequent return to Greece, where he sought a life renouncing the world of politics and learning.46 In that sense, a Greek location functions as the alternative to a place of instruction and activity that has apparently lost its promise and edge, replacing the disappointment of modern learning with a promise of instruction from and through nature. While the monk’s education in Italy is completely in line with historical accuracy (Italy had long provided centres of learning for Greek students), the shift of privilege from a tired post-Roman territory to a renewing Greek scene is instructive, and would certainly not have gone unnoticed by the eye of a readership trained on the value of Hellenism. The setting in von Halem’s version is therefore not only relevant insofar as it holds or induces memory, but it also plays an active part in developing the faculties of those inhabiting it: Follow me Wrst to my bower close by; I built it on the rocky slope with a view of the wide archipelago.—Here we are—you can see, the harsh ground yields hardly any vegetation. Every morning I heap new earth onto the tender roots 45 Choiseul-GouYer, Voyage pittoresque, i. 165. Von Halem himself mentions the story in his commentary (p. 224). 46 Choiseul-GouYer, Voyage pittoresque, 166.

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exposed by the rain and little by little my care is rewarded by friendly shade. . . . My spirit Wnally broke through the limits of my need and soared onto the open sea. And to my mind the ruins which came before my eyes everywhere soon became more than stones and boulders. I had an intimation of better times now long gone (pp. 11 V.)47

The imagery of the barren ground is a familiar motif; combined with that of the unrestrained view over Greece, it focuses on the transcendence inspired in the observer (and, by analogy, the reader), an eVect enhanced by the sight of ruins as material mediators, surrounded by an impoverished nature.48 The monk Theobald’s past travels in search of freedom, remembered and told from that heightened perspective, are the point where geographical description and geographical metaphor merge. Crossing the Rhine from France, where the Greek spirit exists like an unripe fruit threatened by decay before its time, Germany, in contrast, presents itself to Theobald as an archipelago of German principalities, separated in dangerous currents, exposed to the stormy sea of their rulers’ interests. Its inhabitants are distinguished by their respectability, prudence, and industriousness and they deserve to be united one day in the greater interest of humankind. Yet it is more likely that the islands of our archipelago should join up to become a solid land-mass than that Germany should see the light of uniWcation. (p. 14).49

The parallel between the multiplicity of German principalities and the city-states of ancient Greece had been a topos of German writings 47 ‘. . . Folge mir erst in meine nahe Laube, die ich mir am Abhang des Felsen baute im Anblick des großen Inselmeers.—Hier ist sie.—Du siehst, schwer gedeiht das Gestraüch in diesem kargen Boden. Jeglichen Morgen haüfe ich die Erde auf die zarten Wurzeln, die der Regen entblo¨ßte. Allma¨hlig lohnt doch freundlicher Schatten meine Sorge. . . . Mein Geist durchbrach dann des Bedu¨rfnisses Schranken, und schwebte ins breite Meer hinaus. Die Ruinen, die aller Orten meinem Blicke sich zeigten, wurden bald mehr als Steinmassen fu¨r mich. Ich ahnete verXossene scho¨nere Zeiten.’ 48 For the artistic representation of ruins as both indicating a transitional stage or as conWrming continuity, see Heinrich Bu¨hlba¨cker, Konstruktive Zersto¨rungen: Ruinendarstellungen in der Literatur zwischen 1774 und 1832 (Bielefeld, 1999), 13 f; Reinhard Zimmermann, Ku¨nstliche Ruinen: Studien zu ihrer Bedeutung und Form (Wiesbaden, 1989), 252 V. 49 ‘Ein Archipel deutscher Staaten, die durch die Wogen des Interesses ihrer Gebieter in manchen gefa¨hrlichen Stro¨mungen getrennt sind. Die Bewohner, ausgezeichnet durch Biedersinn, Besonnenheit und Fleiß, verdienen es, daß einst das gro¨ßere Interesse der Menschheit sie vereine. Aber eher versammeln sich unsers Archipelagus Inseln zu festem Lande, ehe Deutschland jene Vereinigung sieht.’


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since Wieland.50 Yet by superimposing the natural and geographical imagery of Greece metaphorically on Germany, von Halem achieves a more direct comparison. Despite the critical attitude towards Germany that is implied, the application of metaphor establishes a framework by which aspirations of freedom and cultural emancipation (particularly to be located in the island world) become the common and justiWed ground for comparison between Germany and Greece. Remembering the aesthetic susceptibility required by von Halem of his reader, it is the very act of imagining the Greek land as an aesthetic object that enables writer and reader alike to derive productive insights from it. To make that particular comparison at all, in other words, and to base it on the example of nature, proves the ground(s) of comparison already. The last part of the story describes the return of the Maniot boy Koras to Greece, with the aim ‘to prepare his fellow citizens for the era of freedom’ (p. 24). Von Halem has him journey across the Balkan peninsula to meet the Morlaken people. The Morlachs or Morlacchi, a people of uncertain ethnic origin and sometimes confusedly named as ‘Vlachs’ too, had by the end of the eighteenth century become the subject of ethnographic curiosity, not unlike that later bestowed on the Greek klefts, for the half-appalling and half-appealing mixture of free barbarity and unspoilt virtue that was attributed to their origins and customs. Halem’s Koras, appropriately, encounters here scenes of a ready hospitality grounded in natural freedom: Then [Koras] descended into the lovely Kotar valleys; here the hospitable Morlach opens his paltry hut to every traveller, here the sacred bond of friendship is tied at the foot of the altars, here freedom walks hand in hand still with innocence, as it did in the golden age. With the evening twilight he would often climb the mountains and listen for the folk songs of the Morlachs. They celebrated the deeds of their ancestral heroes, accompanied by the monotonous sound of the strung Guzla. Other wayfarers, hearing the familiar sounds from afar, would join in their song and thus it echoed to and fro until it reached a bend in the valley and died away in the ravines. (p. 24).51 50 Conrad Wiedemann, ‘Ro¨mische Staatsnation und griechische Kulturnation: Zum Paradigmenwechsel zwischen Gottsched und Winckelmann’, in F. N. Mennemeier and C. Wiedemann (eds.), Akten des VII. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses, Go¨ttingen 1985, ix (Tu¨bingen, 1986), 173–8, 178, traces the motif from Wieland to Friedrich Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt, yet credits it with little importance. 51 ‘Dann senkte [Koras] sich in die anmuthigen Tha¨ler von Kotar, wo der gastfreye Morlake jedem Reisenden seine arme Hu¨tte o¨Vnet, wo der Freundschaft heiliges Band

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The literary interest in folk motifs and its implications is treated in more detail in Chapter 3 below;52 what is notable here is the way folk songs echo in a graceful nature, which responds as their natural habitat. The last prospect of the narrative, now on the Ionian island of Cephalonia, is a panoramic one from above towards the west:53 ‘At last Koras stood high up on Cephalonia, looking across the wide sea, lost in thought. Night fell. He admired the full moon rising above the ocean’s surface and he was overcome by sentiments he had never felt before. The waves of the Adriatic came rushing toward him with a name: Bonaparte; and: Bonaparte! the land echoed far and wide’ (p. 25).54 The mountain view as such, which we encounter time and again in the landscape descriptions of the period, is reminiscent of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle He´loı¨se, where St Preux reXects on a mountain view as aVecting the imagination and inducing, in its total perspective, transcendence and ease among a range of other sensations.55 In von Halem’s case, nature, as it is viewed, responds to the

am Fuß der Alta¨re geknu¨pft wird, wo noch, wie im goldenen Alter, Freyheit Hand in Hand wandelt mit Unschuld. Oft in der Da¨mmerung des Abends erstieg er die Gebirge, und horchte den Morlachischen Volksgesa¨ngen. Sie feyerten die Thaten ihrer Helden der Vorzeit, und einto¨nig erklangen der Guzla Saiten zu dem Gesange. Andre Voru¨berstreifende, die fern schon die kundigen To¨ne vernahmen, stimmten laut in ihr Lied ein, und fort to¨nte der Wechselgesang, bis etwa ein Thal sich kru¨mmte und der Laut in den Klu¨ften verhallte.’ 52 According to von Halem, his information on the Morlachs was taken from the writings of the Countess Rosenberg and from Herder’s Volkslieder. A collection of Croatian songs included in Alberto Fortis’s Viaggo in Dalmazia (Venice, 1774), some of which Herder had included in his collection, were, however, largely pastiches of songs written by the Franciscan A. Kacˇic´ Miosˇic´ (1704–60); the latter had composed them in the tone and style of old Serbo-Croat heroic songs to help generate national consciousness among his people under foreign (Turkish and Venetian) dominance; see Ulrich Gaier, ‘Kommentar’, in Herder, Werke, iii, ed. Gaier (Frankfurt/M., 1990), 839–927, 859 f; on the Morlachs as an object of curiosity, see WolV, Inventing Eastern Europe, 315–24. 53 On the recent invention of the panorama as an art-form at the time, see Stephan Oettermann, Das Panorama: Geschichte eines Massenmediums (Frankfurt/M., 1980), 5 V. 54 ‘Zuletzt stand Koras auf den Ho¨hen von Cephalonia, und schaute denkend in das weite Meer aus. Es ward Nacht. Bewundernd sah er den Vollmond u¨ber die MeeresXa¨che hervorgehn, und nie gefu¨hlte EmpWndungen ergriVen den Seher. Da rauschten ihm Adria’s Wogen den Namen: Bonaparte entgegen; und: Bonaparte! wiederhallten fern die Gestade.’ 55 J.-J. Rousseau, Julie ou La Nouvelle He´loı¨se, in Oeuvres comple`tes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, ii (Paris, 1969), Wrst part, 23rd letter, pp. 78 f.


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liberating view by reciprocating with a political message.56 This one mini-drama, then, combines all the hallmarks of the discourse of Greek nature: freedom, understood as aesthetic, political, and individual, is generated by placing Greece. Of the other fourteen episodes of von Halem’s anthology, some, such as ‘The Bishop of Damala’, or ‘The Needle-Worker’, feature verses or verse dialogues inspired by folk motifs and songs taken from his literary sources, such as Chandler and Guys, as he duly acknowledges in his comments. Turkish-Ottoman tales are combined with Wrst-person narratives of Greek resistance and stories of Western travellers searching for antiquities or, in one case, for Homer’s tomb on the island of Nio.57 Locale and natural scenery serve throughout to enhance the feelings, are means of teaching, or carriers of metaphor, as for example in the story ‘Delli of Casos’, where the Greek narrator describes a Turkish garden: ‘I thought the leafy bower was pressing upon me like the Ottoman’s despotism’ (p. 59), while a storm shaking the leaves announces the impending arrival of Greek freedom; nature is moreover presented as the object of perfect imitation in folk art, such as stitching or song, and as the object of reverence, such as when, in the closing story, the island of Nio, not unlike Patmos before, is in its entirety revealed as the resting-place of Homer. In addition, it is noticeable that apart from few exceptions the island setting prevails. Halem, in his introduction, continues the organic image of the ‘Insel-Saat’: ‘There lives a people here, separate from the mainland and its corruption, which has mostly maintained its original character and remained close to nature, without much law-making or science’ (p. 4). Well known across the corpus of travel literature, the motif of the Greek archipelago as closer to nature, and hence as a place endowed with greater residual as well as potential freedom, will continue to feature strongly in the writings surrounding the Greek War of Independence, on which more 56 In 1797, Napoleonic troops had taken over the Ionian Islands (among them Cephalonia) from Venetian rule. Their arrival there had initially been greeted with enthusiasm for the ideals of the French Revolution, complete with commemorative poems and the planting of Trees of Liberty. 57 Several islands have, following the strong biographical tradition of Homer in antiquity, laid claim to Homer’s tomb, among them Chios and especially Ios, whose old demotic name is Nio; see von Halem, Blu¨then, 245; Bartholdy, Bruchstu¨cke, 203. See also the appendix ‘Homer’s Tomb’ in Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, 215–18.

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below.58 Herder had already speculated that ‘the ancients made their happy homes on islands and not without reason, for here they would likely have found the most free and happy peoples’,59 and it is the vision of individual islands interlinked across a connecting yet liberating element that accounts for the appeal of the archipelago model: be it in the guise of political community—von Halem’s ‘Archipelago of German principalities’—or in the valued notion of the bond, especially the bond of friendship, linking individuals and including the art of correspondence practised by von Halem and his circle, as much as the cult of friendship which the early Romantics would raise to a programmatic level. Apart from the special case of the archipelago, which recurs frequently with regard to Greece, the topos of the island utopia, preferably in the South, holds generally a prominent position in German and European literature of the second half of the eighteenth century, especially in the wake of the discovery of the PaciWc island of Otaheiti by Cook and Forster in 1772.60 The model setting need therefore not be Greek, but the imagined island communities each often bear traces of a direct or indirect Hellenism, for which, given their over-determined self-containment, they provide an eminently suitable location. Like Romantic symbols, islands tend to point beyond themselves, and if Hellenism is partly about the transcendental potential of a contained, material location, then islands tinged by Greekness function particularly well in their contexts of representation. Friedrich von Stolberg, one of von Halem’s close literary correspondents and, very appropriately for island utopias, a translator of Plato, published a work entitled Die Insel (1788). Its Wrst part is a dialogue, led by a character named Sophron, developing plans for a utopia; the second part is a collection of poetry such as it might be created on this utopian island.61 Despite choosing a small Danubian, and hence realistically located, island as the location to inspire such utopian reveries, the exchange is strongly modelled on the precepts of 58 For British travellers, see Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Eve of the Greek Revival, 95, 237. 59 Herder, Ideen, bk. 13, Werke, vi. 518. 60 Heinrich Brunner, Die poetische Insel: Inseln und Inselvorstellungen in der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart, 1967), 144. 61 For a detailed synopsis see Go¨tz Mu¨ller, Die Utopie in der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart, 1989), 130–8.


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the Socratic dialogue; Sophron, to round it all out, is introduced as the son of a German politician who has only recently returned from a formative educational journey to Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Switzerland. Although as a literary work Stolberg’s piece remained largely without inXuence, it sketches the semantic grid in which locality as speciWc and ‘real’ (a Danubian island, not an unknown place), but also as raised to a Greek status, becomes meaningful; a location moreover, that produces meaning through the reXective approach of the experienced traveller. Among the spate of eighteenth-century utopian narratives mapped onto the world of the South, Wilhelm Heinse’s novel Ardinghello and the Islands of the Blest (Ardinghello und die glu¨ckseligen Inseln, 1787), a title strongly reminiscent of F. W. Zachariaes’s Tahiti or the Islands of the Blest of 1777,62 is a particularly stark example: here the ideal world of social experiment Wrst overlaps with the geographically extremely accurate, only to be overtaken, subsequently, by the uneasy encroachment of real political events. Ardinghello, which is mainly set in sixteenth-century Italy, leads only very late in the book to the foundation of an artistic community of aesthetically like-minded, libertarian souls on the Cycladic islands of Naxos and Paros (at the time indeed part of the Venetian-ruled Duchy of the Archipelago), which are described following detailed contemporary travel accounts (especially Choiseul-GouYer); the community itself meanwhile is modelled after certain precepts of the Platonic state, such as the separation of men and women and the communal upbringing of children, although with strong Bacchanalian overtones (Naxos being, after all, an island with cultic connections to Dionysos). The episode, however, ends with the remarkably abrupt invasion of the realistic into this still-brittle commune: the utopian plan of further expanding the territory of these blessed islands is cut short by the arrival of the Ottomans and their historical takeover of the island territory—and that is the end of the novel. Heinse closes curtly: ‘The special secret of our constitution, revealed only to those who had excelled themselves through heroic deeds or brilliance of mind, was this: to bring to an end altogether the rule of the Turks in this happy clime, and to elevate humanity back to 62 A letter by Boie to von Halem of September 1787 shows that both von Halem and Stolberg knew the work; L. W. C. von Halem, Selbstbiographie, 65.

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its former dignity. Yet after a period of bliss, relentless fate intervened.’63 What distinguishes Ardinghello, therefore, is the thickness of the ropes that tie the utopian community down to a realistic and geographically and historically veriWable setting. It is not an ou-topos, or an exotically far-Xung location; instead, its meaning derives precisely from the promising actuality of its environment. No matter how many or how few people, relatively speaking, travelled to that part of the world (Heinse almost certainly did not, even though he repeatedly expressed a desire to travel there),64 the Greek archipelago was reassuringly there. Yet even if the ‘actual’ Greece, as a founding site for the exotic commune, may be unexpectedly and oddly determined by the real political situation of the Ottoman Mediterranean, Greece, as a place of origin and displacement alike, is part of the aesthetic programme of the novel. Set for the most part in Renaissance Italy, the novel is largely a series of reXections on the relations between the creative arts and questions of artistic autonomy, held together by a rather wild coming-of-age plot, and it was at the time largely celebrated or reviled for its alleged aesthetic immorality and libertarian attitude.65 In the series of dialogues on art, however, which form the backbone of the work, landscape as an aesthetic object is given the central role. The mentor-Wgure of the novel, who inspires the utopia in the Wrst place, is the Greek exile Demetri; to him in particular is given the position of identifying landscape as a work of art of nature, and thus of conXating natural and artistic beauty. Landscapes, ambivalent in Heinse as both the natural prospect and the artistic genre, are in Demetri’s opinion given the status of prime genre for painting; they

63 ‘Das besondere Geheimnis unserer Staatsverfassung, welches nur denen anvertraut ward, die sich durch Heldentaten und großen Verstand ausgezeichnet hatten, bestand darin: der ganzen Regierung der Tu¨rken in diesem heitern Klima ein Ende zu machen und die Menschheit wieder zu ihrer Wu¨rde zu erheben. Doch vereitelte dies nach seligem Zeitraum das unerbittliche Schicksal.’ Wilhelm Heinse, Ardinghello und die glu¨ckseligen Inseln (Stuttgart, 1975), 376. 64 The archipelago is also a constantly recurring point of utopian reference in his ¨ sthetische Immoralismus: Zur corrrespondence, see W. Brecht, Heinse und der A Geschichte der Italienischen Renaissance in Deutschland (Berlin, 1911), 46 V. 65 On the recent revival of interest in Heinse’s work, see the essay collection Das Maß des Bacchanten: Wilhelm Heinses U¨ berlebenskunst, ed. Gert Theile (Munich, 1998).


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are instances of a true ‘Poetry of Nature’.66 Although instances of actual Greek locality and descriptions of a speciWcally Greek landscape are comparatively few in the novel, which moves to the Greek archipelago only in its very last section, it is signiWcant that the heightened awareness of the value of aesthetic landscape is voiced by the character of the exiled Greek: his (spatial) displacement from his natural aYnity with Greece, Greece being the literal breedingground of that which is considered truly beautiful in art, allows Demetri to adopt the stance of the (non-Greek) modern artist who is distinguished by a similar (temporal) distance from the original realization of Greek spirit and art. The modern Greek as a leadership Wgure realizing and reXecting his displacement is a character who reappears a little after Heinse’s publication in the shape of Ho¨lderlin’s Hyperion, and Heinse himself was the mentor of Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, certainly as far as a theory of the visual arts was concerned.67 If Ardinghello and Hyperion share the sentiment of a lost nature and the attempt to regain it in a speciWcally modern Greek setting, Heinse’s energetic revival of a sensuous utopia still oVers an answer very diVerent to that suggested by Ho¨lderlin.

¨ LDERLIN’S HYPE RION: T H E GRE EK HO LANDSCAPE OF TH E GERMAN SOUL The work of Friedrich Ho¨lderlin (1770–1843) in many ways exempliWes the challenge of the realization and spatial visualization of the ideal, based on a correspondence between internal and external landscapes. In his poetry, speciWc landscapes, identiWed by concrete place-names, cohere aesthetically with a poetic and philosophical 66 Ardinghello, 195. In his upgrading of the landscape genre in painting, Heinse slots into a contemporary discussion that valued that genre less highly and thus pre-empts artistic debate by a decade; see Ulrich Port, ‘Die Scho¨nheit der Natur erbeuten’: Problemgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zum a¨sthetischen Modell von Ho¨lderlins Hyperion (Wu¨rzburg, 1999), 258. 67 For their personal contact in Ho¨lderlin’s Frankfurt period (1796–98), see Port, ‘Die Scho¨nheit’, 292 V.; Ulrich Gaier, ‘ ‘‘Mein ehrlich Meister’’: Ho¨lderlin im Gespra¨ch mit Heinse’, in Theile, Maß des Bacchanten, 25–44; on Ho¨lderlin’s reception of Ardinghello further Elisabeth Stoelzel, Ho¨lderlin in Tu¨bingen und die Anfa¨nge seines Hyperion (Tu¨bingen, 1938), 19 f.

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programme that focuses on reality production and the role of the aesthetic in between the rational and the sensory: in the realm of the imagination. The transcendental is at the same time again not apolitical but very much about society, individuality, and unity. The landscape descriptions in Ho¨lderlin’s work as a whole are noteworthy for their wealth of precise geographical detail. Images of Swabia and the Swiss Alps (his mythological new Hesperia) in particular are complemented by the depiction of Greece and other environments representative of the transalpine, Mediterranean, and, in this sense, ‘Greek’ world (including the landscapes of the South of France).68 Ho¨lderlin’s use of travel writing in the composition of Hyperion is well documented:69 for the all-important setting of Greece, the land he never visited in actuality, Ho¨lderlin is known to have drawn on the usual suspects, such as Chandler’s Travels in Asia Minor and Travels in Greece (published in German translation by H. Ch. Boie and Wilhelm Voss in 1776/7) and Choiseul-GouYer’s Voyage pittoresque. There is also evidence that he knew Barthe´lemy’s Anacharsis.70 As would be expected, the source material undergoes its own process of modiWcation. We are faced with a reality that is concrete, but not independent. Since Ho¨lderlin’s poetic landscape is the mirror of internal, mental processes, that is, the medium of their externalization, there is only ‘one level of objective reality, shaped to the demands of aesthetic experience’.71 Just as in the poeticized world of the other Romantics, even if Ho¨lderlin stood at an odd angle to them as a close-knit group, there is not a question of imposing an ideal upon a material reality, but of mutual creation—and it is a set of issues that is particularly implicated in Greek modernity. 68 David Constantine, The SigniWcance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Ho¨lderlin (London, 1979); Romano Guardini, Form und Sinn der Landschaft in den Dichtungen Ho¨lderlins (Stuttgart, 1946). 69 Martin Anderle, Die Landschaft in den Gedichten Ho¨lderlins: Die Funktion des ¨ ber die Realien Konkreten im idealistischen Weltbild (Bonn, 1986); Friedrich Beißner, ‘U des ‘‘Hyperion’’’, in Ho¨lderlin-Jahrbuch, 8 (1954), 93–109; Constantine, The SigniWcance of Locality, and Ho¨lderlin (Oxford, 1988), ch. 5; Werner Volke, ‘ ‘‘O Laceda¨mons heiliger Schutt!’’ Ho¨lderlins Griechenland: Imaginierte Realien—Realisierte Imagination’, in Ho¨lderlin-Jahrbuch, 24 (1984/5), 63–86. 70 Volke, ‘Ho¨lderlin’s Griechenland’, 74 V. 71 Raymond Immerwahr, ‘Reality as an Object of Romantic Experience in Early German Romanticism’, Colloquia Germanica (1969), 133–61, 152.


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The novel Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland, its Wrst part published in 1797, the second in 1799, stands at the end of a series of Ho¨lderlin’s attempts to contain the Hyperion theme in appropriate form.72 The theme of a young, near-contemporary Greek, the story is set around 1770, and of his individual search for freedom is a study in the realization of ideals, caught in a network of mutually reinforcing cognitive, spiritual, emotional, and political facets. The Wnal version is constructed as a series of confessional letters from Hyperion to his German friend Bellarmin, recounting his path from Greece and his youth through a period of quasi-exile in Germany to his recent return to his homeland; the second part contains some additional letters from Diotima, the guiding female Wgure, inset within Hyperion’s letters. Ho¨lderlin’s choice of form combines the Bildungsroman and novel of letters with the confessional tradition, all genres allowing for a high degree of reXection on subjectivity.73 The ‘healing anamnesis’74 mirrored in the letters implies that Hyperion’s German exile is a necessary stage, and hence a structurally functional location both in spatial and temporal terms. His return to the Greek ‘Vaterlandsboden’, his home ground, is predicated upon his sojourn in a place temporally, spatially, and cognitively removed, an Archimedean lever to ascertain Hyperion’s identity, and the novel, indicatively, Wnishes with Hyperion recollecting his contemplation of nature in Germany. The German perspective, maintained in the framework of establishing a German addressee for his letters, is a condition for recalling his origin and his progress across Greece, marking Greece as a place of memory. Ho¨lderlin outlined his plans for the novel Hyperion in a letter to his friend Caspar NeuVer in 1793: ‘What you have said so well about terra incognita in the realm of poetry, pertains especially to a novel. Predecessors enough, few who chanced upon new and beautiful 72 For the textual evolution of Hyperion see the critical apparatus in the Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe (GStA), iii. 295–335. I quote from Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Sa¨mtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt/M., 1994), vol. ii, based on the GStA with a slightly modernized orthography. Page numbers cited parenthetically. 73 For the genre of confessio and its eVect on Ho¨lderlin, see Ulrich Gaier, Ho¨lderlin: Eine Einfu¨hrung (Tu¨bingen, 1993), 113–19; on Hyperion as a poetic novel see Lawrence ¨ ber Ho¨lderlin, ed. Jochen Ryan, ‘Ho¨lderlins Hyperion—ein romantischer Roman?’, in U Schmidt (Frankfurt/M., 1970), 175–212. 74 The expression is Gaier’s, Ho¨lderlin, 120.

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territory, and still immeasurable realms to be discovered and worked on!’75 The image of territorial exploration, already coloured by anxiety that territory is always somebody else’s, is not accidental: one of the characteristics of Ho¨lderlin’s style is his use of geographical or landscape metaphor to show individual and artistic progress and in the process trace a philosophy of subjective identity. In a letter to NeuVer the following year, Ho¨lderlin again stresses the spatial aspect of his philosophical and aesthetic project when he insists that what is needed is the ‘step across the Kantian borderline’.76 In the spatial aspect of the landscape image, in the ‘beautiful land’ that is Greece, the experience of transcendence is verbalized. The view becomes a Wgure for the act of cognition. Or, in Eckart Lobsien’s words: ‘What happens in descriptions of landscape is something akin to a verbal reconstruction of what the conditions of cognition of landscape as landscape are. This means that descriptive sequences yield less a representation of landscape than they thematize the cognitive Weld from which landscapes arise.’77 Hyperion’s ideal is a synthesis, a completeness of nature that signiWes both return, or rejuvenation, and maturation, a completion which Ho¨lderlin captures in the spatial image of ‘the eccentric course, which man covers, in general and in particular, from one point (of more or less pure simplicity) to another point (of more or less complete Bildung)’.78 So, too, in his description of the ideal at the outset of the novel, spatial vantagepoint and metaphor merge: ‘To be one with all . . . this is the summit of thoughts and pleasures, the height of the sacred mountain’ (p. 16). This ascent is inscribed in the nature of Greece as experienced by Hyperion. ‘What once was nature will become ideal’ (p. 73), he insists 75 ‘Was Du so scho¨n von der terra incognita im Reiche der Poesie sagst, trifft ganz genau besonders bei einem Romane zu. Vorga¨nger genug, wenige, die auf neues scho¨nes Land geriethen, u. noch eine Unermessenheit zu’r Entdeckung und Bearbeitung!’ Letter to NeuVer, 21 July 1793, GStA vi. 87; the English translation is that of Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany, NY, 1988), 122. 76 Letter to NeuVer, 10 July 1794, GStA vi. 137. At the time Ho¨lderlin envisages a philosophy of the subject that sets nature, spirit, and freedom as principles manifested in the subject; he does so by having recourse to Platonic ideas of the Beautiful, so as to surpass Kant’s and Schiller’s Transcendental Idealism; see Gaier, Ho¨lderlin, 81–7. 77 Landschaft in Texten: Zu Geschichte und Pha¨nomenologie der literarischen Beschreibung (Stuttgart, 1981), 84. 78 Prologue to ‘Fragment von Hyperion’ (1794), 177.


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later, to express the inevitable process of growing beyond nature. In the same speech, Hyperion speaks of this process also as one of fermentation (‘Ga¨rung’), one of his favourite organic metaphors for the natural and sometimes violent process of transformation. The growth ‘out of ’ nature is reminiscent of Schiller’s overcoming of the naive, which is only constituted in the very process. On the level of setting and imagery to describe Hyperion this means that the Greek landscape is realia and metaphor at the same time. A meaningful speciWc natural environment, that of Greece, with additional nature imagery as metaphor for the development of subjectivity superimposed upon it, emerges as one of the structuring principles in the treatment of landscape and locality in Hyperion, and it is the focus of analysis here. To make sense of Ho¨lderlin’s locating the Greek land, it helps to understand better Wrst his own system of how antiquity and modernity are related. Within that framework, the site of modern Greece can, and more speciWcally has to, function as the link between an ancient, Greek ideal and a modern, Western identity. Increasingly in Ho¨lderlin’s thought this relationship between antiquity and modernity is fuelled by a consciousness of their essential diVerence, and by 1801, at the end of writing Hyperion, he declares that ‘I have laboured long over this and know by now that, with the exception of what must be the highest for the Greeks and us—namely the living relationship and destiny—we likely have nothing in common with them’.79 Hellas, or antiquity, is not a model in the sense that modernity could ever be built upon its imitation. Like Schiller’s analysis of modernity vis-a`-vis nature, or Bhabha’s split national subject generating its own narration from a distance to itself, Ho¨lderlin’s claim rests on the same basic, but far-reaching, structure of relating to the similar but not identical, an argument that leaves a modern Greece exactly and deliberately on that fault-line.80 In Ho¨lderlin’s theory of 79 ‘Ich habe lange daran laborirt und weiß nun, daß außer dem, was bei den Griechen und uns das ho¨chste seyn muß, nemlich dem lebendigen Verha¨ltniß und Geschik, wir nicht wohl etwas gleich mit ihnen haben du¨rfen.’ Letter to Bo¨hlendorV, 4 Dec. 1801, GStA vi. 426. 80 Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in id. (ed.), Nation and Narration (London, 1990), 292–322.

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culture, aspiring to the ideal means for each, ancient and modern, to realize (or to have realized) its own character freely. As he has it in the same letter to Bo¨hlendorV: ‘we cannot imitate [the Greeks] as regards especially what is proper, what is national to us. As I said, the free employment of what is proper to us is the most diYcult.’81 Comparison and observation are built into what it means to be modern, though. Hellas was not a place of nature as opposed to art, but it underwent its own reXexive and hence artistic development, its ‘nature’, in that sense, but also in a literal sense, expressing harmony and fullness.82 It reached its own maximum, with a modern new maximum to be achieved on a diVerent plane.83 Again, here is the familiar recasting of a wavering, spiralling line of history into threedimensional space.84 Hellas, in its beauty once supremely free, is beyond retrieval, as the conditions triggering its character have irreversibly changed; yet Hyperion’s Greek land is still supremely beautiful, and the episode of Hyperion’s visit to the ruins of Athens expresses the temporary hope of a new Xourishing on its grounds: ‘Lie still, I thought as we returned on board, lie still, you slumbering land! Soon fresh young life will sprout from you to grow towards the blessings of the sky. Soon the clouds will not rain in vain any longer, soon the sun will Wnd the old pupils’ (p. 101). The realization of Hyperion’s visions is, however, inWnitely deferred by the turn of events, summarized in the closing words of the novel: ‘These were my thoughts. More soon’ (p. 175). It is the present Greek nature that allows a glimpse of the link between the ancient and the modern ideal, diVerent as they are, yet there is no structural provision for the glimpse to become an open view. ¨ berwindung des Klassizis81 To Bo¨hlendorV (as n. 79). See also Peter Szondi, ‘ ‘‘U mus’’—Der Brief an Bo¨hlendorV vom 4. Dezember 1801’, in his Ho¨lderlin-Studien: Mit einem Traktat u¨ber philologische Erkenntnis (Frankfurt/M., 1967), 85–104; also stressing the essential diVerence of Greece is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Ho¨lderlin and the Greeks’, in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 208–35. 82 Hyperion’s letter on the visit to Athens includes his outline of the ancient inclusiveness of religion, art, and philosophical reXection (pp. 88 V.). 83 The scientiWc notion of a maximum, i.e. a balance of powers, repeated on diVerent levels, was prevalent in contemporary theories of culture, including that of Greek antiquity; it is found, for example, in Herder’s Ideen (bk. 13) and Schiller’s ¨ ber die a¨sthetische Erziehung (6th letter); also Gaier, Ho¨lderlin, 94 f. U 84 Here again is the ‘exzentrische Bahn’ Ho¨lderlin speaks of famously in the preface to Hyperion, the eccentric trajectory that distinguishes our modern life.


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Throughout Ho¨lderlin’s poetry, ancient Hellas’s main attribute is its active, fully realized, semi-divine or heroic character.85 Merging with the Wgure of the semi-divine hero, it is also inscribed in the modern Greek landscape of Hyperion. In the opening vista over the Corinthian Isthmus, as just one example, one of the gulfs lies ‘like a victorious hero’ (p. 14). Yet in its active character lies also Hellas’s (self-)destructiveness, accelerated by the immediate contact with the sacred. Its opposite, which characterizes Hesperia (Ho¨lderlin’s quasi-mythological West representing the ideal of modernity), is a self-consciousness implying mediation. This establishes Hyperion’s contemporary Greece as the site of a necessarily superseded past. The point of reference is Hyperion’s modern subjectivity, which is shaped by and expressed in the natural environment surrounding him. The landscape, made up of material, natural objects aesthetically perceived, bears traces of the ancient Greek spirit in the sense of a non-modernity necessary for a modern identity; the aesthetic perception of landscape as shaping (and shaped by) the subject is an expression of that modern identity. There is in Hyperion a longing for the reuniting of poetic expression with a material nature that is its original condition yet resists simple imitation or integration. On the plot level, this re-emerges as the longing for the political uniWcation of a Greece independent of Ottoman rule. These longings mirror the relation Ho¨lderlin assumes between modernity and the ancients. In that sense, the character of Hyperion conWrms the ascription of the landscape as ‘Greek’, or, to be precise, as Greek from the standpoint of modernity. As the work is built on the principle of a spiritual progress enhanced by a geographical one, the course of Hyperion’s path across Greece, as he recounts it himself, oVers a good enough line for analysing Ho¨lderlin’s Greek landscape. Hyperion’s opening vista is that of the Gulf of Corinth, a raised viewpoint at a major crossroads on Greek territory (between Attica, the Peloponnese, and Roumeli); the view takes in plains, the sea, and Mounts Helicon and Parnassus (both sacred mountains of the Muses and obvious topoi of poetic inspiration in addition to their material bulk). Hyperion’s internal state, however, that corresponds to this setting of multiply inscribed contemplatio or 85 See Paul de Man, ‘The Image of Rousseau in Ho¨lderlin’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York, 1984), 19–45, 35 V.

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theoria, is one of sharply felt loss and desolation, only reinforced by the prospect: ‘Happy the man whose heart can take pleasure and strength from a Xourishing fatherland! I feel I am drowned in a swamp, I feel the coYn lid is thrown shut above my head when I am reminded of my own’ (p. 14). The Wrst words of the novel, likewise, are programmatic for the relation between interior and exterior nature: ‘The dear ground of my fatherland gives me, once more, pleasure and pain’ (p. 14). By the same logic, Hyperion’s aesthetic experience of nature implies its potential to overcome the sorrow it causes: ‘My entire being falls silent and listens when the tender wave of air surrounds my chest. Lost in the deep blue I often look into the aether above and into the sacred sea, and it is as if a kindred spirit would open its arms, as if the pain of solitude was resolved into the life of the divinity’ (p. 16).86 Hyperion’s vision edges onto Rousseau’s Reˆveries du promeneur solitaire, a work describing the desire to melt into nature, relived in writing.87 But as opposed to Rousseau’s local nature, the prospect of the surviving natural conditions of the Greek land oVsets the feeling of exclusion. The combination of the ‘authenticity’ of the Greek environment, well known from travel discourses, with the erotic desire for that nature, and the parallel state of desolation and regeneration mirrored in Hyperion, add to the identiWcation of Hyperion with the Greek land. The correspondence between exterior and interior nature, aesthetically represented, is not one of strict synchronization, though, but obeys a staggered pattern of adaptation and development. It is from this jointly mental and geographical vantage-point, then, that Hyperion is led to relate the story of his life. His older friend Adamas is a Wrst mentor Wgure to appear in his educational biography. To him Hyperion owes not only guidance and inspiration, but together they repeat the traditional model of the educational journey, cast in the language of the Grand Tour, and with 86 ‘Mein ganzes Wesen verstummt und lauscht, wenn die zarte Welle der Luft mir ¨ ther und um die Brust spielt. Verloren in’s weite Blau, blick ich oft hinauf an den A hinein in’s heilige Meer, und mir ist, als o¨Vnet’ ein verwandter Geist mir die Arme, als lo¨ste der Schmerz der Einsamkeit sich auf in’s Leben der Gottheit.’ 87 J.-J. Rousseau, Les Reˆveries du promeneur solitaire, in Oeuvres comple`tes, i (Paris, 1959), 1065, speaks of ‘me fondre pour ainsi dire dans le syste`me des eˆtres, a` m’identiWer avec la nature entie`re’.


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the localities to match. They travel to Mount Athos, the Hellespont, and to the ancient sites of Elis, Nemea, and Olympia; not only in their itinerary but also in their activities they comply with the expectations of the classical traveller in search of (dis-)continuity. Nature in spring reminds Hyperion that man’s glorious nature is hardly present any more, like the fragment of a temple or in memory, in a picture of the dead—and there I sat next to him, sadly playing and picking moss oV the pedestal of a demigod, from the rubble I would dig the marble shoulder of a hero and from the half-buried architraves I would cut oV the briars and weeds, while my Adamas was drawing the calm and soothing landscape that surrounded the ruin, the hill of wheat, the olives, the herd of goats suspended on the mountain rocks, the elm forest tumbling from the summits down to the valley. (pp. 20f.)88

In this tableau reminiscent of the aristocratic Grand Tour (and undoubtedly owing to Choiseul-GouYer), Hyperion’s mentor approaches his environment through art. Landscape is its result, and the statue of a hero, half-buried and sheltered in this landscape, is the materialization of Ho¨lderlin’s notion of the semi-divine character of the ancient Greeks; we view the scene vertically, the herd graphically ‘hanging’ on the rock and the forest hurling itself down the slope. What is more, this, as will become clear, is a spatial movement consistent with the act of consciousness as described by Ho¨lderlin repeatedly throughout the novel. The period of Adamas’s tutorship Wnishes when Adamas decides to travel further east. Hyperion instead turns toward Smyrna, a direction (of both travellers) in accordance with Ho¨lderlin’s belief in the origin of modern civilization in the East, and its later spiritual movement westwards.89 The latter is echoed in the deliberate choice of Nio, the island of Homer’s tomb, as their place of farewell, that 88 ‘daß des Menschen herrliche Natur jetzt kaum noch da ist, wie das Bruchstu¨ck eines Tempels oder im Geda¨chtnis, wie ein Totenbild—da saß ich traurig spielend neben ihm, und pXu¨ckte das Moos von eines Halbgotts Piedestal, grub eine marmorne Heldenschulter aus dem Schutt, und schnitt den Dornbusch und das Heidekraut von den halbbegrabnen Architraven, indes mein Adamas die Landschaft zeichnete, wie sie freundlich tro¨stend den Ruin umgab, den Weizenhu¨gel, die Oliven, die Ziegenherde, die am Felsen des Gebirges hing, den Ulmenwald, der von den Gipfeln in das Tal sich stu¨rzte.’ 89 Constantine, The SigniWcance of Locality, 41 V.

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leads Hyperion to the coast of Asia Minor in search of Homer’s birthplace. He Wnds it in the vicinity of Smyrna, the place that is also a meaningful locale to be reading in. As Robert Wood had experienced before him (and a host of classical scholars had experienced by proxy, reading Wood’s descriptions), and as Hyperion can conWrm, to read Homer in his proper setting qualitatively changes the understanding: ‘I found him. Every sound was silenced in me. I opened his divine poem and it was as if I had never known it, so diVerently it came alive in me now’ (p. 27). But again, and stronger than the implication in Wood, it is a new Homer who emerges from the pages read on site, an alien, unknown Wgure rather than a rediscovery. Ho¨lderlin’s Greece is never a place of early revivalism or renaissance: its discovery marks a radical break from identity, in all its unsettling extent. Importantly, this experience of landscape also brings to the surface a moment of speechlessness. The inability or insuYciency of authorial utterances vis-a`-vis signiWcant nature is an undercurrent that is inseparable from Hyperion’s progressing aesthetic consciousness. The same, repeated oscillation between initial enthusiasm and a feeling of deWciency structures Hyperion’s experience of Smyrna. To him, having fully internalized the beauty of nature, the city appears as a paradise, and Smyrna responds to his enthusiasm in turn: ‘My heart was too full of the agreeable and could not but lend from its abundance to mortality. I had captured in me nature’s beauty all too happily and could not but Wll the cracks of human life with it. My needful Smyrna put on the clothes of my enthusiasm and stood there, like a bride’ (p. 29).90 The clothing of Smyrna in his own colours, however, turns into its own parody, the analogy is corrupted: ‘the paradox of their manners gave me delight, like a child’s play, and because I was naturally above all the introduced forms and customs I played with all of them, put them on and took them oV like fancy costumes’ (p. 29). The immediate Anschauung, combined with Hyperion’s experience of Homeric literature and the Smyrniots’ lack of interest in the literary and cultural signiWcance of their (once Homeric) environment, leads ¨ berXusse der 90 ‘Mein Herz war des Wohlgefa¨lligen zu voll, um nicht von seinem U Sterblichkeit zu leihen. Ich hatte zu glu¨cklich in mich die Scho¨nheit der Natur erbeutet, um nicht die Lu¨cken des Menschenlebens damit auszufu¨llen. Mein du¨rftig Smyrna kleidete sich in die Farben meiner Begeisterung, und stand, wie eine Braut, da.’


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him to acknowledge eventually that their childlike character and his own enthusiasm are out of tune with his already more advanced stage of consciousness: ‘How my heart delighted in it! How faithfully I interpreted those friendly hieroglyphs! But I experienced almost the same as with the birch trees in spring. I had heard of the juice of those trees and thought what a marvellous drink they surely must produce. But there was neither strength nor spirit enough in them’ (p. 29).91 His conclusion, formulated in analogy to an experience of nature, echoes the belief in the less advanced childhood stage represented by the East as it was suggested, for example, in Herder’s universal history. More than that, Hyperion’s act of judgement is triggered by a speciWc, appropriate location and is expressed through a metaphor taken from nature. In addition, this assertion of Hyperion’s identity in front of a signiWcant environment is predicated on the Smyrniots’ absence of self-reXexivity by comparison. Overall, Hyperion’s increase in knowledge and consciousness is mediated by nature in a double sense: the aspect of nature, its aesthetic perception and reXection, is instrumental in maintaining Hyperion’s progress; in turn, the progress is charted through images taken from that very same nature, locking an environment whose signiWcance ostensibly rests on its independent materiality even further into a structure of expected, transcendent meaning. The central Wgure, however, to guide Hyperion’s winding course is that of Diotima, who, like her namesake in Plato’s Symposium, appears as the female representative of a completed, physical and spiritual ideal. In contrast to the closely deWned world of a classical symposium, into which the Socratic Diotima enters only by way of recollection and narrative, Ho¨lderlin’s Diotima is radically put in a place whose very reality and materiality drive Hyperion’s path, as much as his despair. Not only is she an actual love object, as opposed to a teacher of love, but she is situated in a spatially and temporally signiWcant environment. The sheltered home of Ho¨lderlin’s guiding Diotima, and the initial meeting-place with Hyperion, is Kalaurea, 91 ‘Wie hatt ich meine herzliche Freude daran! wie glaübig deutet ich diese freundlichen Hieroglyphen! Aber es ging mir fast damit, wie ehemals mit den Birken im Fru¨hlinge. Ich hatte von dem Safte dieser Baüme geho¨rt, und dachte wunder, was ein ko¨stlich Getra¨nk die lieblichen Sta¨mme geben mu¨ßten. Aber es war nicht Kraft und Geist genug darinnen.’

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or, by its modern name, the island of Poros, a small island oV the Eastern Peloponnese in the Saronic gulf, which is separated from the mainland by only a very thin waterway (the Greek poros of its name). That Poros, whose ancient Greek name signiWes a strait as much as resourcefulness, is in Plato’s mythology also the father of Eros, about whom his Diotima is the acknowledged expert and master, means that Ho¨lderlin eVectively spatializes the mythical, Platonic genealogy of that most persistent and present of deities, Love, who is characterized as constant longing and deWciency, on a Greek map of modernity, as much as on a map of modern Greece. Within the speciWc repertoire of information on contemporary Greece, moreover, Ho¨lderlin not only selects a site which earlier and contemporary travel accounts, such as Chandler’s, had singled out for its beauty and fertility;92 Diotima’s natural environment is also that of a secured and separated, individual island which is at the same time geographically as close as possible to the revolutionary mainland: the site of Hyperion’s greatest hopes, disappointments, and reXections towards which Diotima guides him. Hyperion’s memory of Kalaurea is triggered indirectly, by the mountain view across the nearby island of Salamis, which he enjoys at the opening of Book II. The evening view extends to the shore and the sea, as far as Attica. Hyperion’s interior and his exterior surroundings bear each other’s mark; the landscape induces a mental process, serving as its visual mirror image: ‘Or I look out at sea and reXect on my life, its rising and falling, its bliss and its sadness,’ just as the landscape, in its entirety and particularity, adopts the emotional colouring of the psyche: ‘I love this land of Greece above all else. It has the colour of my heart.’ This vantage-point leads Hyperion to remember the mountain view he frequently shared with Diotima from the top of her island, where ‘one could live in more freedom than anywhere else’ (p. 57). Later on, Hyperion tries to salvage the vision of Kalaurea as his blessed island, inhabited by himself and Diotima, from the ruins of Athens: ‘What is the shipwrecking of the world to me when I know only of my blesssed island?’ (p. 98). Like Diotima, Hyperion himself hails from an island (Tenos), a signiWcant origin in the light of the privileged character that distinguishes the islands of the Aegean archipelago in Ho¨lderlin’s elegy of the same 92 Commentary in GStA iii. 456.


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name, written around the time when the Hyperion project was drawing to a close. In ‘The Archipelago’ (1800/1) the sea is the unifying factor linking the personiWed daughters of the Archipelago, those ‘mothers of heroes, the islands’ (l. 19), that have survived since the heyday of a Greece uniWed and blossoming after the Persian wars. The island world, the site of a transcendent, deiWed nature, that is still present now and promises a fulWlled future, diVers from Hyperion’s view though; despite the grief at the incompleteness of the present and the solitary distance from the harmony of the past, the unnamed speaker of ‘The Archipelago’ foresees an unspeciWed future renewal. Hyperion, even if he follows an analogous cycle of reXection, seems quite literally more entangled in the material and the geopolitical realities of his Greek setting, in a speciWc historical period—quite in line with the fact that what keeps Greece in place for modern Hellenism is exactly the peculiar symbiosis of placeness and historicity, that is envisaged not as peculiar but as natural. To Hyperion, Diotima is identiWed with both her real and his visionary island: ‘Like the ocean wave lapping the shores of the blessed isles, so did my restless heart Xood the peace of this heavenly maiden’ (p. 68). Again, the landscape framing the scene is reintroduced through the door of metaphor, this time to express the promise of unity between Hyperion and Diotima, yet not without the threat of an overpowering, destructive force of nature. The talks with Diotima follow the same fashion: ‘Our talks Xowed softly, like a skyblue river, its gold blinking here and there among the sand, and our silence was like the silence of the mountain tops where, high above the sphere of thunderstorms, in glorious solitude, only the divine air rushes through the locks of the daring wanderer’ (p. 85).93 In the fold between literal and metaphorical use, the identity of Diotima, the ideal Wgure, and the real world is total: ‘because our world is your world too. Your world too, Diotima, for it is a copy of you. Oh you with your Elysian calm, if only we created what you are!’ (p.127). Through her association with Hyperion, however, who links them both to nature through poetic metaphor and his reXexive view, 93 ‘Unsre Gespra¨che gleiteten weg, wie ein himmelblau Gewa¨sser, woraus der Goldsand hin und wieder blinkt, und unsre Stille war, wie die Stille der Berggipfel, wo in herrlich einsamer Ho¨he, hoch u¨ber dem Raume der Gewitter, nur die go¨ttliche Luft noch in den Locken des ku¨hnen Wanderers rauscht.’

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her ‘naive’ immediate relation to nature is already lost, just as deWciency is inscribed in landscape by the act of aesthetic representation. When the Wgure of Diotima is interpreted from the standpoint of her location within nature and landscape, hers is an ideal position of calm and freedom, which she alone is able to sustain. Compare the following two passages. Poised on the edge, overlooking the island from the point of her home ground, Diotima’s soul expands up into the open ‘as if she was to soar up into the clouds’, yet she can equally sustain the view down below: ‘She stepped closer now and looked down the steep face of the rock. She took delight in measuring its horrible depth and in losing herself in the night of the forests stretching their tops from the rocks and foaming rivulets towards the light’ (p. 64).94 Contrast Hyperion’s description of his farewell exchange with Diotima: ‘Diotima stood like a marble sculpture and I could feel her hand die in my own. I had killed everything near me, I was alone and I felt dizzy in the face of such limitless silence where my life found no hold’ (pp. 113 f.).95 The motif of vertigo (‘Schwindel’) is never far from the ascending movement that governs Hyperion’s perspective. Expansion of view, like the expansion of meaning implied in the Romantic image, can just as easily reveal the void beyond it. The end of Book I, that is, the passage directly preceding Hyperion’s view from high on Salamis, evokes the mythological ascent of the Titans to overthrow Zeus’ residence on Mount Olympus (which doubles as a real landmark elsewhere in the novel) by linking it to the spiritual Xight and fall of Hyperion and his companions: ‘and our spirits too thronged upwards, bold and exultant, and broke through the limit, and when they turned around, alas, there was an inWnite void’ (p. 54). Diotima’s ‘Xight’, in contrast, is restricted, or rather secured, by a low fence of the garden demarcating her sphere. The garden appears many times, especially as a site of the encounters with Diotima; and 94 ‘Nun trat sie weiter vor, und sah die schroVe Felswand hinab. Sie hatte ihre Lust daran, die schro¨ckende Tiefe zu messen, und sich hinab zu verlieren in die Nacht der Wa¨lder, die unten aus Felsenstu¨cken und schaümenden Wetterba¨chen herauf die lichten Gipfel streckten.’ 95 ‘Diotima stand, wie ein Marmorbild und ihre Hand starb fu¨hlbar in meiner. Alles hatt ich um mich her geto¨tet, ich war einsam und mir schwindelte vor der grenzenlosen Stille, wo mein u¨berwallend Leben keinen Halt mehr fand.’


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again, in Hyperion’s early discussions with Alabanda it is used as a particularly poignant metaphor: ‘The state is nothing but the rough shell around the core of life. It is the wall fencing in the garden of human fruits and Xowers.’ The sheltered existence of Diotima’s island where the garden is integrated into the broader environment is one actual, material development of Hyperion’s metaphor; it is envisaged as a mode of living which is in keeping both with nature and with a political, social framework. Yet, in other contexts, the garden can become an image of deWciency or displacement alike. Hyperion, at the end of Book I, asks: ‘If your garden is so full of Xowers, why does their aroma not give me pleasure?’ (p. 55), and Alabanda, towards the end of the novel, tells of his own exile when, shipwrecked in his youth near Trieste, he was confronted on shore by a garden (and social community) which stands in stark contrast to the Greek soil: ‘I followed the road towards the town. Before I reached its gates I saw a cheerful crowd in the gardens, I entered and I sang a cheerful Greek song. I did not know of any sad ones. All the while I burned with shame and pain to have to show my unlucky fate so publicly’ (p. 170). During the crucial visit to Athens, gardens too oVer the grounds for decision-making (‘we went out into the nearby gardens’, p. 97). Here, next to the ruins, Hyperion, in dialogue with Diotima, is free to develop his vision of rejuvenation and his role in it. Here also, the sight of Athens’s ruins triggers Hyperion’s new awareness that ‘I am an artist’ (p. 100). Yet the plans to become a modern educator of Greece are cut short by the actual mobilization of forces on the Peloponnese and Hyperion’s decision to join them. As in Heinse’s case, there is a certain thrill with the invasion of historical ‘real time’ and events into a signiWcant landscape, which ultimately proves Greece’s structural function as a material symbol. The desire for the (untimely) realization of his ideal, which will lead to political failure and Diotima’s death, is expressed in territorial terms. ‘The new bond of like minds cannot live in the air, the sacred theocracy of beauty must live in a free state; that state wants a place on earth and we will surely conquer that place’ (p. 108). Hyperion recounts his journey across the country to join Alabanda in the Southern Peloponnese: ‘I am happy once more. I wandered through the land as if walking through Dodona’s grove, where the oak trees resound with oracles foretelling glory’ (p. 117). Once more, we Wnd the strategy that a level

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of nature imagery and metaphor, in this case pertaining to the speciWed Greek locale of Dodona, the nature oracle in Northern Greece, is superimposed on the level of geographical description, locality, and spatial order which are already signiWcant in their own right. Nature metaphor makes a reappearance in the description of the Greeks preparing for freedom: ‘The mountain people are Wlled with powers of revenge, they sit like a silent storm cloud waiting for the wind to set them on their way’ (p. 117). The natural imagery already suggests the duplicity of this threatening energy, anticipating its later destructiveness. At the same time, the released forces of nature relate back to the original friendship of Alabanda and Hyperion: ‘We encountered each other like two streams rolling from the mountain, pushing aside the weight of earth and stone and rotting wood to force their path towards each other, until they break through to the point where they merge, sweeping and being swept along by the same power, united in one single stream, and begin their journey towards the wide sea’ (p. 34).96 The episode precedes their painful separation, and the image of the powerful stream is subsequently turned onto its more sinister axis when Hyperion accuses those of the Greek people who lack spirit (Geist) and greatness: ‘—oh take your sons from the cradle and throw them into the river, at least to save them from your disgrace!’ (p. 36). This threatening aspect of ‘real’ powerful nature is continued in Hyperion’s letter to Bellarmin that tells of Diotima’s confession of love: ‘I see, I see now how this must end. The rudder has fallen into the sea and the ship, like a child gripped by the ankles, will be seized and smashed on the rocks’ (p. 86). In this dark parallel image, the identiWcation of Hyperion with the Greek country is revalidated; and to the vertigo of space is added that of time, in more than one direction: temporally, the violence of nature, like the violence to a child gripped by the ankles, echoes the mythical history of Astyanax’s cruel death, in the Trojan War, at the hands of the Greeks. In the future, and at a spatial distance, this identiWcation in failure will be realized back in the Peloponnese. 96 ‘Wir begegneten einander wie zwei Ba¨che, die vom Berge rollen, und die Last von Erde und Stein und faulem Holz und das ganze tra¨ge Chaos, das sie aufha¨lt, von sich schleudern, um den Weg sich zueinander zu bahnen, und durchzubrechen bis dahin, wo sie nun ergreifend und ergriVen mit gleicher Kraft, vereint in Einen majesta¨tischen Strom, die Wanderung ins weite Meer beginnen.’


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The unsuccessful Wghting at Mistra marks the disintegration of the insurrection, and Ho¨lderlin deliberately emphasizes the Greeks’ active role in their abandoning of the cause. While the historical reasons for the Greek defeat in 1770 surely were manifold (structural weaknesses, lack of Russian support, only localized conXict), Ho¨lderlin even surpasses contemporary accounts of the insurgency in laying the blame squarely on the Greek side. Ho¨lderlin here intensiWes a bias already found in Reichard’s partial translation of Chandler’s Voyage pittoresque. Chandler is one of the few to give a detailed description of the political upheavals in 1770, including the Wghting at Mistra. In Reichard’s translation, the weak and disunited Greek contingent, facing an opposition outnumbering them by far, as Chandler had portrayed it, becomes a band of degenerate, corrupt, and greedy good-for-nothings unable to withstand even a small number of enemies. And while it is internal splitting, or disunity, of the Greeks as a body that is causal, it is recognizable only from an outside perspective, doubling and in that sense validating the splitting of the subject. The involution of desire, the wilful destruction of the ideal by Hyperion’s men themselves, runs parallel to Hyperion’s decision to abandon both Diotima and a period of further education, and thus his failure to reach, or alternatively, to stop at, a level of consciousness that can express its unity with nature. The result for him is exile—and, with it, the reXective act of writing. Writing in turn propels Hyperion once more onto the path, or ‘eccentric course’, of both rejuvenation and maturation. In his description of the search for the materialization of his ideals, there is awareness that the transcendent is realized in language, including the very language describing landscape. At the same time, this language describing landscape, that is to say, the imagery of nature, is understood to be deWcient. For Hyperion, and with him for Ho¨lderin, landscape is not only a way of seeing but also a way of writing. The topos of the ineVable, of what is incommunicable by language, is a recurring one; this is certainly not surprising for the fabric of Romantic poetry, but in Hyperion’s landscapes natural scenes come to replace the need, or, more strongly, the ability, to speak. The insight familiar from the cultural criticism of Schiller, that the alienation from nature is a condition of modern artistic expression, is exempliWed in Hyperion’s insight regarding the description of Diotima as the copy of the world: ‘Only now and then can I speak a word about

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her. I must forget what she is in her entirety if I am to speak of her at all’ (p. 76). This rift has even more profound consequences: Ho¨lderlin admits that the simple equation of the objective correlative, ‘interior corresponds to exterior’, is insuYcient when it is put into words and images: ‘Nothing can grow and wane so deeply as man. He will often liken his suVering to the darkness of the abyss and his bliss to the aether, and how little has he said by this?’ (p. 55). Ho¨lderlin’s text is—among other things, and again like other Romantic writing—a case study in critiquing the use of poetic language through engagement with the natural world. What distinguishes Hyperion is the interlacing of imagery and objective reality: nature imagery is employed to express the ideality and the failure of such poetic language oriented toward nature, and Greek nature speciWcally.97 At the same time, this tension is considered an inevitable part of artistic identity. At the end of Book I, Hyperion expresses it through another, again vertical, metaphor taken from nature: ‘Believe me and consider what I tell you from the bottom of my soul: language is a great abundance. The best will always remain on its own resting in its depth, like the pearl at the bottom of the sea’ (p. 148). Linking the emancipation of consciousness to the artistic representation of nature is in many ways a hallmark of the period. Ho¨lderlin, though, integrates his use of nature imagery and his own reXections upon it into a deliberately and particularly Greek setting, much as his aesthetic representation relies also on earlier artistic traditions.98 Ho¨lderlin maintains the polarity of regeneration and irreversible decline out of which the contemporary site of Greece emerged in the late eighteenth century; but Greece is also understood as the appropriate landscape to represent, in turn, the issues involved in the self-positioning of the artist. The appropriateness of landscape 97 De Man develops his own interpretation of the Romantic image from Ho¨lderlin’s line ‘nun mu¨ssen dafu¨r Worte, wie Blumen, j entstehn’ (‘Brot und Wein’). He identiWes a longing of poetic language for the ontological (natural) status of the object: ‘At times, romantic thought and romantic poetry seem to come so close to giving in completely to the nostalgia for the object that it becomes diYcult to distinguish between object and image, between imagination and perception, between an expressive or constitutive and a mimetic or literal language.’ ‘Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image’, 7. The same could be said of the use of nature imagery in Hyperion. 98 Port, Scho¨nheit der Natur, 11 f., notices the classical and Renaissance tendencies of Hyperion and its aYnity with the tradition of ideal landscape that belongs to the seventeenth century and the classicism of the eighteenth century.


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metaphor for artistic self-understanding is perhaps most immediately expressed in Ho¨lderlin’s letter to his brother of 1 January 1799. Here he compares the relation of philosophical and political understanding to poetry, as it is found in Germany, to the relation of a perspectivally correct sketch to a landscape painting of the same model: for, regardless of everything else, the philosophico-political education already contains in itself the inconvenience that it knits together the people in the essential, inevitably necessary relations, in duty and law; yet how much is left then, for human harmony? The fore-, middle-, and background, drawn according to optic laws, is far from being the landscape, which, at most, would like to place itself at the side of nature’s live creation.99

Ho¨lderlin’s own artistic metaphor then concludes: ‘Yet the best among the Germans still think that if the world was only neatly symmetrical everything would be done with. Oh Greece, with your genius and your piety, whereto have you come?’100 The lifeless symmetrical plan as opposed to the landscape painting, which does justice to nature, is not as such identiWed with the misguided German priorities and the lost Greek spirit respectively. Yet they create meaning as they are bound together in a rhetorical parallel that is consistent with Ho¨lderlin’s artistic programme, manifest in the imagery of Hyperion.101 De Man speaks of the transcendental aspects of Ho¨lderlin’s writings as ‘the ascending movement . . . by means of which the poetic 99 ‘denn, alles andere abgerechnet, so hat die philosophisch politische Bildung schon in sich selbst die Inkonvenienz, daß sie zwar die Menschen zu den wesentlichen, unumga¨nglich nothwendigen Verha¨ltnissen, zu PXicht und Recht, zusammenknu¨pft, aber wieviel ist dann zur Menschenharmonie noch u¨brig? Der nach optischen Regeln gezeichnete Vor- und Mittel- und Hintergrund ist noch lange nicht die Landschaft, die sich neben das lebendige Werk der Natur allenfalls stellen mo¨chte.’ Ho¨lderlin, GStA vi. 306 f.; tr. Pfau, Essays and Letters, 139 f. 100 ‘Aber die besten unter den Deutschen meinen meist noch immer, wenn nur erst die Welt hu¨bsch symmetrisch wa¨re, so wa¨re alles geschehen. O Griechenland, mit deiner Genialita¨t und deiner Fro¨mmigkeit, wo bist du hingekommen?’ Ibid. 307; tr. Pfau, 140, slightly amended. 101 A literary scene, which transposes Ho¨lderlin’s view on the deWcient relation between philosophy and art deliberately back into a landscape setting, is found again in Rousseau’s Nouvelle He´loı¨se. In the well-known 23rd letter of part I, St Preux comments: ‘J’admirois l’empire qu’ont sur nos passions les plus vives les eˆtres les plus insensibles, et je me´prisois la philosophie de ne pouvoir pas meˆme autant sur l’aˆme qu’une suite d’objets inanime´s.’

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imagination tears itself away, as it were, from a terrestrial nature and moves toward this ‘‘other nature’’ ’. In relation to material reality and the natural environment, this is ‘the ascent of a consciousness trapped within the contradictions of a half-earthly, half-heavenly nature’.102 The natural imagery relating to these philosophical stages, those of suspense and ascent, abound in Hyperion. And yet, especially as regards Greece, the material grounding is a structurally indispensable, and in itself valuable, even if highly ambivalent, part of the movement of transcendence. If, compared to the visionary speaker of ‘The Archipelago’, Hyperion is caught, and, as I argue, has to be caught, on the ground of his Greek land, Ho¨lderlin, in the letter to his brother on New Year’s Day 1799, superimposes the curious image of verticality onto the diVerence between modernity and antiquity, and the progress engendered by that diVerence. This is the very remark quoted at the beginning of this study: ‘I, too, with all good intentions can only stumble behind those singular [Greek] people in everything I do and say, and often I do it all the more clumsily and out of tune, because I, like the geese, stand Xat-footed in the waters of modernity, Xapping my powerless wings up towards the Greek sky.’103 The Greek sky above Hyperion may be marginally closer than that above Ho¨lderlin’s geese, but Constantine has rightly termed Ho¨lderlin’s Greece still a ‘landscape of longing’.104 In its impression of wholeness, it is the initiator of an inWnite longing, as well as a place that consoles for the failure of its achievement, by being that: a real place, aesthetically perceived and represented. The pain of the restless expansion towards unity is the general theme and it is through the dynamic of loss that spiritual freedom is achieved: ‘True pain enthuses. He who steps on his misfortune, rises higher. And it is glorious that we should feel the true freedom of the soul only in suVering’ (p. 133). The loss, apart from the real loss of Hyperion’s companions and his beloved Diotima, is implied in the landscape that evokes feelings of incompleteness and separation. In this sense, too, the character of the landscape matches the character of its protagonist. In the Prologue to Hyperion, Ho¨lderlin explicitly states 102 De Man, ‘Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image’, 14 f. 103 GStA vi. 307. 104 Constantine, Ho¨lderlin, 86.


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that Greece, while already a literary topos, is the proper place for his main character, even if there again looms the threat that the location of Greece is never ‘new’ but always somebody else’s already: ‘The location where the events took place is not a new one, and I admit that I was foolish enough once to consider a change with the book; I became convinced, though, that it is the only place that is appropriate for Hyperion’s elegiac character.’105 Elegisch is best understood in Schiller’s sense of the term as a category of poetic perception, proposed in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry: If the poet should set nature and art, the ideal and actuality, in such opposition that the representation of the Wrst prevails and pleasure in it becomes the predominant feeling, then I call him elegiac. This category too, like satire, comprehends two species. Either, nature and the ideal are an object of sadness if the Wrst is treated as lost and the second as unattained. Or, both are an object of joy represented as actual. The Wrst yields the elegy in the narrower sense, and the second the idyll in the broader sense.106

For Hyperion, such loss of nature also leads to the extreme of a landscape devoid of people, Wtting his status as that of an ‘Eremit in Griechenland’. The Greek landscape not only charts and reciprocates his development as an ‘idealist’, but also as a writer; the choice of Greece as a suitable aesthetic setting for the poetic mind returns us to the important question of the position of the poet within his society, and the potential to address this role through landscape imagery. The Wgure of the hermit is certainly not inconsistent with the self-positioning of the German artist of the period. The social role of the writer as a professional was in the making and still characterized by a high level of dependency and insecurity, at a time that was equally formative for disputing a national identity—meaning that the issue of isolation and the role of the intellectual as a solitary Wgure were negotiated, and negotiable, on both a social and an aesthetic level.107 105 ‘Der Schauplatz, wo sich das Folgende zutrug, ist nicht neu, und ich gestehe, daß ich einmal kindisch genug war, in dieser Ru¨cksicht eine Vera¨nderung mit dem Buche zu versuchen, aber ich u¨berzeugte mich, daß er der einzig angemessene fu¨r Hyperions elegischen Charakter wa¨re.’ 106 Schiller, Werke, v. 728. 107 H. J. Haferkorn, ‘Zur Entstehung der bu¨rgerlich-literarischen Intelligenz und des Schriftstellers in Deutschland zwischen 1750 und 1800’, in Bernd Lutz (ed.), Deutsches Bu¨rgertum und literarische Intelligenz 1750–1800 (Stuttgart, 1974), 113–275; Ludwig

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Despite the loss of nature as a condition of modernity, the Greek landscape embodies the sheer potential for realization, however fractured or unachievable this realization may be. In order to sustain the position of potentiality, the rift between its success as the surviving environment of the ancients and its present ambiguous state of deWciency must, of necessity, defy closure. The Greek land as both authentic materiality and imagery bridges that rift while keeping the divide open. In that way it can continue to be a ‘landscape of longing’, conforming to the aesthetic positions that have turned attention towards it in the Wrst place. Hyperion, of course, is a modern man, and it is the free self-realization of the ‘Western’ identity that is in question. For Ho¨lderlin, the site of contemporary Greece is his Archimedean point of leverage, just as Germany is for Hyperion. This leads us on to consider the artistic responses when contemporary Greece became a stronger material presence, not only on the metaphorical or cognitive maps, but on the political and geographical ones too, especially around and after 1821. The principal structure, underpinned by aesthetic tenets, perseveres: the rift that marks the Greek land as both authentic and deWcient is kept open. So does using the site of Greece as an intrinsically suitable foil for the concerns of individual and national artistic identity. With the politicization of the topos after 1821, dynamism and decline remain the deWning features in depicting the Greek land. The stress on the former element increases, without the latter being discarded. How this is achieved in detail is the topic of the next chapter. Fertig, Die Hofmeister: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Lehrersta¨nde und der bu¨rgerlichen Intelligenz (Stuttgart, 1979), 3–99; Bernd Giesen and Kay Junge, ‘Vom Patriotismus zum Nationalismus. Zur Evolution der ‘‘Deutschen Kulturnation’’ ’, in Bernd Giesen (ed.), Nationale und Kulturelle Identita¨t: Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit 2 (Frankfurt/M., 1991), 255–303; Henri Brunschwig, Gesellschaft und Romantik im Preußen des 18. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt/M., 1976), 344–74. Ho¨lderlin, as a privately employed teacher, belonged to that rank of intellectuals particularly prone to exploitation, dissatisfaction, and isolation.

3 Nature in Arms: German Philhellenism, its Literature, and the Greek War of Independence The old hypothesis that comets are the revolutionary Wrebrands of the universal system is surely true of another kind of comet too, one that periodically revolutionizes the spiritual system of the universe and makes it young again. The astronomer of the mind has long noticed the force of such a comet over a large part of the planet of the mind that we call humankind. Mighty deluges, changing climates, a moving centre of gravity, a common tendency for diVusion, and strange meteorites are the symptoms of this violent incitation, which will result in a new world age. As necessary as it may be to mobilize everything periodically so as to create new, necessary combinations and prompt a new and more pure form of crystallization, it would be as inconceivable not to shore up such crisis and thereby avoid complete diVusion, so that a root might remain, a kernel on which new matter can be grafted, to develop around it in beautiful new shapes. (Novalis, Faith and Love, fr. 21)

By the second decade of the nineteenth century the sheer vertigo of modernity, which Ho¨lderlin had so painfully experienced, had in some respects given way to a more manageable incline, at least as far as the position of Hellenism, and its institutions, was concerned. As for Hellenism as the study of ancient Greece, classical scholarship, in the wake of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s educational reforms in the 1800s, had become Wrmly established as a foundational subject in

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schools and especially in the universities, feeding from there into all other institutions of state and the civil service. Literary Romanticism (and Classicism), at the same time, was giving way to a growing eclecticism, even if the symbolizing practice of landscape representation continued in the discursive framework that linked it to the employment of the imagination and to poetic activity as an exercise of freedom. In the world-view which German literary history has termed Biedermeier, but which has been extended beyond Germany as the general phenomenon of what Nemoianu has called a ‘tamed Romanticism’, individual and nature are treated as part of a single higher order, going hand in hand with increased attention to local realism and religious symbolism.1 At the same time as local realism is invested in, increased political realism enters literary production too. The Congress of Vienna (1814–15) after the Napoleonic Wars, the establishment of the German Federation (Deutscher Bund) in 1815, and the so called Karlsbad Decrees in 1819, which reinforced censorship and the restrictive climate of Restauration, all made politics an issue both for the conditions and themes of literary productivity.2 In addition, Greece, through the development of its own political situation, now became an entity that existed more Wrmly in the present than ever before. The main argument put forward in this chapter is that, regarding the representation of Greece by way of its landscape, the focus of the period after 1821 shifts from characteristic and reXexive nature more widely to a concentration, or a shorthand, of speciWc locations, of rhetorical and literal topoi, without, however, abandoning the structure of aesthetic landscape and Romantic nature imagery. I will argue that this abridgement occurs not coincidentally at the same time as topoi, or cliche´s, an air of citation, become part of Romantic poetics and its self-awareness. The literary output occasioned by the Greek War of Independence held a fragile position already in its own time between 1 e.g. Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution, 1815–1848, Bd. i (Stuttgart, 1971); this is not to be understood as an opposition to Romanticism, but instead as a reassessment and modiWcation of the elements of Romantic aesthetics. 2 T. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866: Bu¨rgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich, 1983), 569–79; Sengle, Biedermeierzeit, i. 110–256, for the diVerent literary tendencies and their degree of politicization.

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inspiring admiration and uneasy derision in its readers in almost equal measure. As the classical historian Bartold Niebuhr expresses it, with appalled delight, in a letter to Hensler in 1826: ‘Did you read Tiedgen’s poem ‘‘The Battle of Greece against Barbary’’? I should not have thought he had it in him; no matter how many imperfections the verses as such may have. The sentiment is frightfully beautiful (die Gesinnung ist gra¨sslich scho¨n).’3 Repetitive much of the occasional poetry may be, but it is not simply ‘bad verse’, or rather it may be bad verse for a good reason, if we take into account the reduction that put images of Greece into a Wrm place, despite the insistence on unleashed freedom and upheaval as the proper content of that poetry. At the same time this strategy is accompanied by a politicization of nature imagery, and a corresponding naturalization of its political aspects. In capturing the Greek War of Independence, the imagination of the Greek land and its natural environment merges with a tradition of nature metaphor to describe historical and political events. This tradition was certainly not new, but it had gained momentum throughout the period of the French Revolution, Jacobinism, and the Wars of Liberation. If, once the insurrections in Greece had been given the name of a War of Independence, images of Greece appear to become more formalized, it is because concrete political events were now contained not only within the relative security of lasting, particular place, but also within tested aesthetic and artistic models and imagery to describe them. The case of Ho¨lderlin shows how at the turn of the nineteenth century national identity was increasingly part of the question of authorial identity, and how, pondering on both, Ho¨lderlin could draw argumentative strength from the designation of his poetic landscapes as Greek. Hyperion, the displaced Greek, is painfully conscious of his position and, in contrast to his beloved Diotima, he cannot sustain the look into the abyss. A good twenty years on, the Greeks reenter the scene with a new assurance, populating poetry occasioned by the Greek War of Independence. It is in images like that of the mountain-dweller thundering down into the plain to raise freedom, ‘free, like my mountain streams, like the eagle in the sky’, that violence 3 Karl Dieterich, Aus Briefen und Tagebu¨chern zum deutschen Philhellenismus (1821–1828) (Hamburg, 1928), 315.

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is suggested, yet still kept at bay.4 This chapter looks at a phase of more obvious politicizing of content and imagery in German poetry about contemporary Greece. Among other things, this aVects particularly the employment of nature metaphors and the use of location. Wilhelm Mu¨ller’s poems, in particular, not only reXect contemporary political and literary issues, but they do so by positioning Greek-speakers within their natural environment. ‘Greece’ provided a value system transcending historical and geographical space, while the establishment of a Greek nation state would come to pose a challenge to both German and Greek notions of a national landscape. Overall, it is important that although the description of Greece is speciWc, as far as signiWcant location and general ambience go, it is broad enough to allow identiWcation and transfer to the German perspective, quite in line with the pattern whereby Greece stands in for a privileged location to combine the particular and the universal with maximum transparency. Roger Paulin has rightly argued that it is unfair to treat all political poetry of the time as a surrogate for a German situation that could not be openly expressed or discussed.5 By the same token, not every philhellenic sentiment was ‘mixed with a Hellenic Teutonocentrism’ (‘griechische Deutschtu¨melei’), as Varnhagen von Ense suspected (although he has a point).6 Greece may share some of the German concerns brought to its revolution with those brought to the liberation movements of Spain, Italy, or, a little later, Poland. Yet Greece is not a random choice, and it is certainly not one free of ambivalence. It is Greece, especially in its contemporary material manifestation, that is considered particularly entitled to represent and to regain freedom, and to a large extent this conviction is bolstered in writing through the use of nature imagery, although an imagery now turning in its dynamic towards the extremes of the static and the violent, often combining both.

4 Wilhelm Mu¨ller, Werke, ed. Maria-Verena Leistner (Berlin, 1994), i. 245. 5 Roger Paulin, ‘Some Remarks on the Occasion of the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Mu¨ller’, Modern Language Review, 92/2 (1997), 363–78, 364. 6 Letter to Oelsner, Nov. 1821, in Dieterich, Aus Briefen, 313 f.

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PHILHELLENISM As a term, Philhellenism carries connotations of revolution in appeal to tradition, and it is this double vision that informs the imagery of philhellenic writing as well. Just as the sheer abyss between Greek antiquity and German modernity seemed to have receded a little into the background, so had the curious tension that characterized perceptions of modern Greece. At the same time, during the Wrst decades of the nineteenth century the nature of German knowledge of contemporary Greece had developed, and so had the perception of Europe among the Greeks, that is to say, mainly the educated Greek-speaking, Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The latter half of the eighteenth century had seen considerable change in the social structure of Greek territory under Ottoman rule, with an increase in (maritime) trade enterprises in Europe and a decided orientation towards Western European models by the inXuential educated classes of Greek (or more broadly Balkan) society and those living in Greek communities outside the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire.7 Greek commercial communities in Leipzig, Breslau, Trieste, or Vienna, to name but a few, also provided the ground and means for much publishing activity. In addition, the inXux of Greek students to German universities and academies increased in the last decades of the eighteenth century (as Italy lost its monopoly in attracting Greek students), and led to personal acquaintances which very often proved the initial trigger for voicing what, especially following the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1821, was now a more active interest by German scholars.8 Social changes for Greek strata of the Ottoman Empire meant that its decline coincided with an increase in revolutionary potential.9 In March 1821, Alexander 7 For the development of an Enlightened intellectualism across the Balkans, see e.g. Paschalis Kitromilides, Enlightenment, Nationalism, Orthodoxy: Studies in the Culture and Political Thought of South-Eastern Europe (Aldershot, 1994); Victor Roudometof, ‘From Enlightenment to Romanticism: The Origins of Modern Greek National Identity, 1453–1878’, Thetis, 7 (2000), 149–67, esp. 149–60. 8 On the Greek communities in the German-speaking areas, Emil Turczynski, Die deutsch-griechischen Kulturbeziehungen bis zur Berufung Ko¨nig Ottos (Munich, 1959) and Giorgios Veloudis, Germanograecia: Deutsche EinXu¨sse auf die neugriechische Literatur (1750–1944), 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1983), 21–46. 9 Gunnar Hering, ‘Zum Problem der Ursachen revolutiona¨rer Erhebungen am Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Ch. Choliolcˇev et al. (eds.), Nationalrevolutiona¨re

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Ypsilantis, aide-de-camp to Tsar Alexander I, led a short-lived uprising in Moldavia, followed shortly afterwards by episodes of violence in the Peloponnese, which took on the form of all-out revolt. To the observing German public, the new Xaring-up of insurrection against Ottoman rule had similar eVect to that after the events of 1770, only greater; the same constituents were there: an interest in the physical and spiritual condition of the Greek land, connected with the hope of Wnding in Greece a paradigm for a country liberating itself. The political scene in Germany and Europe in general had of course changed drastically since 1770: in 1776 America had given Europe the example of a successful attempt at establishing a new independent nation state. The subsequent experience of the French Revolution and the Terror had left Germany with a diVerent set of political and cultural expectations. The Napoleonic Wars, fought in the name of liberation both by and against the French, had since 1792 acted as a catalyst for national movements across Europe. Hence there was a strong liberal-democratic, ultimately national, side to support for the Greek cause. An example are the Griechenvereine (Greek Associations) and their fate: established to enlist Wnancial and military support across Germany, they became almost immediately suspect as hothouses of revolutionary activity, and many of them, especially in Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria, were closed down by the authorities in the autumn of 1821.10 Fervour for the Greek cause slowly diminished over the next years, to be reignited after 1826 with the fall of Missolonghi, when also the balance of power in a European contest was changing. Russia now paid renewed attention to the Balkans, and the other Great Powers too began to show more sympathy for the Greek struggle.11 Philhellenism slowly became socially acceptable and hoVa¨hig. Bewegungen in Su¨dosteuropa im 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1992), 17–30; also Barbara and Charles Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920 (Seattle, 1977), 3–25. 10 For the social-political role of organized Philhellenism in Germany see, pro toto, Christoph Hauser, Anfa¨nge bu¨rgerlicher Organisation: Philhellenismus und Liberalismus in Su¨dwestdeutschland (Go¨ttingen, 1990). A critical appraisal of whether the appeal on grounds of charitable obligation did much to further the development of political consciousness among the broader population or not is found in Dieter Kramer, ‘Der Philhellenismus und die Entwicklung des politischen Bewußtseins in Deutschland’, in Kontakte und Grenzen: Probleme der Volks-, Kultur- und Sozialforschung. Festschrift fu¨r Gerhard Heilfurth zum 60. Geburtstag (Go¨ttingen, 1969), 231–47. 11 Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 364.

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By 1821 Philhellenism no longer denoted only the valuing of classical Greek culture, but a positive attitude towards the political aspirations of the contemporary Greeks.12 Without doubt, this, just like Hellenism, was a European phenomenon;13 what distinguished German Philhellenism was the way in which it continued to be aVected by the structural relation between Greek antiquity and a German, or certainly non-Greek, modernity at the centre of German Hellenism. In its practical manifestations, the movement of German Philhellenism divides into that of ‘the sword, the open hand, and the pen’:14 there were those who went to Greece to participate in the military struggle, the donators of money following the appeals for charity, and the writers.15 These are not hard-and-fast categories: some of those who went out to Greece returned to write memoirs, some of the writers donated their proWts, and Wilhelm Mu¨ller himself outlines his exemplary situation as the professional writer who pledges to contribute both in poetry and cash, while his personal circumstances (a young family and safe employment in the ducal educational system) unfortunately keep him from joining the expeditions, appealing though the prospect may be: ‘Fortunate I am that my home and the Muse bring me comfort in times such as these. Were I unmarried I might well be now standing ready and armed in Greece’ (emphasis his).16 Of the writers’ response there was, right from the beginning of the Greek revolutionary movement, a steady Xow of German publications 12 ‘Philhellene’ is in Germany Wrst attested in the sense of ‘support for fellow Christian Greeks’ by Martin Crusius (Turcograeciae libri octo, 1584), and in the later seventeenth century; see Lambros Mygdalis, ‘Der Philhellenismus in Deutschland’, in E. Konstantinou (ed.), Europaïscher Philhellenismus. Die europaïsche philhellenische Literatur bis zur 1. Ha¨lfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1992), 63–72, 63; Gerhard Grimm, ‘Studien zum Philhellenismus’, unpublished habilitation ms., Munich (1965), 2. The OED deWnes ‘Philhellenism’ as the ‘love, friendliness towards, or support of the cause of Greece or the Greeks (especially in relation to national independence)’, 2nd edn. (1989), xi. 679. 13 Concise overviews are found in Gerhard Grimm, ‘ ‘‘We are all Greeks’’. Griechenbegeisterung in Europa und Bayern’, in R. Baumstark (ed.), Das neue Hellas. Griechen und Bayern zur Zeit Ludwigs I, exhibition catalogue (Munich, 1999), 21–32; Gunnar Hering, ‘Der griechische Unabha¨ngigkeitskrieg und der Philhellenismus’, in A. Noe¨ (ed.), Der Philhellenismus in der westeuropaïschen Literatur (1780–1830) (Amsterdam, 1994), 17–72. 14 Grimm, Studien, 2. 15 A solid overview in Regine Quack-Eustathiades, Der Deutsche Philhellenismus wa¨hrend des Griechischen Freiheitskampfes 1821–1827 (Munich, 1984), 55–89. 16 Letter to P. D. A. Atterbom, 2 May 1822 (Werke, v. 221).

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dealing with the Greek question, often in the shape of newspaper and journal articles or as separate political pamphlets.17 Overall, the response of the pen to the events in and after 1821 was Wrst and foremost an academic and a journalistic one. Despite the variety of political attitudes, the writers mostly came from the same social background, and although philhellenic sentiment cut across all sections of German society, its most vocal supporters were members of the educated middle classes.18 The intellectual foundations of the philhellenic venture lay Wrmly with the Bildungsbu¨rgertum, even if diVerent arguments for support found favour with diVerent social groups.19 The authors of the Wrst pamphlets and articles rallying support for the Greeks were university professors, philologists, or theologians, who often had personal contacts with educated diaspora Greeks, and who through their personal acquaintance with each other established a strong network. The Wrst wave of pamphleteers in early 1821, for example, was almost entirely made up of university teachers, professors Krug, Tzschirner, and Jo¨rg, and another anonymous author, all connected with the University of Leipzig.20 It is diYcult to identify a single political alignment in these publications. The Greek cause was argued for and against by liberals and conservatives alike, but in each case the main line of argument concerned the question whether the Greek revolution was a legitimate act. Argument concentrated on the one hand on the theme of ‘Dankesschuld’, that is, the obligation towards Greece as the foundation of European Bildung. Friedrich Wilhelm Thiersch, in an article in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung in September 1821, writes of the obligation ‘to pay oV, even if only a little, the sacred duty of old’.21 17 For a detailed list of 34 pamphlets see Quack-Eustathiades, Der deutsche Philhellenismus, 155–63. 18 Johannes Irmscher tellingly calls it a true ‘movement of the people’, Der Philhellenismus in Preußen als Forschungsanliegen (Berlin, 1966), 44. 19 The religious argument, for example, was advanced mainly by the clergy and was well received in the lower strata of society, see Walter Puchner, ‘Die griechische Revolution von 1821 auf dem europaïschen Theater: Ein Kapitel bu¨rgerlicher Trivialdramatik und romantisch-exotischer Melodramatik im europaïschen Vorma¨rz’, Su¨dost-Forschungen, 55 (1996), 85–127, 94. 20 Quack-Eustathiades, Der deutsche Philhellenismus, 164 V. On Krug’s personal acquaintance with Greek students see Roxani Argyropoulou, ‘O W. T. Krug ŒÆØ Ø ‚ºº ’, ˇ ¯æÆØ, 10 (1972–3), 267–73. 21 Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 Sept. 1821.

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Another anonymous pamphlet was entitled The Rescue of Greece, the Task of Grateful Europe (Die Rettung Griechenlands, die Sache des dankbaren Europa, Leipzig, 1821). On the other hand, it was the appeal to a Christian obligation to support fellow Christians against Ottoman unbelievers that accounted for the strong religious overtones encountered in many publications, literary or not. F. G. Nagel’s gorily entitled pamphlet How Much Longer Will the Turkish Slaughterhouses Fume with Greek Blood? And Shall the Hereditary Enemy of the Cross Continue to Taunt Christianity? (Werden die tu¨rkischen Schlachtba¨nke noch la¨nger von griechischem Blute rauchen? Oder soll der Erbfeind des Kreuzes die Christenheit noch la¨nger ho¨hnen?, Braunschweig, 1821) is only one of the more colourful examples of this religious tendentiousness. In any case, what is crucial is that whatever the political stance of the commentator, or his views on the Wtness or unWtness of the Greeks to succeed, Greece is almost unanimously singled out as diVerent in kind from other instances of revolution. From these comments and from the corpus of poetry, drama, and prose of the Griechendichtung, one impression emerges strongly: they express an apparent desire to see a country that is well described in its physical reality and conditions complemented by a people ripe for a revolutionary challenge, increasingly morally responsible and (hence) predisposed towards freedom, at the same time dynamic, forceful, untamed, courageous, and maintaining a revolutionary momentum. In short, German publicists appeared in search of a people Wt to inherit and inhabit a land and a landscape distinguished by its history, tradition, beneWcial climate, geographical variety, yet also cohesion and, most of all, continuity. Patterns of landscape imagery and nature metaphor are thereby given a framework of political signiWcance.

P OLITICIZING NATURE: GREEK NAT URE LIBERATED With 1821, history in the sense of the past and of current, contemporary events, and space in the sense of meaningful location and of political territory come together more intensely than ever, a constellation that feeds into the particularly close associations of perception of natural space and history that mark modern Greece’s position.

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Comments about the political nation are imbricated with aesthetic expectations of Greek places and environments as symbolic and meaningful beyond themselves. For the phenomenon of justiWcation by way of natural environment, Kaufmann and Zimmer have coined the catchy phrase ‘nationalising nature and naturalising the nation’.22 DeWning the nation as a ‘cultural order with a certain set of values, symbols and myths’ which legitimizes in its wake a certain political order (the state), they understand a nation not as a static entity, but as an entity in an ongoing process of aYrmation, a process of national identity. According to their model, the symbolic analogies between landscape and nation can take either of two forms. In the process which they term ‘nationalising nature’, distinctive national characteristics are seen to be reXected in a particular nature; alternatively, in the complementary process of ‘naturalising the nation’, ‘nature in general, and speciWc landscapes in particular, are depicted as forces of moral and spiritual regeneration capable of determining the nation and giving it a compact, homogeneous, uniWed form’.23 Identifying ‘authenticity’ as one of the key issues in the establishment of national identity,24 they see two processes involved in the endeavour of authentication, one being the establishment of a historical continuity, the other the creation of a sense of naturalness. The deWnition of nation put forward by Kaufmann and Zimmer is arguably too broad, but nationalism as a theoretical problem is not my main concern here. What is more problematic, but a feature shared with many other accounts of the symbolic work done by the creators of national identity in the modern period, is that they, too, rely on a rather timeless and under-deWned notion of the symbolic, as well as a rather too reductive notion of Romanticism as counter-Enlightenment with a search for natural determination and a preference for ‘primitive’ nature as its main characteristic.25 This underestimates the conscious 22 Eric Kaufmann and Oliver Zimmer, ‘In Search of the Authentic Nation: Landscape and National Identity in Canada and Switzerland’, Nations and Nationalism, 4/4 (1998), 483–510. 23 Ibid. 487. 24 Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge, 1995), 65–7. 25 Kaufmann and Zimmer, ‘Authentic Nation’, 488.

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complexity of nature as a term in currency, and the diVerence between nature and nation that creates and generates resistance, as much as it enables representation of the nation as natural. What is useful about their argument, though, is the notion of a deliberate mutual reinforcement of nature and nation (in the sense of political community) as a legitimizing strategy, expressed through nature imagery, as it bears out the observations about the potential of nature imagery made so far. Metaphors to describe history are as varied as they are longestablished, and among them nature metaphor has had a stable place in images of organic growth, of gardens, forests, water, seasons, or weather.26 From the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century, and mirroring the increased complexity and challenge of a new understanding of nature in every area of the arts and sciences, there is a noticeable increase in nature metaphor, and in violent nature imagery in particular, to represent moments of historical importance. On the one hand, of course, there were still mental aftershocks felt, across European writing and reasoning, of the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, where violent nature had itself become a historical event.27 On the other hand, there were the no less earth-shattering implications of the French Revolution, which provoked self-characterization and echoes across Europe with a strong programmatic reliance on nature imagery.28 The ambivalence of nature, the liberation from nature and towards it, its appropriation and taming, is repeated in its violent potential when it comes to the interpretation of history through nature imagery—or the interpretation of nature by aligning it with intelligible historical processes.29 26 For examples, Alexander Demandt, Metaphern fu¨r Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken (Munich, 1978). 27 On the conceptual reorientation of the nature of good and evil and the good and evil of nature triggered by the Lisbon earthquake, see Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, 2002), 240–50; Wolfgang Breidert, Die Erschu¨tterung der vollkommenen Welt: Die Wirkung des Erdbebens von Lissabon im Spiegel europaïscher Zeitgenossen (Darmstadt, 1994); R. H. Brown, Nature’s Hidden Terror: Violent Nature Imagery in Eighteenth-century Germany (Columbia, SC, 1991), 23–55. 28 Hans-Wolf Ja¨ger, Politische Metaphorik im Jakobinismus und im Vorma¨rz (Stuttgart, 1971), 32 V; Helmut Koopmann, Freiheitssonne und Revolutionsgewitter: ReXexe der Franzo¨sischen Revolution im literarischen Deutschland zwischen 1789 und 1840 (Tu¨bingen, 1989). 29 Brown, Nature’s Hidden Terror; Olaf Briese, Die Macht der Metaphern: Blitz, Erdbeben und Kometen im Gefu¨ge der Aufkla¨rung (Stuttgart, 1998), stresses the use of nature metaphor to tame threatening nature, rather than interpret history.

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In the conceptual web that connects the critical subject to his or her environment, nature is keyed to the semantic Welds of politics, religion, and aesthetics. With the prominent use of nature imagery to structure historical narrative, nature appears in eVect politicized while politics is at the same time naturalized. Novalis’s vision, opening this chapter, is paradigmatic for the political vocabulary of revolution and upheaval integrated into a world vision of organic, scientiWc, and poetic conXuence, and Schlegel’s well-known dictum that ‘the French Revolution, Fichte’s philosophy, and Goethe’s Meister are the greatest tendency of the age’ bears out the mutual reinforcement of momentous political, subjective, and poetic generation.30 Yet from nature as the objective correlative that translates political situation into corresponding landscape, as some have argued, nature is now not only politicized but it comes back to infuse political commentary with the force of nature, especially so in the case of Greece.31 The point that the semantic Welds of nature and of history with its events impact upon each other recalls the important reinforcement that takes place in the act of representing one fact or image, and its semantic range, with another one; in short, in the act of metaphor. Following Max Black’s classic analysis that metaphor creates a crossover of meaning from both semantic areas involved, metaphor (like metonymy and allegory) is not a matter of simple similes or of vehicle and tenor smoothly and silently passing each other in the night; cultural knowledge is Wltered in semantic clusters, and the semantic range of the two Welds or ‘systems of implication’ which are engaged in a metaphor, overlaps, that is to say, each set of images aVects and changes the other.32 This not only opens the threedimensional space of the image from the verticality of the symbol to the lateral eVect of metaphor; it also releases the mutual enforcement of the two halves of Wgurative speech into the interpretation of nature imagery, especially when positive legitimizing power is drawn from the act of relating natural factors and conditions to historical 30 Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, no. 216. 31 On the absorption of political context into the moods of Romantic nature poetry, and the afterlife of that argument in scholarship, see Frances Ferguson, ‘Romantic Studies’, in S. Greenblatt and G. Gunn (eds.), Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (New York, 1992), 100–29. 32 Max Black, ‘Metaphor’, in Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY, 1962), 25–47.

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events. Regarding Greece, history is thought inscribed into nature and space especially prominently and compellingly, and what better place, therefore, for history in the making, that is, the revolutionary events around 1821, to have an appropriate, justiWed fertile ground—history, disruptive and signiWcant, being made naturally. This happened in the writings commenting on the Greek War of Independence. In the case of the Greek Revolution, the use of forceful nature imagery to legitimize the historical events it describes, and which were otherwise not always so easily justiWed in the climate of Restauration, is indeed a prominent strategy. One of the supporters making that case was Carl Iken (1789–1841), a private scholar from the north of Germany and a philologist by training, although with a strong research interest in the sciences too (his editorial repertoire included fare as varied as collections from contemporary Greek and classical Persian writings, and translations from English treatises on steam technology). Of his writings on contemporary Greece, the Wrst, after the Greek War of Independence, is his Hellenion. Ueber Cultur, Geschichte und Literatur der Neugriechen (Leipzig, 1822), following his earlier doctoral thesis entitled De statu Graeciae hodierno deque Neohellenum seu Romaicorum historia tam politica quam literaria (Jena, 1817), as well as a catalogue of travellers, Tabelle der Reisenden in Griechenland seit 1453 (1817).33 Hellenion, published by Brockhaus in 1822 (page references below are to this edition), consists of two parts, a ‘general introduction’, and a translation of Adamantios Korais’s lecture Me´moire sur l’e´tat actuel de la civilisation dans la Gre`ce, presented to the Socie´te´ des Observateurs de l’Homme in Paris almost twenty years earlier in 1803. Iken’s introduction, dated July 1821, follows the same argument a great number of contemporary political pamphlets relied on, namely, that current Greek events were not to be treated as a revolution in the common sense; instead, the insurrection at hand was a token of regeneration and liberation from illegitimate oppression. Iken’s plea displays many of the regular features of justifying the Greek revolution. The bold tone in which Iken Wrst of all viliWes the satanic character of Ottoman rule right at the beginning of his pamphlet underlines the other large 33 On Iken see Wilhelm Kosch, Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon, 3rd edn., Bd. viii (Munich, 1981), 353 f.

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argument that made up the philhellenic portfolio, namely, the Christian duty to come to Greece’s aid: ‘[it is] the attempt to break the heavy iron chains of a despotism that oppresses to the utmost degree and to put that demon of darkness, who has wielded power in this area for 400 years, back in chains and send him down into the realm of shadows forever’ (pp. 1 f.). It is also worth noting that with the Wgure of Satan bound in chains and thrown into Hell, Iken may well be acknowledging the apocryphal story of the Descensus that is part of the canon of the Orthodox Church, which, as Iken likes to stress, entertains close aYnity with the Protestant one (pp. 40 V.). The argument for Christian sympathy with the Greeks is further bolstered by reference to Greece as the holy ground of the Apostle Paul. With the satanic Turk removed from the earthly realm and territory, to create anew the rightful space of hallowed Greek ground, there is an underlying appeal to the appropriateness of place; and beyond the argument from Christian duty, the overriding strategy of Iken’s text lies in his crafting an argument from nature. In this frame, where spaces jostle for emergence, the force of oppression triggers the counter-force of Greek insurrection, and Iken goes on to develop an even grander-scale system of natural balances within which Greece’s reaction is legitimated. To describe the force of progress, which has brought Greece to its present state on the brink of revolution, Iken enlists both natural events and natural imagery to support his argument. An earthquake that aVected the island of Zante and the Morea two months before the insurrection of March 1821 is to Iken a portentous sign: ‘Nature and mankind joined hands to become the vanguard of an extraordinary phenomenon’ (p. 5). Likewise, an earthquake near the Moldavian town of Iassy (a contemporary centre of activity for Greek learning and politics) early in the same year had proven that ‘earth and sky gladly signaled their approval’ (p. 6). Comparing it to the impact of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Iken foretells a similar disturbance (‘Erschu¨tterung’) of the Ottoman Empire, while linking the event to the earthquakes and a volcanic eruption at Naples in the previous year: On the ninth of February of this same year, at three o’clock in the morning, the capital of Moldavia was shaken by three serious tremors of three seconds each, accompanied by loud underground rumbling; the direction of the

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earthquake from north to south was to the Greeks all too clearly an intimation of the direction their undertaking would take across their fatherland. The crumbling of uncountable buildings on the island of Zante and in Morea seemed to preWgure the trembling, if not the actual downfall, of the rotten structure of the Ottoman state; in short, nature herself announced in clear signs what was to come, just as she had spoken a year earlier through Vesuvius’ mouth about the events to come in Naples. (p. 6)

The analogy with political events is made clear: local revolutions in Naples, the Piedmont, and Spain, to which Iken frequently refers, had broken out in 1820–1, but although his use of violent nature imagery is, as we saw, not an uncommon practice, Iken is not simply conXating the geographically literal and the metaphorical. Instead, he explicitly defends his method, and when he states that, ‘to the poet, nature is neither dead nor without intention’ (p. 7), he in fact insists on the poet’s privilege to derive meaning from the sign language of natural events. This assertion is couched in a scientiWc framework of natural global balances. In a grand chain of natural forces, including electric conductivity, tectonics, thunderstorms, volcanoes, Wres, the currents of the sea, avalanches, and meteorites, Greece is the last stage in a worldwide release of liberating forces, spreading from West (the Americas) to East and from North to South (pp. 14 f.). Actual geography is interwoven with imagery, as the waves of revolution break upon the shores of Greece and the echo is multiplied from Spain to the mountains of Greece (p. 16), locating freedom, and providing a ‘natural’ justiWcation for the case of Greece: Almost in the same instance now that the thunderstorm broke loose above the Spanish peninsula, an electric spark was Xaring on the Italian peninsula with such explosive power that it had to jump across to the Greek peninsula. Just as in music, when a harmonious chord is audible to the sensitive ear well in advance even when only two notes are sounded and the third one is not touched, so did this phenomenon of well-tuned strings reveal itself in the realm of the spirit too: as soon as Hesperia and Magna Graecia put forth a sound, Hellas followed suit, as a relative, yes, as the original motherland of both; and even before she began to stir herself and turn to manifest action, she joined joyfully in the resounding harmony of her Wrstborns, even if she herself could rightly have given the Wrst impetus, judging by her suVerings and her fate. (p. 10)

Like the unsounded note that could also justiWably have been the origin of the domino eVect of natural phenomena, Greece’s power of liberation is an almost parthenogenic, autonomous one that chimes

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well with a global balance: it is a carefully crafted sequence of images through which Iken insist that the Greek insurrection (explicitly not a rebellion) is diVerent in kind and genesis. Given the musical analogy, the third unsounded note that is heard in the chord of political revolution leaves Greece as the origin of that global harmony, aVected again in turn, thus squaring its history, yet itself ‘untouched’. In that musical dream of an aesthetic eVect—the sounded harmony—that is totally natural, Greece appears touched indirectly by both space and time, as it is the eVect of its own origins, which return to the land and make it audible, rather than visible. The link between the sound of continuity and a complex naturalness is repeated in other depictions of Greece by German authors. One such example comes from the writings of Friedrich Wilhelm Thiersch (1784–1860), the classical philologist and leading Wgure of the philhellenic movement in Bavaria.34 An inXuential neo-humanist and educational reformer at the Bavarian court, he had expressed hope for the regeneration of the Greeks as early as 1812, and was instrumental in the establishment of the Munich Athenaeum in 1815, a school for the future Greek political elite. Educated at the universities of Leipzig and Go¨ttingen, he was linked by multiple bonds to other members of the philhellenic circles such as Krug, Cotta, von Haxthausen, and Ukert.35 From early on he maintained contact with the Greek intelligentsia and the Philomousos Etaireia in Vienna, and on the occasion of a visit to Paris in 1813 he met Korais.36 In 1831 he took it upon himself to travel in Greece, where he established a reputation as a mediator between the warring political factions after the assassination of the young country’s Wrst prime minister, Ioannis Kapodistrias, in 1831—a mediator in skill and intention, it would appear, rather than in eVect.37 Of his many publications it is a lecture on Greek poetry, delivered before the Bavarian Academy of 34 Ludwig Spaenle, Der Philhellenismus in Bayern (Munich, 1990), 45 V. 35 H. W. J. Thiersch, Friedrich Thierschs Leben (Leipzig, 1866). 36 Johannes Irmscher, ‘Friedrich Thierschs philhellenische Anfa¨nge’, Neo-Hellenika, 2 (1975), 160–80; Hans-Martin Kirchner, Friedrich Thiersch. Ein liberaler Kulturpolitiker und Philhellene in Bayern (Munich, 1996). 37 Despite his eVorts, his practical assistance, and his wide-ranging publications, Thiersch never quite achieved the oYcial position or demand as an adviser with the Regency he had hoped for.

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Sciences in 1828,38 which will concern me here, as it is instructive for the way it expresses the relation of Greek culture to its natural environment, across time. In this lecture Thiersch identiWes the animation or personiWcation of nature as a strong guiding principle of Greek folk poetry and folk song, and he traces it back to the ancient practice of perceiving nature as numinous and divine: Regarding those images which relate to the ‘personiWcation of nature’, the reason [for comparison with antiquity] is clearly more deeply rooted; we have to look for it in the intense and fresh feeling for the abundant splendor of that particular sky and earth, which had already in antiquity clothed the phenomena of all creation in human form so as to worship them as images of the divine and even as divinities themselves. (p. 30)

His account of the naturalness and sense of belonging, which allegedly characterizes Greek song, borrows from familiar artistic vocabulary: sensuousness, the longing, gracefulness, and the sublime: It is that same intense and pure feeling . . . sometimes like a longing for the homeland which makes every separation seem a calamity, every foreign place a place of grief; a feeling for the life that softly shines with twice its charms in such a homeland, under the dark clarity of its sky, in the ethereal spirit of its balsamic air, above the blue waters of the inWnite sea, in the gracefulness of luscious valleys, in the majesty of sublime mountains, under the smell of Xowers and the majesty of most noble fruits, and that quickly makes the blood pulse stronger to preserve the vigour and youthfulness of mind in its unhappy inhabitants, even in deepest distress. (p. 31)

The folk song, the fairy tale, and the ballad are examples of what Susan Stewart calls a ‘distressed genre’, reproduced, made antiquated, and valorized in the process in order to emphasize their nature as artefacts, and, like nature, threatening, with a strong undercurrent rather than a Wrm base.39 The terminology around ‘folk song’ and oral, or naive, culture, in other words, rests on a deep and often ambivalent awareness of modernity. Steward’s subtle wordplay of the 38 U¨ ber die neugriechische Poesie, besonders u¨ber ihr rhythmisches und dichterisches Verha¨ltniß zur altgriechischen, ed. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Munich, 1828). Page numbers in text are to this edition. 39 Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford, 1991), 66–101.

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distressed genre takes on its full literal meaning here. Over and above the memory of a timeless, static scene caught and remembered in song, the actual, deep distress of Greece’s inhabitants is indicating the movement and violence of time and history. Thiersch further postulates a regional determination of songs (‘they each reXect the character of their people and the landscape from which they originated’, p. 32), such as the ferocity of the songs of Souli, Mount Olympus, and other parts of Northern Greece, as opposed to the peaceful scenes of the islands, Smyrna, and Thessaloniki, ‘where the softness and gentleness of the Ionian sky often spreads across language, images, and metre’ (p. 33). He concludes: What then is Modern Greek poetry but the poetry which roots in the people itself, welded to its innermost nature and immediately grasping the events of life, that original poetry of Greek antiquity? . . . it inspires and creates within a range of views and fantasies that is analogous to that of the faraway past, yet it is new and peculiar. . . it is the most recent revelation of the indestructible Greek spirit that breaks forth intact from any misfortune that could befall it, it is the most profound conWrmation of the hopes for Bildung which were tied to the resurrection of that most famous and most original nation. (p. 35)

Although context makes it clear that Thiersch is Wrst and foremost talking about the development and progress of the Greek nation, the syntax is ambiguous as to whose Bildung exactly is being described: his non-Greek readership, in other words, is proWting just as much, if not more, from vicarious participation in Greece’s resurrection from and into its own nature. The inalienable Greek spirit breaks forth with a natural force that echoes the river images of Ho¨lderlin, and Thiersch derives similar argumentative power from linking the natural character of the Greeks, expressed in their folk poetry, to their equally natural political aspirations and the hope for progress. The connection between Greece and folk poetry by way of nature is thus inalienable. To understand the basis for his argument more fully, we need to elaborate the framework of the aesthetic and political interest in folk poetry that allowed Greece to take up a position within that framework. How, in other words, could nature, regeneration, and emancipation, not without their proper ambivalence, the stop and start between stasis and violent motion, be linked to the attention to folk poetry?

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THE NATURE OF FOLK SONG Of course, the terminology of folk song, folk poetry, and folk culture is, not only in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century context, a highly loaded one, and one which requires a careful approach. I use the term ‘folk song’ therefore not to represent the varied popular culture and song practice of Greece (or any other country), with its intricate relationship to both oral and written expression. Instead of pursuing the slippery, and in any case methodologically misplaced, question of presumed ‘authenticity’, which is certainly still alive in studies of Greek folklore,40 I use ‘folk song’ to indicate the hopes and expectation attached to the practice and the re-creation of what were considered paradigms of a native, oral poetic culture. The most cherished aspect of folk songs, after all, was their potential to evoke authenticity and immediacy, and it is this awareness of their formal character, as much as of the distance separating them from the modern author, similar to that powering nature imagery, that interests me most. As in the case of Greek nature in this study, it is neither the reputed ‘essence’ of folk song, nor their constructed character, hidden under an idealist veneer, that needs disclosing, but their enabling and sometimes troubling dynamic—of which the Romantics were all too aware—that is thought to beneWt those who care for their survival and experience. And like nature imagery, folk song, and Romantic poetry reXecting on it, is a medium of historical cognition. The ‘discovery’ of folk culture and forms as artefacts, in the sense of their being collected in writing or in imitation, involves, and to the Romantics fruitfully involves, the distance that separates them from the present literary culture; yet more, it even enhances that rift. The more it is collected, the more it seems endangered. ‘In other words, the writing of oral genres always results in a residue of lost context and lost presence that literary culture, as we have seen, imbues with a sense of nostalgia and even regret.’41 Or even, to take its logic further, of impossibility and grief; Mu¨ller, at the end of the trajectory begun 40 On this, see Margaret Alexiou, After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth and Metaphor (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 172–83. 41 Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing, 104.

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in the eighteenth century, proclaims in a review essay on Be´ranger: ‘A printed folk song is the gravestone of a dead voice.’42 While folk song had, especially from the late eighteenth century, created potential for a new role of the author as editor, this role, as Stewart so perceptively expresses it, ‘was destined to collapse into self-parody because of its impossible claims of authenticity’.43 In Germany, the term Volkslied was Wrst coined by Herder as a translation of the English expression ‘popular song’.44 It derives from Bishop Percy’s slightly earlier Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which, together with Herder’s publications, paved the way for the literary appraisal of folk poetry in the later eighteenth century. Percy’s collection was enthusiastically received in Germany, especially by the poet-scholars of the Go¨ttinger Hain circle (Boie, Stolberg, Voss), the group mentioned above for their contacts with von Halem, the writer of Wctional travel accounts to Greece.45 In the tradition of Herder, folk poetry is a form of creative expression that is less an art form and more a conduit for the natural creativity of a people preserved through history.46 The truly free expression of a free nation is in its songs: ‘Every unpoliced nation sings. . . . Nature has created man as free, serene, full of song: art and customs make him locked in, suspicious, silent.’47 Just as the perception of nature is an act that furthers humanity, the creation of song is part of the same process. Herder’s interest is in an ideal humanity; within that process, artistic expression has to be readjusted to historical and natural conditions as well as to the stages of Bildung. Folk song is an indicator of historical development as well as a lever to recover the free artistic 42 Mu¨ller, Werke, iii. 138. 43 Stewart, Crimes of Writing, 125. 44 Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel u¨ber Ossian und die Lieder alter Vo¨lker (1773); it was developed as a technical term Wrst in the (unpublished) collection Alte Volkslieder (1774), then in his enlarged annotated collection Volkslieder (1778/9). 45 Gonthier-Louis Fink, Naissance et apogeé du conte merveilleux en Allemagne: 1740–1800 (Paris, 1966), 337–56; Heinrich Lohre, Von Percy zum Wunderhorn: Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der Volksliedforschung in Deutschland (Berlin, 1902), 2–10. Boie’s journal Deutsches Museum became a forum for folk-material collections and their literary-aesthetic discussion. 46 Herder, Alte Volkslieder (1774), in Werke, Bd. iii, ed. Ulrich Gaier (Frankfurt/ M., 1990), 60. 47 ‘Alle unpolicirte Nationen sind singend. . . . Natur hat den Menschen frei, lustig, singend gemacht: Kunst und Zunft macht ihn eingeschlossen, mißtrauisch, stumm.’ Ibid.

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expression of humankind. Folk poetry (Naturpoesie) is not necessarily an alternative to art (Kunstpoesie) proper, but is considered its historical and spiritual foundation. However, the awareness of artiWciality remains part and parcel of all subsequent appropriation of folk poetry, and it is this strand that is still strong when the Romantics of the early nineteenth century take a renewed interest both in collecting and (re)creating songs, as for example in the threevolume collection by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–6), part collected folk song and part platform for the editors’ own attempts to reformulate its presumed spirit. The artistic editing of older works or their new creation in line with contemporary aesthetic expectation had of course been accepted practice since Macpherson’s phenomenally successful Ossian (1760–3), and it continued in Percy, ballads and ballad scholarship, the German collections, and eventually in the Wunderhorn. But editorial practice springs from the shared assumption that it was the awareness of the artiWciality of art that made the appropriation of the simple Romantic forms of folk songs and ballads productive for the writers’ own work.48 It is in this sense that attention to folk poetry signiWes an emancipatory act, too. It carries associations of renewal and education, be it in an artistic, political, or individual sense, and we have seen so far that the aesthetics of the period assumes an intrinsic connection between these three Welds. The discourse of folk song does not only follow that of nature imagery, which both refers to phenomenal reality and operates in a metaphorical sense, but folk song and its history can also be described through nature imagery. Nature as environment and its unencumbered, but always past relation to a Volk are understood as the content and basis of folk poetry; at the same time nature metaphors are used to describe this relation itself and its historical development. Mu¨ller, for example, in an essay on contemporary German poetry, summarizes the state of aVairs as follows: ‘There is no doubt that we have to view the invigorating stream of the older German folk song as a blessing with a rich yield: it has watered the dry ground of reXection 48 The writer’s own work and that of the nation. For Ossian and his lasting eVect see Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, 1997).

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and it has washed out the overgrowth of declamatory phraseology from the soil of German poetry.’49 The ‘natural’ character of folk poetry, of its ‘poets’ expressing an immediate relation with nature, is carried over into nature metaphor in the description of poetic practice. In an anonymous review of Mu¨ller’s translation of Fauriel’s collection of Greek folk songs, the features of Greek nature reappear as a metaphor to describe the aesthetic process characteristic of the folk song: ‘There lives an imagination of the brightest colours in almost all those songs, as if an eternal midday sun fell on everything those people see.’50 The motif, or issue, of close interaction with a natural environment as the basis of free artistic expression plays a central role in the perception of Greek folk song. And indeed, in the Greek literature translated as part of the philhellenic endeavour, folk poetry was dominant.51 Some Greek folk songs had already been transmitted in travel accounts; Herder’s folk-song collection of 1778/9 also contained a few labelled as simply ‘Greek’, although their provenance certainly leaves scope for argument about their folk nature: they are mainly examples of highly literary sympotic poetry taken from Athenaeus’ Scholars at Dinner (Deipnosophistai).52 The earliest collections of Greek folk songs were initiated by the Swiss and German scholars Sismondi and von Haxthausen in the Wrst decade of the nineteenth century, although they had only limited circulation in manuscript.53 49 ‘Ohne Zweifel ist der belebende Strom des a¨ltern deutschen Volksliedes als ein u¨beraus befruchtender Segen zu betrachten, der den trocknen Boden der ReXexion befeuchtet und das Wucherkraut der deklamatorischen Phraseologie auf dem Gebiete ¨ ber die neueste lyrische Poesie der der deutschen Lyrik ausgeschwemmt hat.’ ‘U Deutschen. Ludwig Uhland und Justinus Kerner’, in Werke, iv. 299–342; originally published in Brockhaus’s periodical Hermes, 4 (1827). 50 ‘Fast durchweg wohnt in diesen Liedern eine Anschauung in den hellsten Farben, es ist als Wele ein ewiges Mittagslicht auf Alles, was diese Menschen sehen.’ Literaturblatt des Morgenblattes 1826, no. 20 (10 Mar. 1826) and 21 (14 Mar. 1826), 79. ¨ bersetzungen aus dem Neugriechischen’, in Grundriß zur 51 Karl Goedeke, ‘U Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, xvi (Berlin, repr. 1985), 713–17. 52 Herder, Werke, v. 194 f., 1042 f. 53 Roderick Beaton, Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (Cambridge, 1980), 3 V; Alexis Politis, ˙ `ÆŒºıł ø ¯ººØŒ æÆªıØ (Athens, 1984), 87–121. Part of Haxthausen’s collection circulated in manuscript at the time, but was only published in 1935.

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The central (and best-remembered) Wgure is Charles Fauriel, whose Chants populaires de la Gre`ce moderne was published in two volumes, with a long introductory essay, in 1824. Fauriel, a philologist, had been provided with some material by Korais and other Greek intellectuals (Typaldo, Moustoxidis, and Tommaseo), who all shared with him a link to Neapolitan intellectual circles and an interest in the historical philosophy of Vico.54 A German translation of Fauriel’s popular collection, by Wilhelm Mu¨ller, appeared in 1825. In the wake of the philhellenic sentiment emerged a belief that a song tradition and literary form which stresses the immediate analogy or original relation between a people and their environment and which operates with motifs of a personiWed nature exerting direct inXuence on the human agents, was a valuable key to representing the tradition of the Xedgling Greek nation state; this belief bore fruit on both the German and the Greek sides. For a state such as Greece, whose territory was still in a process of (re)deWnition and whose geographical as well as social unity was far from stable, the folk song promised both an identiWable regional origin and an analogous nature unspeciWc enough to allow for the designation of almost any area as ‘Greek’. Mu¨ller himself, in his introduction to Fauriel’s collection, formulated this particular appeal of the folk songs’ setting, when he stresses the strength of their schematic and fragmentary character: ‘We are given only sketches in those songs, but clearly deWned sketches, of intense coloration, which mirror the lights and shadows of the Greek earth and sun’ (p. lxii).55 Likewise, the appeal of a broadly Greek natural setting, together with attention to signiWcant location, was also the principle organizing the representation of Greek landscape and locality in Mu¨ller’s own poetic collections, Lieder der Griechen (1821–7).56 54 Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece (New York, 1986), 24–30; Politis, `ÆŒºıł, 238–85. 55 ‘Wir erhalten in diesen Liedern nur Skizzen, aber scharf umzogene Skizzen, mit kra¨ftigen Farbenstrichen, in denen die Lichter und Schatten der griechischen Erde und Sonne sich abspiegeln.’ 56 Such a pattern of the natural setting is somewhat reminiscent of the reception of Ossian and his wild and sombre landscape across Europe; here the lack of speciWcity and the reliance on stock features in descriptions of the natural setting proved a positive advantage for a widespread reception, by virtue of its ‘compatibility’; see Howard Gaskill, ‘Ossian in Europe’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 21/4 (1994), 643–78, 672.

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Although the responses of the pen to the Greek War of Independence were by and large of a journalistic nature, there was also a sizeable more strictly literary reaction. A case in point are the memoirs of those philhellenes returning from active participation in Greece,57 another a smallish number of translations from Greek literature,58 together with the collection and translation of Greek folk songs. Lastly there was the Griechendichtung proper, which consisted largely of poetry and plays, published mainly in periodicals, newspapers, and almanacs59—and showing no less signs of the distress which the genres of folklore and collection exhibit. Wilhelm Mu¨ller (1794–1827) is to many best known as the author of poems set by Schubert as the song-cycles Die Winterreise and Die Scho¨ne Mu¨llerin. With the Wfty-two poems of Griechenlieder, however, published in six small volumes between 1821 and 1827, Mu¨ller appeared as a popular supporter of the Greek cause. If the French critic Gaston Caminade could call him ‘le plus grand philhelle`ne de l’Allemagne’,60 it is because he expressed in his work the particular blend of political, religious, and artistic concerns which distinguishes the discourse of German Philhellenism in the 1820s. 57 Quack-Eustathiades, Der deutsche Philhellenismus, 90–124, on the memoirs, the quasi-Wctional character of some of them, and the selective reception they met with at home. She concludes that negative portrayals of Greece and the philhellenic venture were usually discarded when the memoirs were published, which apparently was a cross-European phenomenon; see Wallace, Shelley and Greece. ¨ bersetzungen aus dem Neugriechischen’, mentions some samples of 58 Goedeke, ‘U the patriotic poetry of Andreas Kalvos and Dionysios Solomos, as well as translations of Athanasios Christopoulos. For the latter see also Lambros Mygdalis, ‘ˇØ æ ª æ ÆØŒ Ææ Ø Ø ø ı `ŁÆØı æØ ºı (1821–22)’, ÆŒ ØŒ, 17 (1977), 194–211. 59 For an overview of the philhellenic literature, which was often of rather ephemeral value, see R. F. Arnold, ‘Der deutsche Philhellenismus. Kultur- und literarhistorische Untersuchungen’, Euphorion, 2 (1896), 71–178, and ‘Zur Bibliographie des deutschen Philhellenismus’, Euphorion, 11 (1904), 735–41; Loukia Droulia, Philhelleńisme: ouvrages inspire´s par la guerre de l’inde´pendance grecque, 1821–1833: re´pertoire bibliographique (Athens, 1974); Goedeke, ‘Griechendichtungen’, in Grundriß, viii (2nd edn., 1905), 282–93; Puchner, ‘Griechische Revolution’; Hans-Georg Werner, Geschichte des politischen Gedichts in Deutschland von 1815–1840 (Berlin, 1969), 112–46. 60 Gaston Caminade, Les Chants des Grecs et le philhelleńisme de Wilhelm Mu¨ller (Paris, 1913), 8.

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In general, Mu¨ller is valued as a poet typical of the versatility and eclecticism characterizing his period.61 According to Paulin, Mu¨ller belongs in his aesthetic orientation, as do Heine and Byron, ‘fairly and squarely in the century that gave them birth, and yet (allowing for Mu¨ller’s lesser stature) they are associated with revolutionary movements that are part of the political tissue of the nineteenth’.62 Compared to Heine or Byron, though, Mu¨ller has had a less charitable press. His poetry, and in particular the song-cycles, though commended for their attempt to fuse simplicity with intellectual depth, are considered successful only in a few cases,63 and he is mainly commended for his career in literary journalism, and as a perceptive critic of contemporary poetic practice.64 He also shared a great interest in the manifestations of folk literature and folk song, evident from his 1825 edition and translation into German of Fauriel’s important collection. The poetic principle he sought for and discovered in song is simplicity of tone, and he points out the need for reXectiveness on the part of the poet in order to (re)create it.65 Whatever its literary success, Mu¨ller’s choice of imagery is in all cases deliberate. This is relevant to a balanced evaluation of Mu¨ller’s Griechenlieder, if we want to avoid an interpretation which gets all too easily bogged down in questioning the literary merit of occasional (political) poetry. Pride of place in that category surely goes to Goethe’s uncompromising evaluation: ‘ ‘‘Kill him! Beat him! Bring laurels! Blood! Gore!’’. . . That surely cannot yet be called 61 Gernot Gad, ‘Wilhelm Mu¨ller: Selbstbehauptung und Selbstverleugnung’, doctoral dissertation, Berlin (1989); Sengle, Biedermeierzeit, ii. 517–18. 62 Paulin, ‘Some Remarks’, 365. 63 A. P. Cottrell, Wilhelm Mu¨ller’s Lyrical Song-Cycles (Chapel Hill, NC, 1970); Erdman Waniek, ‘Banale Tiefe in Wilhelm Mu¨llers ‘‘Winterreise’’ ’, Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1994), 141–89. 64 Most scholarly interest in his person in the last decades was concentrated in German Studies in the GDR from the 1970s and 1980s onward, maybe as part of a general surge of interest in the Romantics as (political) poets between tradition and history. On his publications Gad, ‘Mu¨ller’, 57–65, and Maria-Verena Leistner, ‘Mu¨ller als Literaturkritiker’, 47–55, who knows of c.70 articles until 1826, on subjects ranging from German Baroque literature, which he also edited, to Lord Byron and contemporary poetry. Among his pieces are also several reviews of Greek travel accounts and German philhellenic poetry. 65 See his essay on Uhland and Ko¨rner mentioned above (and below); also, Gerd Hartung, ‘Wilhelm Mu¨ller und das deutsche Volkslied’, Weimarer Beitra¨ge, 23 (1977), 46–85; Gad, ‘Mu¨ller’, 75 V.

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poetry.’66 It would be misjudging Mu¨ller’s critical acumen, though, to separate the playful from the political.67 Recently, attention has been redrawn to his self-understanding as a political author and, as a key to it, to the acknowledgement of Mu¨ller’s critical work, especially his careful discussion of Byron.68 As for his philhellenic career, Mu¨ller was given the opportunity, in 1817, to accompany the Prussian Baron von Sack on a trip to Greece. Following his classical studies in Berlin, where he was admitted to the circle of the retired (and embittered) classical philologist F. A. Wolf and the up-and-coming scholar August Boeckh, he was recommended by the Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften as an academic companion for the Baron’s intended journey. Despite two months in Vienna in order to establish contact with Greek intellectuals and to learn Modern Greek, Mu¨ller never went to Greece.69 The journey proceeded as far as Rome, where the two men’s ways separated, and from where Mu¨ller two years later returned to Germany and a ducal librarian’s career, juggling a large number of journalistic projects at the same time—among them, to write popularly and at length about his Italian experiences.70 During the publication of his Griechenlieder Mu¨ller kept courting censorship, since some of them attacked very explicitly the Restauration powers, at the time very reluctant to interfere in the Greek conXict. He published mainly with Brockhaus in 66 Goethes Gespra¨che, ed. Freiherr von Biedermann and Wolfgang Herwig (Stuttgart, 1965–84), iii. 699. 67 Gad, ‘Mu¨ller’, 119–22, makes a particular case for a possible reading of Die Winterreise in the light of Mu¨ller’s recent return from Italy to the German climate of the Restauration in 1819. 68 Ibid. 29–38, 57 V.; Andreas Klenner, ‘Kein Sa¨nger der WeltXucht: Wilhelm Mu¨ller als kritischer Beobachter seiner Zeit’, in Norbert Michels (ed.), Wilhelm Mu¨ller: Eine Lebensreise (Weimar, 1994), 71–5; Gu¨nther Blaicher, ‘Wilhelm Mu¨ller and the Political Reception of Byron in Nineteenth century Germany’, Archiv fu¨r das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 223/1 (1986), 1–16. 69 Vienna was a good place to prepare for travel to Greece. Between 1787 and 1814 the number of Greek residents had risen from 600 to an estimated 4000; between 1801 and 1820 about 25% of Greek printed books were published in Vienna. It had also provided a home for the Wrst Greek newspaper, the Ephimeris (1790–7), and the inXuential bi-monthly periodical Ermis o Logios (1811–21), which, under the patronage of Korais, published a wide range of articles and excerpts from German thought and literature, the sciences, medicine, and philology. 70 Bernhard Leistner, ‘Wilhelm Mu¨ller: Leben und Werk’, in Michels, Lebensreise, 11–31.

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Leipzig, who dutifully stood by him through the frequent censorship cases (imposed after the very restrictive Karlsbad Decrees of 1815). The poems were a success. The mixture of lightness of song, honest anger, and a compliance with public taste and commercial needs was recognized, not least by Mu¨ller himself, who prided himself on hitting the right note.71 In Vienna Mu¨ller had spent a few months on the fringes of an intellectual circle where he may have had contact with the ‘Philiki Etairia’, the Society of Friends, a secret society on a Masonic model founded in Odessa in 1814 with the aim of ‘liberating the motherland’ and with great inXuence in the promotion of Greek interests.72 While Ermis o Logios announced Mu¨ller’s impending trip,73 as we have seen, Mu¨ller never got to Greece. He proceeded as far as Italy, where he stayed, felt himself adopted by the circle of young German artists in Rome, and only after a two-year residence returned to Germany to settle back in Dessau.74 The publication of his Griechenlieder followed quickly on the heels of the Greek War of Independence. Like his Wrst collection of poetry in Bundesblu¨then (1816), a co-production by Mu¨ller and his friend Kalckreuth under the impact of the German Wars of Liberation 71 Lohre, Wilhelm Mu¨ller als Kritiker und Erza¨hler: Ein Lebensbild mit Briefen an F. A. Brockhaus und anderen Schriftstu¨cken (Leipzig, 1927), 141, 190. 72 Thus the version proposed by B. Leistner, ‘Mu¨ller’, 23. Leistner relies on Gustav Schwab’s biographical sketch of Mu¨ller accompanying his edition of Mu¨ller’s poems in 1837. Johannes Irmscher, ‘Der Dessauer Dichter Wilhelm Mu¨ller und der Deutsche Philhellenismus’, ¯ººØŒ, 21 (1968), 48–74, makes reference only to the inXuence of the Society of Philomouson, also founded in 1814, whose most prominent founding member was the CorWote Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, who had served as the Russian legate at the Vienna Congress in 1814–15. Kapodistrias was very active in winning new and inXuential members for his cause (amongst them Thiersch in Bavaria), and it is very likely that Mu¨ller made Wrst and foremost contact with this Etairia. There are, generally, strong allusions in Mu¨ller’s work to ideas and imagery of the Freemasons, and archival work has identiWed him as a member, even if not one with a great Masonic career, of a Lodge in Leipzig; see Ulrich Hartung, ‘Wilhelm Mu¨llers Beziehung zur Freimaurerei—eine ReXexion der Winterreise’, in U. Bredemeyer and C. Lange (eds.), Kunst kann die Zeit nicht formen. 1. internationale Wilhelm-Mu¨ller-Konferenz Berlin 1994 (Berlin, 1996), 174–82. 73 Philip Buttmann, ‘Brief an die Hellenen’, a letter of reference for Mu¨ller by a prominent member of the Berlin Academy, appeared in the journal both in German and in Greek in November 1817; a copy of the letter is printed in the appendix of Lohre, Wilhelm Mu¨ller. 74 B. Leistner, ‘Mu¨ller’, 18 f.

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against Napoleon (in which they had both fought), the Lieder der Griechen (Wrst published under this title in 1821, then reissued in 1825 with the collections Neue Lieder (1822/3) and Neueste Lieder der Griechen (1824)) were no less fervent or politically outspoken. Predominantly framed as Wrst-person narratives, they are uttered by a variety of Greek personae, from the Phanariot Greek to the island boy and the Maniot mother, and some of them attacked very explicitly those who were reluctant to interfere in the Greek conXict. Poems like ‘The Greeks addressing the Austrian Observer’ (‘Die ¨ sterreichischen Beobachter’, October 1821), the Griechen an den O latter being a conservative political magazine published in Vienna, made censorship quickly aware of Mu¨ller. After Metternich’s attempt to clamp down on political agitation such as Thiersch’s plan for a German Legion,75 the atmosphere became even more hostile. Mu¨ller’s second collection, Neue Lieder der Griechen (1822/3), contained more poems courting trouble, such as ‘Pestilential Freedom’ (‘Die Verpestete Freiheit’), which accused the European ‘Pharisees’ of shying away from the prospect of a Greece liberated at all costs, or ‘Pontius Pilatus Washing his Hands’ (‘Pontii Pilati Ha¨ndewaschen’), which very outspokenly attacked Friedrich von Gentz, a loyal member of Metternich’s cabinet, and also a stout Roman Catholic.76 The fact that Mu¨ller also decided to change his allegiance from his publisher Ackermann in Dessau to Brockhaus in Leipzig could not save him from censorship, even if Brockhaus loyally stood by him.77 By 1824,

75 Spaenle, Philhellenismus in Bayern, 51–69. 76 Von Gentz’s critical articles on the Greek War of Independence were published ¨ sterreichischer Beobachter ; see also I. D. Dimakis, O O ¨ sterreichischer mainly in the O Beobachter ´Ø ŒÆØ ¯ººØŒ ¯ÆÆØ (Athens, 1978). 77 The Wrst volume of Neue Lieder der Griechen, which Mu¨ller had commended to Brockhaus in September 1822 as ‘hymns of freedom’ and ‘poetic-political ware’ (Lohre, Wilhelm Mu¨ller, 168 f.), was rejected by the publisher and the censors; the third volume, which contained poems like ‘Die neuen Kreuzfahrer’ (the Christian powers joining in a crusade against fellow Christians) and ‘Die Pharisaër’, was likewise rejected by the censors in Leipzig in 1823 and instead published in the Deutsche Bla¨tter in Breslau. On the publication history, see James Taft HatWeld’s introduction to his edition of Mu¨ller’s Gedichte (Berlin, 1906). The poems, which did not appear in the collections of 1821–6, are added in Max Mu¨ller’s edition in a section misleadingly entitled ‘Letzte Lieder der Griechen’.

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however, a tone of pettiness begins to creep into their correspondence. Sales, so promising at Wrst, were Xagging, and Brockhaus became reluctant to produce new Griechenlieder, because the ‘poetic and political hotcakes’, as Mu¨ller had termed them, were becoming ‘Makulatur’. This was generally the time, across Germany, when the original fervour for the Greek cause was diminishing, to be reignited only after 1826 and the fall of Missolonghi, when the European balance of power was changing. In 1824, let alone in 1821, that was still some distance away, and by and large the Lieder were a big success. The mixture of lightness of song, honest anger, and a compliance with public taste and commercial needs were recognized, not least by Mu¨ller himself.78 Beyond their fairly overt political criticism, however, expressed through support for the Greek cause, the Griechenlieder illustrate the complexities of two concepts mentioned earlier: the establishment of continuity as legible in the natural environment, and the process of ‘naturalization’ as a key features in the representation of a nation. The signiWcance of environment in relation to Mu¨ller’s characters is mainly reXected in three motifs: locations of classical signiWcance, the mountains, and the sea.79 As opposed to the range and the allusive nature of place-names, as, for example, still in Ho¨lderlin, the Greek land is now deWned more directly through names and mainly by names with a military association. At the same time, the range of natural features narrows: mountains (mainland or island) and the sea dominate the Greek landscape. By way of only a few, strong topoi Greek freedom is located; and again, Wxed reference points are mixed with an aesthetics of transcendence (on which more below). What is more signiWcant, though, is that the internal echoes between Mu¨ller’s poems not only unite and multiply the voices of his Greek characters and their supporters, but they seem to move from self-referentiality to straight self-quotation. Thomas Pfau, in the context of arguing for melancholy vis-a`-vis history as the predominant mood of late Romanticism, has suspected, with regard to the folk tone of German high Romantic lyric, that ‘this unsettling 78 Lohre, Wilhelm Mu¨ller, 141, 190. 79 It is noteworthy that apart from the Griechenlieder there is only sparse use of mountain imagery in Mu¨ller’s other poetry; Philip Allen, ‘Wilhelm Mu¨ller and the German Volkslied, II: Nature-sense in the Volkslied and in Mu¨ller’, English and German Philological Quarterly, 3 (1901), 35–91, 69.

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proximity of poetry to outright citation or cliche´ may indeed constitute the underlying aesthetic and ideological signature of European writing during the era of the Regency in Britain and the Restauration in Germany’.80 The citational character, though, he argues, may express the very fear of Wnding language lacking in resonance, especially as it is so often, in that same lyric poetry, oVset by inversion, qualiWcation, or doubt about the cliche´. Mu¨ller’s topoi, accordingly, are not simple attempts to evoke a past glory, but, in line with the dynamic form of the Romantic nature image, they are complex and ambivalent commentators on the availability of freedom and the availability to express it: both in Wghting for it, and in writing about it. A Wrst heroic location of repeated and repetitive signiWcance is the site of Thermopylae, the natural landmark of ostensibly one of the most consequential battles of Greek antiquity, that of few Spartans against the Persians in 480 bc. Alongside Marathon, it is the favourite example of an ancient battle site in the literature (German, Greek, and generally European) surrounding the War of Independence. It was so precisely because it was not only a location which proved the Spartans’ military valour and courage, but also a place whose topographical character (a narrow pass) seemed to give active support to their military prowess.81 The battle of Peta, for example, one of the few actual Weld battles between the Greeks and the Turks in the War of Independence, was fought in 1822 on a hillside near the village of Peta in Epirus, and resulted in the large-scale and traumatic defeat of the Philhellenes’ Battalion.82 In the newly founded German periodical The Greek Struggle for Liberty (Der Freiheitskampf der Griechen) it was reported as a (new) victory at Thermopylae.83 Even if this is a somewhat contrived and uneasy use of Wgurative speech, it is at least fully consistent with the familiar treatment of place and nature: it shows a military action in accordance not only with a tradition, but 80 Thomas Pfau, ‘Conjuring History: Lyric Cliche´, Conservative Fantasy, and Traumatic Awakening in German Romanticism’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 102/1 (2003), 53–92, 69. 81 On the popularity of the theme across Europe and the arts, see Emma Clough, ‘Loyalty and Liberty: Thermopylae in the Western Imagination’, in T. Figueira (ed.), Spartan Society (Swansea, 2004), 363–84. 82 Dakin, Greek Struggle, 92 V; W. St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Oxford, 1972), 97–101. 83 E. Klein (ed.), Der Freiheitskampf der Griechen: 3. Heft (1822), 314.

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with its environment. Mu¨ller too makes frequent use of the topos of Thermopylae, most explicitly in the poem of that name, where the chorus of the buried Spartans appeals to their descendants, and in ‘Alexander Ypsilanti auf Munkacs’, where an apparition of Leonidas conjures up the vision of Thermopylae as a site of contemporary victory to the Greek commander imprisoned in Hungary: ‘In dem engen Felsenpasse . . . [h]aben u¨ber die Barbaren freie Griechen heut gesiegt’ (‘In the narrow rocky pass free Greeks today were victorious against the barbarians’, ll. 16–18). As in the battle report on Peta, Thermopylae becomes a landscape marker that, although topographically determined, is not geographically limited. To Mu¨ller’s German reader it is likely to become even more of a portable entity as it parallels a motif from the patriotic poetry of the German Napoleonic Wars of 1813, in particular that of the resurrected Prussian troops of Frederick the Great, such as it was used, for example, in the collaborative collection Bundesblu¨then.84 Mu¨ller’s second favourite imagery centres around the Mani, the southernmost peninsula of the Peloponnese, and its inhabitants. In line with the focus on Sparta and the Spartans as the most militant manifestation Greece has to oVer, it seems the location best suited to accommodate the transition to Greece present. The Maniots had not only taken part in the uprisings of 1770 and 1821, but they were perceived, much as they perceived themselves, as the descendants and successors of the ancient Spartans;85 hence, since classical times, the Mani had had a reputation, still reXected in nineteenth-century travel accounts, as an unapproachable, wild, and dangerous territory, populated by a Wercely freedom-loving people.86 No doubt, the Mani is and was remote and harsh, but during the period of Ottoman rule leading up to the insurrection it was among those areas of Greece comparatively well populated, with a high degree of cultivation, 84 e.g. Georg Graf von Blankensee’s ‘Kriegslied fu¨r 1813’, Bundesblu¨then (Berlin, 1816), 24, or Wilhelm von Studnitz’s ‘Die drei Worte des Preußen’, ibid. 235. 85 Petrobey Mavromichalis, the Maniot leader of the 1821 insurrection, issued an appeal to the European powers as the ‘general of the Spartiate forces’ from the ‘Spartiate camp’ (repr. in Spyridon Trikoupis, æÆ ¯ººØŒ ¯ÆÆ- ø (London, 1853–7), i. 368 f.). 86 From the latter half of the seventeenth century the Maniots’ liking for bravery, liberty, and robbery had become a set piece in travellers’ reports; Augustinos, French Odysseys, 113 f.

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especially when compared to the rest of the Morea, and in addition enjoying a degree of relative independence.87 This standing, coupled with the rather conservative, very self-contained and clan-oriented social structure of the Maniots,88 might easily have reinforced the image, in native and foreign eyes alike, of an area that was distinguished by forcefulness and continuity. Small wonder, then, that references linking the Spartans and the character of the Mani became leitmotifs in the poetry dealing with the Greek revolutionary movement,89 where Spartan discipline and courage, itself with a long tradition in the Western perception of Greece, now gathered new political signiWcance.90 Sparta, in many ways, stood for an essentially un-Athenian, more Doric, and in this sense pre-classical and more ancient element of the Greek world, which extended even further the time-scale of continuity;91 a concentration on the less perfectly balanced yet more dynamic style associated with the Spartan tradition rendered the imagery highly suitable for representing a Greece in action. A notion of Greece was now needed which could justify the revolutionary and seditious movement, and maybe also deXect its political explosiveness into a natural, and hence less contentious, link between an essentially wild and free landscape that is striving to regain its freedom, and the Wghters it breeds. In 87 Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Eve of Greek Revival, 34 V., quotes statistical and demographic material, according to which up to 50% of arable land in Greece was left untilled, especially on the Peloponnese, where Turkish landownership and an uneven distribution of the population rendered cultivation more often than not barely self-suYcient. Maniots had served as Venetian mercenaries from the Wfteenth century; from the seventeenth century the Mani had been infamous for piracy and brigandage, and in 1777 the region eVectively maintained autonomy, even if contested, from the Porte; see Peter Greenhalgh and Edward Eliopoulos, Deep into Mani (London, 1985), 17–43. 88 A recent summary of enduring Maniot social structures is C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago, 1991), 16–46. 89 Apart from Mu¨ller, one other such example is Harro Harring’s drama Die Mainotten (Luzern, 1825), which also comes complete with thundering rivers and Spartan blood. Wilhelm Waiblinger’s novel Phaeton (1823), taking up motifs from Ho¨lderlin’s Hyperion, has the father of the heroine be revealed as a ‘descendant of the ancient Spartans’ and the son of a ‘wild Maniot’ (Werke und Briefe, ii. 85). 90 Rawson, Spartan Tradition, 306–43. 91 This could associate a positive value: the young Friedrich Schlegel, for example, in Von den Schulen der griechischen Poesie (1794/5), identiWes the Doric lyrical style (not only as historical but as a more general classiWcatory term applicable to diVerent literary, political or cultural periods) as altogether more truly Hellenic than that of the more orientalized Ionians.

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Mu¨ller’s intellectual environment and literary repertoire there was no shortage of writings to assert such a characterization. Ewald Dietrich’s Griechenland und die Tu¨rkey, for example, one of the accounts which emerged to Wll the information gap in German public opinion following the events of spring 1821, states in the section on Greek national character: ‘The Maniots (Spartans) are distinguished among all others by their nobility, independence and courage.’92 Pouqueville’s Histoire de la regeńe´ration de la Gre`ce (1824), of which Mu¨ller owned a copy, dwells extensively on the Maniots and their Spartan heritage;93 Nagel’s pamphlet Werden die tu¨rkischen Schlachtba¨nke . . . (1821), similarly knows of the Maniots as descendants of the Spartans, keeping themselves free of the Turkish yoke in their mountain fastness (p. 20); F. A. Ukert’s Gema¨lde von Griechenland (1810), part of Mu¨ller’s library, stresses the impression of freedom and independence which the traveller gained from his encounter with the Maniots;94 his hopeful description of Spartan women, moreover, as ‘blond, free, and strong’ (pp. 115 f.) is even more remarkable when it is seen next to his repeated analogy—in regard to natural environment and character of inhabitants—between Sparta/the Mani and Switzerland. The link between the past tradition and the future prospects of the Spartans/Maniots and the Swiss may conjure incongruous images of Germanic utopianism seen at work here, but the link is not accidental: the Swiss Alpine environment was as much a cause of aesthetic fascination to European literati as it was held responsible for their authentic simplicity and republican liberty, especially on the way to a new national consciousness after the demise of the old Swiss Confederation in 1798.95 Arcadia, too, was thought to be reminiscent of the Alpine republic. Bartholdy, for example, notes that ‘this region looks very much like Switzerland’, and although historically and geographically clearly diVerent from either Sparta or the Mani, those three areas are often conXated in a general geographical impression of a rough, mountainous, and valiant unity. The philhellenic pamphleteering did not hold back either, but followed through the political implications of the comparison. 92 Ewald Dietrich, Griechland und die Tu¨rkey (Annaberg, 1921), 43 f. 93 Excerpts in Caminade, Les Chants des Grecs, 39–42. 94 F. A. Ukert, Gema¨lde von Griechenland (1810), 115 f. 95 See Kaufmann and Zimmer, ‘Authentic Nation’, for further bibliography; on the Alps as the seat of ‘Helvetic freedom’, see Jacek Wozniakowski, Die Wildnis: Zur Deutungsgeschichte des Berges in der europaïschen Neuzeit (Frankfurt/M., 1987), 238–58.

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Krug, for example, in 1821, envisages a ‘Confederation on a Swiss model’ as the ideal solution for the Greek political make-up.96 Another historical curiosity that had bathed the Mani in the light of political activism and European relevance was that of a seventeenth-century Maniot colony apparently established on Corsica. When, during his Italian campaign, Napoleon was approached by the Bey of Mani, he pledged his support to the area in case of an extension of the campaign to Greek territory. To secure the Mani’s alliance in a possible confrontation with the Ottomans, Napoleon sent an envoy there in 1797, headed by two members of the Stephanopoli family from Corsica, Napoleon’s birthplace, which claimed descent from the founders of the Maniot settlement, and, further into the past, descent from the Byzantine imperial family into the bargain. According to one account of the venture, ‘the occasion was one for an orgy of Spartiate sentiment on both sides’.97 Iken, in his historical-scientiWc account of Greece’s awakening, goes so far as to claim a Maniot origin for Napoleon himself, who, through what we have to assume is an osmosis of courage, soaks up the displaced Maniot valour on his home ground in Corsica, even if, according to Iken, he does in the end fail to live up to the Maniot ideal. Greek character, arising from territorial realities, is in this context atmospheric enough to be transposable and to have an impact upon signiWcant political events and their participants, in an act of natural cross-fertilization. In other words, the groundedness of Greek character, movable to the territory it has colonized, goes to shape the human actors and decision-makers of fast-moving, volatile history, no matter how tenuous that link is. In turn, the appeal to and of Spartan origins aVected Maniot selfpresentation to its European supporters. A letter from Petrobey Mavromichali, the Maniot leader of the 1821 insurrection, to Jean Eynard, the director of the Griechenverein at Geneva, invokes the Maniots as the descendants of the Spartans and the guardians of freedom, also by virtue of their natural habitat. Mavromichalis 96 Bartholdy, Bruchstu¨cke, 241; Krug, Letztes Wort u¨ber die griechische Sache, 21. 97 Rawson, Spartan Tradition, 293. The account was published in 1800 as Voyage de Dimo et Nicolo Stephanopoli en Gre`ce, pendant les anneés V et VI [1797/1798], d’apre`s deux missions, dont l’une du gouvernement français, et l’autre du geńe´ral en chef Buonaparte; re´dige´ par un des professeurs du Prytaneé (Paris, 1800).

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bolsters his appeal for Wnancial support in this way: ‘Be assured that your generous help will be rewarded by the deeds of the Spartans. They live a life almost conforming to the primitive state of nature. Forced to retire to their dry and steep mountains, in order to preserve freedom, they were extremely poor and not in a state to establish schools for the education of their children there.’98 The habitat of those latter-day Spartans, as it is represented to the outside observer, is deWcient and in need of support, but in that way it literally lays bare the foundations of why it is worth rescuing. Almost conforming to the primitive state of nature is exactly what seems to entitle them, in the eyes of their projected readership, to progress towards the political state that thrives on the stereoscopic vision of progress and an originary, timeless naturalness. While this is the dynamic and paradoxical tension which Homi Bhabha, prominently, has identiWed for almost any act of modern national (self-) representation, natural environment, in the case of Greece, slots particularly smoothly into that structure. Against this background it is not surprising that Mu¨ller’s dramatis personae should feature a number of Maniot characters: poems such as ‘The Maniot Woman’, ‘The Teaching of the Maniot Woman’, ‘The Maniot’, ‘The Maniot Boy’, and ‘The Maniot Widow’ spin a web of family continuity and aYliation across the volumes of the Griechenlieder. ‘The Maniot’, from his third collection of September 1822, is one such example. The perspective is that from a mountain-top, and a reiWed freedom is inscribed into the natural features of the Mani: freedom lies buried in the plain but the rallying-cry, in a reverse upward movement, is to bring freedom down from its mountain refuge in triumph (‘Do you want to regain your freedom? Come up with sharpened swords! From the mountains we will bring her down, united’). The Maniot as freedom Wghter comes to personify a vital freedom that, as opposed to its buried namesake, thrives in a natural, organic fashion. His image as a mountain-dwelling hero, descending 98 ‘Soyez persuade´ que vos geńe´reux secour seront rećompense´ par les exploits des Spartiates. Ceux-ci me`nent une vie presque conforme a` l’e´tat primitif de la nature. Force´s de se retirer sur leurs montagnes arides et escarpeés, pour conserver la liberte´, ils e´taient extreˆmement pauvres, et hors d’e´tat d’e´tablir chez eux des ećoles pour l’e´ducation des enfants.’ Documents oYciels sur les secours envoye´ en Gre`ce par Monsieur Eynard, et sur l’etat de la Gre`ce a` la Wn de juillet 1826 (Geneva, 1826; repr. Athens, 1975).

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like a rushing river onto the plain where freedom lies buried, renders the action of the Maniot factually indistinguishable from that of nature: ‘Free, like my mountain streams, like the eagle in the sky, j I thunder down into the plain, where freedom lies buried’ (‘Frei, wie meiner Berge Strom, wie der Adler in den Lu¨ften, j Stu¨rz ich brausend in die Fla¨che, wo die Freiheit liegt in Gru¨ften’). The classical (and maybe expected) continuity and heritage that are alluded to by reference to ‘old heroic dust’ and the ‘grey rubble’ (l. 5) burying Greek freedom, are exchanged in favour of a living tradition: the reference to his children—as inheritors of the contested freedom— places the Maniot in a continuous line of predecessors and descendants, while his own actions are invoked as continuity of resistance: ‘never, never did a slavish yoke bend my strong neck.’ The image of the Maniot also does something else; the fashioning of the mountains as a place of freedom, which is a recurrent theme in German as well as Greek poetry and prose, deliberately evokes, and integrates into the fabric of a volatile and violent natural continuity, the klefts, the groups of irregular brigands who, particularly during the last century of Ottoman rule had determined the social structure of areas of Roumeli, Epirus, and Thessaly, as well as some of the Morea.99 Existing on the edge of both legality and society, owing no Wxed allegiance to the authorities, yet marked by a strong sense of group loyalty, they were not only a staple of travel accounts in circulation, but they became identiWable with the potential for achieving freedom. To link them, moreover, with the imagery of personiWed nature not only strengthened the coherence of Mu¨ller’s poetic imagery, it also established a link to the kleftika, the particular group of Greek folk songs treating this group of social bandits, which had developed during the eighteenth century.100 Mu¨ller’s Griechenlieder, in fact, need to be seen in an emerging folk-song tradition not only on the German side, in that they also consciously evoke formal characteristics of the Greek folk song: the 99 See John Koliopoulos, Brigands With a Cause: Brigandage and Irredentism in Modern Greece 1821–1912 (Oxford, 1987), 20–35. 100 The so-called kleftic songs, using the same stylistic and structural elements as other (older) folk songs, take as their topic the Wghting of groups of brigands against the Turks and were composed mainly during the course of the eighteenth century, particularly in the area of Roumeli. See Alexis Politis, ˜ ØŒ æÆª Ø: ˚º ØŒ (Athens, 1976), introduction; Beaton, Folk Poetry of Modern Greece, 102–11.

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Wfteen-syllable verse (with a caesura after the eighth syllable) mirrors the politikos stichos, the ‘political verse’, a standard metre of, among other things, the Greek popular or folk song. Mu¨ller, fully engaging in the logic of the distressed genre, is keen to bring the model to his readership’s attention. In a review of recent Griechenlieder in Brockhaus’s Literarisches Conversations-Blatt in 1824, Mu¨ller commends the exemplary character of his own songs, claiming that the ‘well chosen metrical form is developed from Modern Greek models’, models he in turn likens to the ‘Nibelungen verse’ of medieval German epic.101 In a second review of 1825, this time of recent translations of Greek folk song into French, English, and German, the last being his own translation of Fauriel, Mu¨ller oVers a more precise deWnition of the ‘heroic verse’ of Greek folk songs, as a Wfteen-syllable line, separated by a caesura into one eight- and one seven-syllable section, and with the main accent of the Wrst section on the sixth or eighth syllable, of the second section on the sixth syllable.102 Although Mu¨ller is very conscientious in following this metrical pattern in his translation of Fauriel’s collection, his own Griechenlieder are much less conceived as faithful adaptations. Here Mu¨ller follows the model of the Wfteensyllable line with a caesura in about half of his Lieder, yet without ever fully succeeding in a complete metrical reconstruction. In some poems he attempts the dactylic ending of the Wrst half-line, but without consistency and with a change of the main stress to the Wfth or seventh syllable.103 It is no less important that he insists on the use of regular rhyming couplets, which deviates from the Greek norm of largely unrhymed lines and brings his poems much closer to European expectations of versiWcation.104 More than a concession to taste, Mu¨ller 101 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 59 (10 Mar. 1824), 235. The review, of three recent German collections of poetry in support of the Greeks, is not signed, but is almost certainly by Mu¨ller himself, given the comparisons he draws with Mu¨ller’s poetry, the nature of analysis of metre, and his characteristic and immensely readable style of damning with faint praise, familiar from his other reviews. 102 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 122 (27 May 1825), 485. Mu¨ller claims that English and French are not suited, nor willing, to break with their strict traditions and render an unrhymed Wfteen-syllable verse as precisely that. 103 In more detail Gad, ‘Mu¨ller’, 149 V. 104 In his translation of Fauriel’s collection Chants populaires de la Gre`ce (1824) in 1825, Mu¨ller keeps as close as possible to the unrhymed original. His own poetic translations of folk material as Reime aus den Inseln des Archipelagus, on the other hand, are free adaptations using a standard rhyme form.

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also aligns Greek song with the popular precedent of the rhymed ballad. It creates familiarity with a foreign, ostensibly more organic and original relation between the individual (or the group) and its environment expressed in the songs, in which the reader may participate to a degree. Mu¨ller hints at the particular predisposition of the German reader in his assertion that the language particularly suited to render the Greek originals is German, ‘whose nature made it possible to follow the peculiar metrical form of the original almost word for word, without distorting or forcing the free and natural character of folk song’.105 Again, naturalness here provides the necessary translucency that allows the diYcult translation from one nation in the making (Greece) to another (Germany). At the centre of the folk ‘tone’ lies its immediate relation with nature. The adequate expression of feelings or internal processes through the images provided by nature is not merely artistic practice, but the prerogative of the poet who has grasped this very relation to nature that is characteristic of folk song. Mu¨ller’s comment on his contemporary, Kerner, another poet making use of folk elements, reiterates his basis for the analogy between interior sentiment and exterior environment: Moreover, Kerner’s Muse is never indoors: for joy and sorrow, in longing and contemplation, in dreamy solitude and playful sociability she is surrounded by free nature all around, above and below. And yet, she would never care to represent nature like a landscape painter. She takes in nature and returns it from inside her through her thoughts and feelings. For this her nature is so peculiar and yet so simple and so true. Shapeless longing clothes itself and its object in images of nature, and even the sun and the moon are mere carriers of the poet’s love.106

105 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 122 (27 May 1825), 485. ¨ berhaupt ist Kerners Muse nie in der Stube: in Lust und Leid, in Sehnsucht und 106 ‘U Andacht, in traümender Einsamkeit und spielender Geselligkeit hat sie die freie Natur um sich, unter sich und u¨ber sich. Dennoch aber fa¨llt es ihr nie ein, die Natur als Landschaftsmalerin darstellen zu wollen. Sie nimmt die Natur in sich auf und gibt sie aus ihrem Innern mit ihren Gedanken und Gefu¨hlen wieder heraus. Daher ist ihre Natur so eigentu¨mlich und doch so einfach und so wahr. Die gestaltlose Sehnsucht kleidet sich und ihren Gegenstand in die Bilder der Natur, und selbst Sonne und Mond sind fu¨r den ¨ ber die neueste lyrische Poesie’, 329 f. Dichter oft nur Tra¨ger seiner Liebe.’ ‘U

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Against the reWned inventory of stylized landscape painting, Mu¨ller’s work espouses the ideal of artistic simplicity implied in folk song.107 Some aspects singled out by Mu¨ller are particularly relevant to the tone of the Griechenlieder : the untamed Xow of both Greek freedom and mountain rivers in his songs echoes the metaphor of his own musings on the reviving ‘stream of folk song on the dry ground of reXection’. Yet the regenerative force lies precisely in the use of ‘authentic’ imagery, not in the emulation of archaizing language or form.108 The turn away from merely imitating older forms ties in with Mu¨ller’s credo expressed in the same essay that new folk songs had to be contemporary (‘zeitgema¨ß’).109 The stylistic feature to achieve that end, which Mu¨ller commends in Uhland’s writing, is the use of personae or dramatic monologue;110 the fact that he himself uses the same device, that is, the various representative Wrst-person speakers in his Griechenlieder, lets him claim the same naturalness and immediacy he values highly as a poetic quality; not only does the Wrst-person perspective facilitate identiWcation; the ultimate beneWciary is again the individual (and the poet) who, in the act of reading or re-creating folk songs and the original direct relation between individual and environment expressed in them, furthers his own (poetic) understanding and human character. The ‘contemporary’ character of his (Greek) folk songs—and the political applicability to their German reader’s present situation—is further strengthened by Mu¨ller’s awareness of the unbridgeable gap between the past and the present, whether between older folk-song models and modern imitations, or between ancient and modern 107 Heinrich Heine, in an often-quoted letter to Mu¨ller in 1826, praises the latter’s collection Sieben und siebzig Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten (1820), which contained the song-cycle Die scho¨ne Mu¨llerin, as exemplary in achieving the authentic voice of natural simplicity; Nigel Reeves, ‘The Art of Simplicity: Heinrich Heine and Wilhelm Mu¨ller’, Oxford German Studies, 5 (1970), 48–66. ¨ ber die neueste lyrische Poesie’, 304. Mu¨ller’s attitude betrays the inXuence of 108 ‘U his teacher F. A. Wolf, who was one of the Wrst scholars to stress the importance of oral tradition in the composition and transmission of Homeric epic. Mu¨ller himself wrote a treatise Homerische Vorschule (1824), modelled on Wolf ’s Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795); Wolf himself had relied on Herderian ideas of poetic composition and had stressed the, in the last analysis, irretrievable nature of ancient texts. ¨ ber die neueste lyrische Poesie’, 304. 109 Mu¨ller, ‘U 110 Ibid. 309.

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Greece. On the one hand this concerns the evaluation of contemporary Greek events by the European public. The opening poem of the Griechenlieder, ‘The Greeks to the Friends of their Antiquity’ (‘Die Griechen an die Freunde ihres Altertums’), uncovers the failure of the professed Philhellenes (and, one wonders, the professed poets?) to integrate the present situation into their idealizing view: Das Alt’ ist neu geworden, die Fern ist euch so nah, Was ihr ertraümt so lange, leibhaftig steht es da, Es klopft an eure Pforte—ihr schließt ihm euer Haus— Sieht es denn gar so anders, als ihr es traümtet, aus? (ll. 23–6) What was old has become new, what was far away has come close, what you had dreamed is, at long last, standing before you alive; it is knocking on your door—and you barricade your house—Well, does it look so diVerent from your dream?

On the other hand, and despite the repeated appeal to the ancient glory revived in the present Greek struggle, there is a strong sense within the scenes of the individual poems and in the views of the individual speakers that the material remains of antiquity are degenerating and beyond recovery. The personiWed ‘Ruins of Athens to England’ (‘Ruinen von Athen an England’) predict their ultimate downfall, ‘The Maniot’ deWes the ancient rubble which has buried freedom, and the voice of ‘Temples Old and New’ (‘Alte und neue Tempel’) summarizes the vain attempt to salvage the monuments of old: Laßt die alten Tempel stu¨rzen! Klaget um den Marmor nicht, Wenn die Hand des blinden Heiden seine scho¨ne Form zerbricht! Nicht in Steinen, nicht in Asche wohnt der Geist der alten Welt, In den Herzen der Hellenen steht sein ko¨nigliches Zelt . . . (ll. 1–4) Let the old temples come tumbling down! Do not lament the marble, when the hand of the blind heathen destroys its beauteous shape! The spirit of the ancient world rests not in stones or in ashes, but in the Hellenes’ hearts, and here it has put up its royal tent . . .

The continuity between the ancient and the contemporary spirit is constantly sought throughout the poems, yet Mu¨ller warns against a false sense of continuity which, like the contrived use of formal aspects of folk poetry, does not recognize that the historical past is beyond

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retrieval. If continuity is to be established, it is in the memory of the past. The surrounding nature, with the locations and markers of memory, is simultaneously the complementary dynamic setting which reXects the actions of its inhabitants. ‘The Maniot Woman’, who challenges her fellow women to search out the ruins of Sparta so as to gather stones to pelt those of the returning sons who have achieved nothing in the Wght for freedom, indicates Mu¨ller’s understanding of continuity: material locality includes, yet of necessity transcends, the fragments of the past, while the continuity of a cultural tradition (Spartan maternal pride and manly honour) comes at the cost of destroying quite another, immediate continuity, that of the family and the sons’ lives. Mu¨ller’s strong views on the potential of folk song (and its potential for failure) echo in the violence that is enabled by his Greek nature: stones become weapons to quench false continuity, while mountain refuges house appropriately independent spirits, whose character is set loose with unforeseen consequences, as much as it is cautiously contained by the trust in the justiWcation of politics by way of natural habitat. The repeated apostrophe by parts of the Greek land itself must, as a rhetorical strategy, have hit the right note. Mu¨ller’s collective review of philhellenic poetry speaks with approval of poems by Heinrich Stieglitz, that ‘the individual moments of the Hellenes’ struggle, which the young poet has singled out to sublimate, are well chosen, and he, like Wilhelm Mu¨ller, seeks to Wnd characteristic images of this great struggle in speciWc locations and nationalities’.111 Together with place, though, the most consistent attention across contemporary reviews, is to folk songs as paradigms and as collectibles in a landscape. With the translation of Fauriel’s collection, Mu¨ller began to have extensive contact with the Greek folk-song tradition, and there are instances, especially after 1824, of very direct literary inXuence too. Two poems from the later volumes of the Griechenlieder, ‘On the Death of Markos Bozzaris’ and ‘On the Death of Georgis’, are more or less straight translations of Greek songs quoted in Voutier’s Lettres sur la Gre`ce. Notes et chants populaires extraits des portefeuilles du colonel (1826). Motifs like the following, from the beginning of ‘Song before Battle’ (‘Lied vor der Schlacht’): 111 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 59 (10 Mar. 1824), 235.

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Wer fu¨r die Freiheit ka¨mpft und fa¨llt, des Ruhm wird blu¨hend stehn, Solange frei die Winde noch durch freie Lu¨fte wehn, Solange frei der Baüme Laub noch rauscht im gru¨nen Wald, Solang des Stromes Woge noch frei nach dem Meere wallt He, who Wghts and dies for freedom, his glory will Xourish as long as the winds blow in the free air, as long as the leaves of the trees are free to rustle in the green forests, as long as the river surges in freedom towards the sea

are reminiscent of certain topoi from the kleftika, as in the following: ‘As long as the mountains are covered in snow we are not going to bow to the Turks!’ (‘ˇ Øı Æ !ı; æŒı æŒı " ).112 Yet the repeated application of the words ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ to a plethora of natural features is Mu¨ller’s own doing. Still, it is likely that he had had some exposure to Greek models before 1824. Many travel accounts, amongst them those of Ukert and Pouqueville, whom Mu¨ller is known to have read, contain examples of Greek songs. Moreover, Baron von Sack, who after their falling out continued his travels from Rome to Egypt without Mu¨ller, was himself a collector of Greek folk songs, and both in Vienna and Rome there was no shortage of opportunities for Mu¨ller to hear, at least, about the growing interest in the systematic collection of the songs.113 After the mountains and the historic battle site, the third and last of the topographical motifs mentioned above, which Mu¨ller uses to relate the Greek speakers actively to their environment, is the sea. As a place of freedom and a site of memory and tradition, the sea is not only the natural feature seen as most characteristic of Greece since antiquity, it also tends to suggest the search for freedom, as its horizon is ever expanding. The sea’s unlimited expanse and the transgression of bounds can mirror an expansion into the past without, however, the prospect of attainability, the pattern familiar from Romantic aesthetics as outlined in Chapter 1. In poems like ‘The Phanariot’ or ‘The Slave Girl in Asia’ (‘Die Sklavin in Asien’), the sea is a carrier of voices from the past, even though—evoking lost family—a very recent one: Ho¨r ich eine Woge rauschen, ist es mir, als ob’s mich ruft, Ja mich rufen meine Eltern aus der tiefen weiten Gruft, 112 ‘ı æªØ ’, Fauriel, i, no. 24. 113 On the role of von Sack in the procurement of Greek folk songs, see Politis, ˜ ØŒ æÆª Ø, 28 f.

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Rufen Rache—und ich schleudre Tu¨rkenko¨pfe in die Flut, Bis gesa¨ttigt ist die Rache, bis die wilde Woge ruht. When I hear the sound of waves, my parents, I feel, are calling to me from their grave, calling for revenge—and I hurl Turkish heads into the sea until revenge is done and the waves are calmed.

‘The Athenians Embarking’ (‘Die EinschiVung der Athener’) moves beyond this temporal frame as the ‘free’ sea not only contains the promise of a future free Hellas, but is supposed to carry the Athenians, retreating from the Turks, back to the island of Salamis and the Athenian victory against the Persians. The seafaring tradition, and hence the assurance of the sea’s favour, Wnd further expression in the education of ‘The Little Boy of Hydra’ (‘Der kleine Hydriot’). Continuity lies in the passing on across generations of knowledge of how to attain a harmonious relation between man and sea. For the importance of locality in representations of Greece and her inhabitants liberating themselves, the combination of nature imagery with the little Hydriot boy that oVers a natural form of schooling and Bildung, could not be more exemplary. Let me conclude with a brief look at the poem ‘Hydra’, which appeared in the collection Neue Lieder der Griechen in January 1823. The island of Hydra, which had a strong seafaring and mercantile tradition and was relatively independent of the Ottomans,114 features in a number of Mu¨ller’s poems. The naval support from Hydra, and the spiritual support deriving from Hydra’s history (after 1770 the island oVered asylum to a substantial number of Peloponnesian refugees), were a regular feature in the rallying-cries to advance the Greek liberation movement: Ukert knows of the ‘Vaterlandsliebe’, the patriotic feelings of the islanders in general; Korais’s 1803 lecture, published in Iken’s Hellenion, praises their progressive strength of character and spirit, and he quotes an example from Hydra, where the earliest education of the mariners’ children is in (local) geography; Theodor Kind, in his Contributions To Better Acquaintance with Modern Greece, with Regard to History, Literature and Geography (Beitra¨ge zur besseren Kenntnis des Neuen Griechenland, in historischer, literarischer und geographischer Beziehung, 1831), devotes ten pages alone to the island of 114 Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Eve of the Greek Revival, 67; Vakalopoulos, æÆ ı ı ººØ , 8 vols. (Thessaloniki, 1961– ), v. 409–18.

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Hydra, singling out its proximity to European standards and its comparative freedom from Ottoman intervention, and cross-referencing his observations to earlier works by Iken, Leukothea (1822), Korais, George Waddington, and Pouqueville.115 The rocks of Mu¨ller’s Hydra, as the natural seat of Greek liberty, are surrounded by scenes of violent onslaught. Nature let loose is at the same time not only the force of opposition but also the bearer of Hydra’s memory and glory. The permanence of the coastal rocks surpasses even the traces of continuity implied in the material remains of Athens and Thebes: ‘Let towers and walls fall down; what is built must perish: j The rock of freedom will stand in the free sea for all times!’ (‘Laßt die Tu¨rm und Mauern stu¨rzen; was ihr baut, muß untergehn: j Ewig wird der Freiheit Felsen in dem freien Meere stehn!’). At the same time the opening vista of the seascape brings about the mental liberation of the spectator: ‘When I see your clouded summits, my heart races and my blood surges j . . . and on the wings of your sails my spirit soars out above the wide sea’ (‘Seh ich deine Wolkengipfel, steigt mein Herz, und wallt mein Blut j . . . Und mit deiner Segel Fluge schwebt ins weite Meer mein Geist’). Mu¨ller’s use of locality shows that for the Greek narrators in the poems it is the locality and character of the present environment that activates liberation: it evokes the past and in so doing authenticates the present aYnity between nature and individual. The spectator of the poem ‘Hydra’, however, is unspeciWed, in contrast to many of the other poems which create a distinct persona, yet is more involved in the scenery than the anonymous ‘I’ of the very openly critical poems. It is the spectator of the political events and history acted out within a signiWcant environment rich with associations, whose spirit is lifted up and drawn out to sea. As in the other poems, the particular environment bears the traces and memory of a culture and past that have a particular aYnity with freedom. Here, however, the spectator, the witness and reader, is himself at the centre of the

115 Ukert, Gema¨lde von Griechenland, 117; Korais, in Iken, Hellenion, 161 V.; George Waddington, A Visit to Greece, in 1823 and 1824 (London, 1825), translated into German as Besuch in Griechenland (Stuttgart, 1825). The actual extent of Hydra’s relative independence is quite another matter; what is relevant is that a network of texts reinforces the image.

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poem, which Mu¨ller considered one of his best.116 There seems a consensus among Mu¨ller’s critics and biographers that his Griechenlieder thinly veil his own political agenda and that there is a remarkable similarity with the sentiment of the poems of Bundesblu¨then: the French of the earlier poems are now the Turks, and the imagery of rousing battle-cries and sabre-swinging youths is little diVerent. The scene of Greece, however, as opposed to France and Germany, oVered a diVerent scope to the German reader; much as Greek writing and self-understanding of the period were reliant upon a positive image of Greece and a Greek heritage imported from the Western European tradition, Germany was equally reliant on the image of a Greek state whose aspirations were founded upon and reXected in its own natural habitat, at the same time a habitat which still left enough scope to reXect the German reader’s own position. As Mu¨ller characterized the German Griechendichtung in his review in 1824: ‘From the land of reality, German enthusiasm for the freedom of the Greeks took wing toward the higher reaches of poetry.’117 Nevertheless, Greece is not a dream-world but a reality, eVective by its naturalness and the fusion of material and spiritual factors put into artistic form. Although the perception of Greece is on the one hand Wrmly connected to the features of a Greek locale, the Greek environment remains on the other hand a transposable entity, a symbolic colony without geographical restriction. Winckelmann’s Gedanken opened with the address to the elector August, under whose government the arts were ‘as a foreign colony’ introduced to Saxony, and in whose time the search for the pure springs of art ‘meant travelling to Athens; and Dresden from henceforth will be an Athens for artists’.118 After 1821 the search for a national identity still means ‘travelling to Athens’; an Athens with the power to become in turn a Dresden, a Jena, a Berlin, or a Munich for writers. In the imagery favoured by philhellenic literature, it is the topos of (political) unity that is foregrounded as one of Greece’s overriding aspirations in liberating itself. It is a topos that perfectly matches the centrality—and structurally necessary elusiveness—of unity to the 116 In a letter to Brockhaus of 4 Jan. 1823 Mu¨ller calls the poem ‘the best of all four volumes’; Werke. i. 323. 117 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 59 (10 Mar. 1824), 233. 118 Winckelmann, Gedanken, 4.

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workings of the Romantic image. For Germany, and a Europe in general that was preoccupied with the issue of nationhood and the relation between the state and the individual, the motivation of the Greek events seemed to rest in the Greeks’ desire to establish a stable form of national unity and territorial cohesion on Western European models. Whether this was indeed the case is a diVerent story altogether.119 In all this, it is important to remember that the conditions in Greece were not just those of a clan-oriented microcosm, but had been that of a linguistically, ethnically, and territorially highly complex area with much scope for diVerent interpretations, objectives, and strategies of becoming a uniWed polity.120 In terms of the local military action the Philhellene battalions met with, their objectives and tactics bore the mark of regional power-struggles and small-scale warfare, motivated often by demands diVerent from those imputed to them; in an uneasy mixture of Western-trained military units, mostly composed of non-Greeks, aristocratic Greek military leaders, and bands of armed brigands under the guidance of local captains, unity against the common enemy was diYcult to achieve.121 Social and regional diVerences practically led to civil warfare waged in parallel with the Wght against Ottoman rule, and prevented the rise of any permanent authority. Early successes of the insurgents in the Peloponnese had led to the setting up of three provisional regional governments, and in early 1822 a constitution was adopted. A year later the constitution was revised and the three governments merged into one central authority, which did nothing to stop, and in fact even advanced, the factionalism. Still, many of the Western-educated and -oriented Greeks who were involved in the early government did exert a substantial intellectual inXuence on Greece’s self-understanding and self-deWnition towards the outside world and 119 For an in-depth description of the practical expressions of illusion and disillusion on both sides, see St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free. 120 Peckham, Natural Histories; S. Petmezas, ‘The Formation of Early Hellenic Nationalism’, Historein, 1 (1999), 51–74. 121 There is a rather Xuid subdivision into armatoloi (Greek or in any case nonMuslim irregulars licensed and employed by the Ottomans to ascertain a certain degree of security and state control in the pashaliks) and klefts (brigands living in the mountains, not in the service of the authorities); both groups participated in the War of Independence with diVering, and often unclear or conXicting motivations, but their shared aim was essentially to maintain the old social system with its network of powers, security, and inXuence. See Koliopoulos, Brigands, 20–35.

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the rest of Europe; and one must not underestimate the increasing need for a national rhetoric during and after the War of Independence, especially after the establishment of the Greek state proper, which followed the battle of Navarino in 1827, the granting of statehood by the Western ‘protecting powers’ in 1829 in the Treaty of Adrianople and conWrmed by the London protocol in 1830, and the establishment of the Greek kingdom under a Bavarian monarch in 1833. The brittleness and the ambivalence of unity is not merely political, but it Wnds expression in the works and in the poetic self-understanding of the Wrst generation of Greek writers after 1821, who are the topic of the next two chapters. If Greek nature proved portable across to Germany and Europe through representation and its beneWts for the observant reader and writer, then how is that system of transposition, of looking at Greece as an object that functions by not being one’s own, going to work for Greek writers themselves? The literary contact zone provoked by that retranslation, I suggest, left Greek writers facing an aesthetic structure in which Greece was Wrmly held in place as an entity—and, by extension, a landscape—that was necessarily and functionally suspended above an abyss of non-representation, or rather of no need for rethinking representation. All this at a time when the claim became pervasive in literature and other cultural institutions of the new state that its content and narratives must needs be national, investing that claim with authority and impotence in equal parts. Where Peckham described this dilemma in terms of social-historical structures, I suggest that the aesthetic structures of that claim add to the overall eVect. As the next two chapters show, the extreme responses to that challenge appear to be either an eventually paralysed pastiche or all-out refusal to make the Greek landscape, as a place of freedom, visible.

4 The Ambivalence of Nature: Poetry for the New Greek State In the infancy of art, its productions are, like the handsomest of human beings at birth, misshapen, and similar one to another, like the seeds of plants of entirely diVerent kinds; but in its bloom and decay, they resemble those mighty streams, which, at the point where they should be the broadest, either dwindle into small rivulets, or totally disappear. . . . But, among the Greeks, the art of drawing resembles a river, whose clear waters Xow in numerous windings through a fertile vale, and Wll its channel, yet do not overXow. (J. J. Winckelmann, History of Greek Art)

In 1867, as Greek ambassador to Washington, Alexandros Rizos Rangavis (1809–92), poet, scholar, and diplomat, lays out the following account of the condition of his homeland: [The Greek’s] nationality is a spring of exhaustless waters; it may run concealed under mountains of oppression, as certain rivers of his own country disappear for miles beneath the surface, to break forth at last, as they do, with undiminished force and freshness. If these waters be pent up, they will inevitably overXow their banks, and deluge the land which they would otherwise fructify and adorn. The Grecian stream of knowledge, civilization, freedom, if permitted to pursue its natural course, will penetrate the provinces, now dry and gaping beneath the barren sceptre of the Mussulman, and make them productive of the best interests of humanity.1

1 Rangavis, Greece: Her Progress and Present Position, 156.

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The familiar, philhellenic imagery of nature as a liberating force supporting national character here too appeals to the powerful dynamism that is natural, positive, and justiWed because it is embedded in a Greek environment. Rangavis’s account, over thirty years after the Greek state’s coming into existence, was written at a time when the Megali Idea, the expansionist ‘Great Idea’ that promoted the redeeming of Greek territory in the East, was well under way.2 His early work, though, as representative of literary production in the new nation state, is of a diVerent character. In the prologue to a volume of Selected Poems (1837), he describes the trail-blazing, lawgiving function of the Romantic poet through the familiar image of the comet, as it attaches to the trajectory of historic events and individual character alike: ‘Rules do not drive or tug along genius, but follow it at a distance, describing its course, just as the compass does not draw the comet behind it, but instead measures its heavenly path.’3 In the poem ‘Thoughts in Desolation’ (‘Œł Ø æ Æ’, 1837), published in the same volume, the speaker recounts how, in the past, the gaze of his beloved had once propelled him on to unknown paths: ‘But when your gaze struck me, j like a Wery comet I turned my course into the unknown wilderness’ (ll. 44 f.).4 But now that her eyes and favour are turning away, self-imposed solitude provokes in him a desire for extinction: ‘My youth is extinguished as a footstep in the sand, j and at the same time my beautiful dreams are extinguished. j . . . Leave me to the wilderness where, crying, I shall die (ll .57 V.)’. This is a far cry from the dynamic Wt between the Greeks and the natural features representing them in Rangavis’s report written for a foreign readership. The role which the young poets of the 1830s had to confront was a precarious one: facing an uncooperative society, threatened by disunity, most chose to base 2 The term Megali Idea was Wrst coined by Ioannis Kolettis in a parliamentary speech in 1844. Its translation into policy gained momentum throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and eventually ended in the attempt to annex parts of Greek Asia Minor, and subsequent defeat in 1922. 3 ‘ˇØ ŒÆ ª Ø ı æı ıºŒ Ø ııÆ; Æºº ÆæÆŒºıŁ Ø ÆŒæ Ł ; ØÆªæ æ Ø Æı; ø ØÆ! æ Ø Œ ŒÆ Ø ı; Æºº ŒÆÆ æ ıæÆÆ ı’ (p. 22). 4 First published in Alexandros Rizos Rangavis, ˜ØæÆ —Ø ÆÆ, ed. Andreas ÆÆ Æ #ØººªØŒ, 19 vols. Koromilas (Athens, 1937), repr. in A. R. Rangavis, ` (Athens, 1874–89), i. 225–32, under the title ‘In the Wilderness’ (‘¯ ¯æ ı’).

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themselves on a poetic programme that placed the artist in an exalted, borderline position, on the cutting edge; from this position they tried to visualize an ideal state on a real basis, grounded on Greek territory, and a poetry to match. It was also a deeply paradoxical position: writing for the nation, and highly aware of models that insisted on the impossibility of its complete aesthetic realization, all this at a time when the Romantic imagery of Greece outside Greece was already verging on the cliche´d, even though it was infused with new political vigour. The relative dynamism or restfulness of Greek nature rests on the distance of the observer; the position of the writer, in other words, has to be that of an outsider. The position of the inside writer, subsequently, of a writer representing a new, speciWcally Greek literature, clashes with the (nature) imagery that is used to represent the activity of the writer too; the function of Romantic nature imagery, at the same time, pre-structures its usefulness in representing the nation as a material, signiWcant environment. In 1833 the young Greek poet Alexandros Soutsos, a cousin of Rangavis, published a book entitled Panorama of Greece, or Collection of Mixed Poems. Alexandros, born in 1803, and his younger brother Panagiotis, born in 1806, had Wrst arrived in the new rump state of Greece in 1825, after being educated in Italy and Paris to where they returned for a while two years later. Nafplio, the place of publication, was then capital of the Greek state, which itself had been in existence for only three years. By 1830 the Protecting Powers had been ready to grant independence to Greece, albeit in the form of a monarchy, with Otto von Wittelsbach, the underage second son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, eventually chosen as the new king to be; Otto set foot on Greek soil, at Nafplio, in January 1833, and transferred the capital to Athens several months later, in 1834. The Panorama includes a verse ‘Letter to Otho, King of Greece’, in which Soutsos, explicitly writing as both a poet and a citizen, presents a whistle-stop tour of Greek literary history that has the following to say about the contemporary writing scene: ˙ Æ ºÆ! ŒÆØ æÆ Œ" ıªºøÆ ı ˇØ æı ºÆ æ ŒÆØ æÆªØŒ ÆÆ. ˇ ˇØ æ; ŁÆıæ ØŒºø ø ˚ÆØ Œ Ø ; ØŒ ø Œ" ÆØŁ ø.


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Our poetry has gained both new vigour and new eloquence in the brilliant and tragic frenzy of the Wayfarer. The Wayfarer is a treasure of manifold thoughts and a new world of ideas, of images and of feelings.

The Wayfarer referred to is a lyrical drama by his brother Panagiotis, published in 1831, that, in the rather small literary world of Nafplio, had been very successful;5 to create new worlds, to be sure, was not an unusual concern of the time, and clearly no less so for Greece. Nor was an increased awareness of the role of the poet. What would the Greek poet’s ‘new world’ look like? How was it related to the phenomenal world, and how, in what way, and with what means could it be represented? One might expect that writing about home ground, so to speak, might further or facilitate making landscape and place meaningful in aesthetic representation. The familiarity with this newly created territory, however, is relative for those writers, too, both literally and Wguratively speaking. While ‘inhabiting’ is part of the imaginary of Hellenism, being on the ground does not per se change its underlying logic.

PERIOD DRAMA: EVALUATING THE LITERATURE O F T H E 1 8 3 0s The building of a new world, for sure, was not an empty metaphor in the new state of Greece: it was a literal as much as a Wgurative undertaking. Although plans were grand, space, in the Wrst instance, was scarce. For one thing, the provisional territory of the Greek state in 1832 did not include more than the Peloponnese, Attica, and mainland Greece no further north than the imaginary line from Arta (near Missolonghi) to Volos (a little north of Euboea). Athens itself, in 1834, before its redesign as a modern and classical capital, was a provincial and, after the war, heavily damaged town of only a few thousand inhabitants, while Nafplio was a more thriving, but still minor port city;6 both places in any case were unprepared to 5 See the testimony given in later editions of the work by Koromilas (1864) and by Zervos (1915). 6 See further Eleni Bastea, The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth (Cambridge, 2000).

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accommodate the sizeable foreign and then mainly Bavarian military and administrative contingents.7 What was more, in the narrow circles of the newly forming society there was, in the 1830s, no structure of an established middle class, nor of an established artistic proWle integrated (or, for that matter, opposed) to it. The social strata taking up the functions of the upper and middle classes were composed of foreigners, administrators and functionaries, captains of the local bands and members of the local elites (with no small amount of animosity between them). The wealthy merchant communities that had gradually formed abroad in the late eighteenth century largely continued to stay abroad, and it took several more decades before the hierarchies of the upper and middle classes were Wlled and determined by new groups of merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and intellectuals.8 Writing from a location that was provisional while ostensibly indicating continuity, and operating in the small, albeit international circles of Nafplio and later Athens, the authors of the new Greece moved also in a rather ill-deWned Weld of professional activity. This leads one to ask to what extent the role of the poet-Wgure in society and the relation to his environment was thematized in their works. Despite their attention to the canons of the Western European arts, the question, if it is to yield any insights about the logic of literary transmission, is obviously not one of verbatim inXuences from European literature, and whether they constitute a dead-end qua imitation; rather, it is to ask how imagery familiar from European Romanticism and Hellenism is functional in the context of establishing a new Greek state, a new Greek literature, and a role of the individual within it at the same time. A reading of some of the nature imagery of Alexandros Rizos Rangavis and Panagiotis Soutsos, as it appears in their early works, shows how the degree of self-awareness which 7 On the lack of space and infrastructure, see e.g., apart from Bastea, the striking account found in the letters of Bettina von Savigny, Leben in Griechenland 1834 bis 1835: Bettina Schinas, geb. von Savigny, Briefe und Berichte an ihre Eltern in Berlin, ed. R. SteVen (Mu¨nster, 2002). 8 John Koliopoulos and Thanos Veremis, Greece: The Modern Sequel: From 1831 to the Present (New York, 2002), 194 V.; Paul Sant Cassia, The Making of the Modern Greek Family: Marriage and Exchange in Nineteenth Century Athens (Cambridge, 1992).


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distinguishes the poet vis-a`-vis his environment, as modern and Romantic, includes an awareness of the indeterminacy inherent in this role—an ambiguity that ultimately threatens conXict with the environment and with integration into it, and one that Wlters out in tropes of alienation from nature and of feeling severed from familiar, signiWcant surroundings. In the case of the poet and author this is the social environment; in the case of the Wctional heroes, who often share attributes of the poet, this concerns their relation not only to a social but also to the natural environment and its problematic representation. Rather than a readily adopted Romantic conceit, the imagery of solitude and of deserted nature thereby becomes an integral element in the self-understanding of the poetic and political persona of the Greek writer. At the same time, this poetry, with a Greek setting, belongs to the Wrst writings that visualize the contemporary Greek state—and they do so through narratives and settings that feed on the strain which the past (personal and national) imposes on the space of the present. The ambivalent relation between nature and the protagonists, as necessarily existing, yet also potentially nonharmonious, disruptive, and even illusory, gains added poignancy when the literary works insist on a contemporary historical, political, and geographical setting. This is the case in Greek writing of this period, where new (young) authors deliberately introduce themselves as contributors to a national literature in a national context. The poetry of the Wrst decade of Greek statehood has received comparatively little attention, both within the overall scheme of Greek literary history and within studies of individual authors. This poetry, usually treated in terms of its relation to models of European Romanticism and the aesthetic of a folk-song tradition, has traditionally been interpreted as a short-lived moment in the quasi-organic development towards the formal and linguistic rigidity of an ‘Athenian Romantic School’ in the mid- and late nineteenth century.9 Internally marginalized, it is, however, also the literature of relative outsiders in a sociological sense—in a period where the question of boundaries between inside and outside was as pressing 9 e.g. K. Th. Dimaras, ¯ººØŒ $ø ÆØ (Athens, 1982), 141–56, 167–241, and æÆ ˝ ººØŒ ¸ª Æ (Athens, 1968), 271–88; Linos Politis, æÆ ˝ ººØŒ ¸ª Æ (Athens, 1978), 168–79, and ‘¯ººØŒ

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in territorial as in cultural terms. The writers of this earlier period, sometimes labelled the ‘Old Athenian School’, share their origins in the well-connected, intellectual cultural world of the Phanariots, that is, the Greek aristocratic class dominating representative administrative oYces in the Ottoman Empire, clustered around Constantinople and the Danubian principalities in particular.10 They were usually educated abroad and arrived in the new Greek state—and a society by no means settled or necessarily welcoming to outsiders—at an age which made them just a little too young to have fought actively in the long-drawn-out War of Independence. For them, and given their usually Western-oriented education, the tendencies of Phanariot literature towards the forms and rhetoric of a learned neoclassicism were fused with knowledge of European Romanticism and then applied to a situation of great social and literary precariousness.11 Despite, or in consequence of, this literary genealogy, Greek Romanticism has, since its early stages, largely been deWned through the old opposition between Romanticism and Classicism, following the $ ÆØ (1830–80)’; ¨ ÆÆ ºª Æ Æ, ii (Thessaloniki, 1976), 99–132. For a view less set on the future development of Athenian Romanticism but instead on its origin as one of the several paths taken by literature of the Wrst decade after the Greek War of Independence, see Alexis Politis, ‘˙ ººØŒ ÆÆÆØŒ æ’, Æ æØŒ, 13/24–5 (1996), 129–38. 10 On their political and intellectual inXuence, see G. P. Henderson, The Revival of Greek Thought, 1620–1830 (Albany, NY, 1970); Paschalis Kitromilides, Enlightenment as Social Criticism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1992); J. A. Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece 1833–1843 (Princeton, 1968), 24–7; for their ambivalent stance towards a Greek national cause Cyril Mango, ‘The Phanariots and the Byzantine Tradition’, in R. Clogg (ed.), The Struggle for Greek Independence (London, 1973), 41–66; also C. Papacostea-Danielopoulou, ‘E´tat actuel des recherches sur ‘‘l’e´poque phanariote’’ ’, Revue des E´tudes Sud-Est Europeénnes, 27/4 (1989), 305–11. 11 The literature available on Phanariot literature is painfully slim. A startingpoint is Peter Mackridge, ‘The Return of the Muses: Some Aspects of Revivalism in Greek Literature, 1760–1840’, ˚ , 2 (1994), 47–71. Rangavis’s father Iakovos Rizos Rangavis, himself the author of an archaeological and topographical account titled Greek AVairs, translated Virgil’s Aeneid and dramatic works by AlWeri, Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire. His uncle, Iakovos Rizos Neroulos, although the author of some works inspired by French classical tragedy, was mainly known for his satirical poems and plays. Formerly a minister in Moldavia, he became in the new state a Minister of Education, and published histories of Greece and of Greek literature, Cours de litte´rature grecque moderne Geneva, 1828; translated into German as Die neugriechische Literatur: In Vorlesungen gehalten zu Genf 1826, u¨bersetzt von Christian Mu¨ller (Mainz, 1827).


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parameters of the debate on the Classical and the Romantic which had been instigated by the representatives of European Romanticism themselves, even if this was and is not always a helpful dichotomy, and even if, from the point of current Comparative Literature, this might seem a gently outdated binary—or at least one with few critical teeth nowadays;12 what makes this self-ascription, dutifully repeated in the literary histories, especially deceptive now is its application to a form of artistic production that was highly eclectic and that wilfully exposed itself to a wide range of literary styles and inXuences, indigenous or not, was always conscious of doing so, and was, by virtue of the desire to create a Greek poetic voice and a tradition (increasingly so from the end of the eighteenth century), experimental to a paradoxically high degree.13 Soutsos’s Wayfarer (1831) is, together with Rangavis’s narrative poem Dimos and Eleni of the same year, commonly read as the earliest example of Greek Romanticism, which then steers, increasingly using the archaizing katharevousa (literally ‘puriWed’ language) as its medium of choice, towards a dead-end of rhetorical excess and linguistically rigid formalism by the 1880s. Literary production and literary criticism have been (and still are) especially tightly interwoven in Greece, and the voice of the critic in the reception of the literary text has over the last two centuries been extremely instrumental in establishing canonical readings.14 More recently, however, attempts have been made that reassess the grounds for such a rigid 12 Elizabeth Constantinidis, ‘Towards a RedeWnition of Greek Romanticism’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 3/2 (1985), 121–36, 125 f., referring to Wellek’s Concepts of Criticism for the unsatisfactorily broad range of deWnitions for the terms ‘Romantic’ and ‘Classic’. 13 For the need of a national literary tradition see also Roderick Beaton, ‘Romanticism in Greece’, in Roy Porter and Mikulasˇ Teich (eds.), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge, 1988), 92–108; on its complexity Gregory Jusdanis, ‘Greek Romanticism: a Cosmopolitan Discourse’, in Esterhammer, Romantic Poetry, 269–86. 14 The received chronology regarding Romanticism owed much to the criticism of Kostis Palamas, who deWned the poetry of his own generation of the 1880s against Athenian Romanticism, overcoming its restrictions through the invigorated use of the demotic language. For the language question as interpreted by the generation of the 1880s, see Dimitris Tziovas, The Nationism of the Demoticists and its Impact on their Literary Theory (1888–1930) (Amsterdam, 1986). On the combination of demotic and katharevousa in Palamas’s own poetry, see C. D. Gounelas, ‘Neither Katharevousa nor Demotic: The Language of Greek Poetry in the Nineteenth Century’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 6 (1980), 81–107.

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chronology,15 and the attendant division into two largely incompatible schools within Romanticism, namely Athenian and Ionian (on which see the next chapter), distinguished by a slightly diVerent time-frame and contextual and stylistic diVerences.16 Still, the relationship, often considered imitative or derivative, with European Romanticism remains the dominant paradigm. The wider European ‘compatibility’ of Greek literature has played a major part in Greek literary criticism since the early nineteenth century, and much of that literature’s subsequent evaluation has hinged on it. Literary Romanticism has in this case usually been equated with the imagery of violence, rupture, and poetic self-centredness, associated with Byronic literature in particular and, more generally, with what has been termed a ‘dark Romanticism’.17 The consequence is a persistent tendency to blame a European Romantic aesthetic and imagery as a foreign element, which, despite Wnding a fertile and receptive ground in Greece, remains essentially alien and ultimately detrimental. It is as if, in continuation of the dream of Greece’s privileged access to what is natural, the modernity of Romanticism (the excessive and unbridled individuality of a solitary Byronic hero, and by analogy a writer, alienated from and alien to a social order) cannot come home to roost in Greece without doing it damage. This argument from incompatibility has often been a staple in the argument for a Greek exceptionalism; incompatibility for a long time 15 Constantinidis, ‘Towards a RedeWnition’, argues for a beginning of Romanticism in the 1820s, with Solomos and Kalvos as exemplary Romantic poets, and suggests that the generation of Palamas marks a late Xowering of (lyrical) Romanticism in Greece. David Ricks, ‘Alexandros Rizos Rangavis’s ‘‘The Voyage of Dionysus’’ ’, ¯ººØŒ, 38 (1987), 89–97, shows how the prejudice against katharevousa has inXuenced the evaluation of poetry, which, in the case of Rangavis, is far less archaizing and linguistically opaque than assumed. 16 On the contested classiWcation into ‘Ionian’ and ‘Athenian’, Mario Vitti, æÆ ººØŒ ºª Æ, 2nd edn. (Athens, 1987), 237 V., argues more strongly for a connection of the two ‘schools’; on the Ionian islands as a distinctive cultural area before 1821 and the problem of separation, Beaton, Introduction, 29–33, 47; Venetia Apostolidou, ‘˙ ÆØÆŒ º Ø Øæ ººØŒ ºª Æ’, in ¸ı —º (Thessaloniki, 1988), 197–208; similarly Nasos Vayenas, ‘ˇ ºø Æ Æ ı `ŁÆı ŒÆØ ı ¯Æı’, ´ Æ (29 Nov. 1998); the debate is competently summarized by Euripides Garantoudes, ˇØ ¯ÆØØ ŒÆØ ºø : …ł Ø Æ Ł Ø 1820–1950 (Athens, 2001), 47–64. 17 The term is that of Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford, 1951).


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has been unhelpfully analysed in terms of mentality, especially in literary studies, but now also, much more helpfully, in terms of sociocultural and political factors peculiar to Greece.18 Still, it can also be analysed in terms of the framework (i.e. logic) of aesthetic representation, which Greek literature faced, and of its shaping power. This may also steer a little away from the question of essential character, as that claim is such a large part of the framework of exceptionalism. Dimaras, for example, credits the Greek mental disposition with a particular aYnity for the melancholic element of Western Romanticism: ‘We are right to believe that this current came from abroad; yet it found a receptive ground to stay in; nostalgia for the past, a melancholy disposition, the euphoria of freedom are some of the essential components of Romanticism, and, at the same time, points made to attract the Greek soul.’19 Mastrodimitris, twenty years later, claims the opposite, without discounting the organic metaphor: ‘the melancholic and pessimistic disposition, which had come about as an echo of the declining Romanticism of the West . . . was something alien to the reality created by the new conditions of life.’20 The result of this organicism is a strong sense, not just in the attention paid to any given Greek author’s biography, to forge a biography of Greek national literature, a teleological, natural ‘story’ of Greek writing, which means in turn a need to single out certain, national writers as its protagonists. In what follows I hope to be able to isolate this language of criticism and look back at the imagery of Romantic critical and literary writing itself as it seeks to create an appropriate ‘environment’ for the Greek author—a continuation of Ho¨lderlin’s choice of the Greek landscape as appropriate for his Hyperion.

T H E C O M E T ’ S TA I L : RA NG AV I S ’ S U ND E RS TA N DI N G OF TH E ROM ANTIC POET Rangavis has received attention, if at all and only of late, for his prose works and their part in the rise of the novel in mid- to late 18 As done e.g. by Jusdanis, Belated Modernity, or Peckham, National Histories. 19 Dimaras, æÆ, 272. 20 Matrodimitris, ¯ØÆªøª ˝ ººØŒ #ØººªÆ (Athens, 1994), 144.

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nineteenth-century Greece.21 Compared to the early years of statehood, this is a period that sees positions on national continuity (including that of the Byzantine period to link antiquity and the present) and national expectations harden into more clearly deWned (even if contested) tracks. Yet in his early literary work, as in that of his contemporaries, the parameters of the language of nationalism are not yet set, and it is this Xuid period that is still somewhat lagging behind in attracting scholarly attention. Like that of most of his peers, Rangavis’s approach to Greece was of a gradual nature in cultural and geographical terms. Foreign or foreign-educated Greeks, they could enjoy the prestige which that education brought, yet at the same time had to contend with a lesser degree of power and inXuence compared to the local elites, when they returned to a theoretically liberated Greece to take up administrative, governmental, or academic positions, to write, to reform, and to establish and deWne a position for themselves as Greek poets. Rangavis’s career, in that sense, is paradigmatic for a generation preoccupied with progress, education, the appeal to and of the West, and the Western model that had developed an elaborate cross-projection between the material and ideal aspects of Greek culture. After family wanderings from Constantinople to Bucharest and Odessa, Rangavis, in 1825, took up a scholarship at the Military Academy in Munich, spending the initial months in the house of Friedrich Wilhelm Thiersch, with whom he established a lifelong connection.22 In 1829 he returned to Greece, where, in Nafplio, he rose in the ranks of the administration.23 Following appointment as Director of the National Press and a period at the Ministry of Foreign AVairs, he had to step down in 1844 when a new law rendered all 21 See Tziovas’s recent edition of Rangavis’s collected short stories ˜Øª ÆÆ, 2 vols. (Athens, 1999). 22 On biographical data Litsa Chatzopoulou in A. R. Rangavis, Æ Ø Æ (Athens, 1995); Efthymios Th. Soulogiannis, `ºÆæ $ $ÆªŒÆ! (1809–1892): ˙ ø ŒÆØ æª ı (Athens, 1995). Also Rangavis’s memoirs, ` ÆÆ, 4 vols. (Athens, 1894–1930). 23 For the political landscape of Greece and Nafplio, and the frictions between the local and the more Western-inXuenced and -educated rival parties with their resentment against the Phanariots, see Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft, 107–50; Elli ł Ø ı ŁØŒ Skopetea, % —æ ı ´Æº Ø" ŒÆØ ªº Æ: ˇ æ!º Æ ¯ººÆ (1830–1880) (Athens, 1988), 87–92; F. W. Thiersch, De l’e´tat actuel de la Gre`ce (Leipzig, 1833).


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Greeks who were not born within the liberated provinces of the Greek state (‘heterochthons’) or were not active veterans of the war ineligible to hold state positions.24 For the next twenty-three years Rangavis held a chair as Professor of Archaeology at Athens University, while from 1856 onwards, under a new government, he was rehabilitated to serve as Minister of Foreign AVairs. Between 1867 and 1874 he was ambassador to the United States, France, Turkey, and Germany, retiring from diplomatic life in 1887, Wve years before his death in Athens. His literary work spans an equally broad range: political essays, archaeological and historical treatises, educational books, translations, poems, prose Wction, plays, and a history of modern Greek literature, published in three diVerent languages.25 The Wrst volume of his Collected Poems (Athens, 1837 and 1840) contains the narrative poem Dimos and Eleni (1831) and the drama Phrosyne, which he began while studying in Munich, and is complemented with a prologue that has been considered a manifesto of Greek Romanticism. Besides, the collection includes ten poems under the title of Folk Songs (˜ ØŒ æÆª ØÆ), which show the internal force of Romantic imagery, and its underestimation so far. The motif of the wanderer and the close attention paid to a natural environment with strong supernatural features is usually and rather elusively referred to as a general catalogue of Romantic imagery, whereas little attention has been paid to what function textual parallels, with German writings in particular, assume in Rangavis’s 24 Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge, 1992), 48, 51; Petropoulos, Politics and Statecraft, 491, 510. The conXict between ‘heterochthons’ and ‘autochthons’ had been brewing since the early days of the revolution. Exempted from the bill were the military, the consular service, and the teaching profession. 25 The history of Greek literature was initially serialized in the journal Spectateur de l’Orient (1853–6). It was republished as Prećis d’une histoire de la litte´rature neóhe´llenique (Berlin, 1877) and in the same year as Histoire litte´raire de la Gre`ce moderne (Paris, 1877). A German version, co-authored with Daniel Sanders, was printed in Leipzig, probably in 1884, as Geschichte der neugriechischen Literatur von ihren Anfa¨ngen bis auf die neueste Zeit. A last revised edition appears in Greek as — æºłØ æÆ ˝ ººØŒ ¸ª Æ, probably printed in 1887. See G. Valetas, ‘¯Œ Ø ŒÆØ Ł ˝ ººØŒ ˆæÆ ÆºªÆ ı `ºÆæı $ı $ÆªŒÆ!’, ˝Æ ¯Æ, 19 (1936), 837–42; Eleni Kovaiou, ‘ ‘‘Geschichte der neugriechischen Litteratur’’ von A. R. Rhangabe´ und Daniel Sanders: ˙ ı !º ı ˜: Æ æ Æ ø ºª ØŒ ÆØºł ø ı `:$: $ÆªŒÆ!’, in Argyriou et al. (eds.), ˇ ¯ººØŒ ˚ , 353–67.

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poetic programme.26 What is more, such Romantic imagery has often, explicitly as much as implicitly, been equated with the imagery of Byron—no less than with Byron’s image: his persona of poet and activist resonates particularly well with the desire to carve a role of the poet that is dynamic and eVective on the cusp of rebelliousness.27 Byron’s descriptions of Greece, however, are far more ambivalent than his reputation as a hero of the Greek cause lets one assume. Appealing to Greece’s physical beauty and ancient splendour now gone, he frequently likens the country to a dead or dying loved woman, and despite or because of his Philhellenism, Byron belongs precisely with those who uphold the image of contemporary Greece as marked by an unbridgeable rift.28 Framed by his landscape of violent beauty are Byron’s male heroes, paradigmatically so the Giaour (1813). Driven by a guilty past and retiring to solitude, the character acquires a new lease of life in Greek writing in the double Wgure of the lonely hermit and the kleft,29 and it is in Rangavis’s writing in particular that we Wnd the transformation of the Byronic amant fatal into the fated Greek freedom Wghter, himself often linked to the Wgure of the poet. The ten poems ostensibly classiWed as Demotika, or folk songs, may serve as a good example of the nature imagery attributed to Rangavis and the Athenian School, and help to pinpoint some

26 e.g. Linos Politis, æÆ, 174: ‘The Romanticism of Rangavis seems to be inXuenced by the German poets, and this gives it a special character’, or ‘The settings are deserted spaces, terrifying, where the winds are blowing and the ghosts are wandering—something between the physical and the metaphysical world’ (Linos Politis, ‘¯ººØŒ $ ÆØ ’, 119). 27 The remarkable reputation of Byron himself as a Wgurehead of Philhellenism and literary Romanticism, both in Greece and across Europe, is quite another topic; on the movement of his reputation as part of both those movements, see Constanze Gu¨thenke, ‘Translating Philhellenism. Comments on the Movement of a Movement’, in E. Konstantinou (ed.), Forms of Expression of International Philhellenism, 17th to 19th Century/Ausdrucksformen des Internationalen Philhellenismus, 17.–19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, forthcoming). 28 An argument cogently summarized by Margarita Miliori, ‘The Greek Nation in British Eyes 1821–1864: Aspects of a British Discourse on Nationality, Politics, History and Europe’, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford (1998), 109–124. 29 Athena Georganta, `Ø ´ıæø Æ: ˇ Œ ı Byron ŒÆØ Æ ººØŒ (Athens, 1992), 53–73; also Robin A. Fletcher, ‘Byron in Nineteenth-century Greek Literature’, in Clogg, Independence, 224–47.


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of the aspects that have featured in the critical evaluation—and underestimation of the diYcult and conXicting nature—of Rangavis’s poetry. ‘The Kleft’ (1837) transforms the Wgure of the folk and freedom brigand into the solitary hero par excellence. First published in 1834 as ‘The Free Greek’ (‘ˇ º Ł æ ‚ºº’),30 the poem opens with a natural scenario: Æ æ" " ŒÆ " Æ !ı " ı !æ ı Ø Ø Ø. " " " ªæØÆ Æ Œ Ø, " æ Ø æ ; " Æ , Œº ÆŁ Ø. " æØ ªı

!Æ Ææ ºŒØ. —ÆºØ Ø !ı

ŒÆ ŒÆ Æ ıæÆ , Œ" ºÆ ıŒØ. Black is the mountain night and snow falls on rocks. Among the wilds, the darkness, the craggy rocks, the passes, the kleft draws his sword. With his bare right hand he wields a bolt of lightning. The forest is his palace, the sky his cover, and his riXe is his hope.

The nature imagery is thought to conform to the expectations of a Romantic ‘setting’, in so far as it stresses the wild and threatening aspect of nature, with a tendency toward the supernatural, which in turn is reminiscent of the use of nature in demotic (folk) poetry.31 Allusion, however, does not equal imitation. While the pattern of substituting one item (here ‘palace’ or ‘cover’) with another is familiar from folk songs, Rangavis’s particular choices do not Wnd an equivalent in them, especially not such abstract terms as ‘hope’ or 30 The 1834 version appeared in the anthology Ø æøØŒ ŒÆØ æøØŒ by Ioannis ChristoWdis (Aigina, 1934), now repr. in Rangavis, Æ Ø Æ, 42. The noticeable diVerence between the 1834 and 1837 versions is the replacing of ‘Greek’ with ‘kleft’, a change that stresses the representative national character of the latter. 31 e.g. Athina Georganta, ‘ ‘‘ˇ ˚º’’ ı `: $: $ÆªŒÆ!: ‚Æ ÆÆ æøÆ ŒÆØ Æ º ØŒ !ÆæØ’, ø, 13 (1991), 25–47. The poem opens with the epigrammatic description of the physical landscape accommodating the outlawed hero. By intensive accumulation nature is presented in all its wild Romantic splendour: dark night, black woods, snow-covered rocks, craggy stones, wild and dark passes (p. 40).

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‘freedom’.32 The poem ends with the death of the kleft in battle and the assertion: ‘the kleft lives free, and free he dies.’ The harsh landscape answers the choice of freedom or death (an explicit motto of the War of Independence) with freedom in death as its only solution. The poem also has a subtitle ‘Tune: Schiller’s Robbers, A, no. 30’; the numbers refer to a contemporary Greek anthology of songs, and the ‘tune’ indicates that ‘The Kleft’ is to be set to music, following the same tune as that of Schiller’s chorus ‘A Free Life We Lead’ (The Robbers, IV. 5).33 Karl Moor, thereby, the generically rebellious protagonist of Schiller’s 1781 play, joins forces with the later Byronic warrior hero, to be transposed to the natural setting that expressed the Greek revolution. There are diVerent ‘places of freedom’ invoked though. The dark forest hideout of The Robbers feeds an emancipation from social oppression that is nevertheless cut through by a professed amorality (as expressed in the robbers’ song). ‘The Kleft’, on the other hand, ostensibly throws into relief the ferocity, hardiness, and virtue of the Wghter. And yet, even if Rangavis’s kleft seems to follow the dynamic path of the Philhellenes, Rangavis’s poetry also consistently undermines any easy identiWcation of the Greek character with his natural (and national) environment. The language of images prevailing in Rangavis’s early poetry indicates that any mode of integration or a harmonious relation with the natural (and social) environment is either presently unattainable or can be achieved only through loss, death, or disintegration. In Dimos and Eleni, or in the poem ‘Thoughts in Desolation’ (1837), the motif of integration is taken to the extreme, by envisaging the melting or total vanishing of the characters into nature through death. There is a recurring link to the dream as the site of possible attainment, while there is highly deliberate play with the notion of forceful, active destruction or negation of a dream state by the acting individual himself. Rangavis himself draws attention to this dynamic, in the most prominent places of generative self-reXection as a Greek 32 See e.g. songs nos. 32, 42, and 58 in N. G. Politis, ¯ŒºªÆ Æ Æ æÆª ØÆ ı ¯ººØŒ ¸Æ (Athens, 1914). Here, instead of abstract nouns, we Wnd earth, stones, and sword replacing wives, brothers, and the Pasha. 33 Georganta, ‘ ‘‘ˇ ˚º’’ ’, 28 V., for details of the various later musical settings of Schiller’s play. The tune in question is probably that of the student song ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’.


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writer, where self-positioning pulls against the insistence on loss or sheer obstructiveness of space: in the commentaries on his own literary production, such as the original prologue to Dimos and Eleni (not reprinted in either the 1837 or 1874 editions), in his memoirs, or in the prologue to the 1837 edition. As with the question of a self-evident Greek place, in the writing matter too we Wnd no immediacy: we need prologues and introduction to see where Greek writing resides. In both prologues we Wnd the shattering of dreams linked to the conceit of failure or even wilful destruction of his (material) literary work. In the poetic self-image constructed in those prologues, however, we see how Rangavis develops a notion of the Romantic poet who is at the same time a poet for the nation— whose material survival may be just as threatened as that of his papers. The 1831 prologue to Dimos and Eleni is an ironic play with notions of literary convention and etiquette, illustrating the precarious standing of the Greek poet in a fragile society. Rangavis begins his comments on the Romantic poet and his function by pointing to the futility of such a debate, and he opens the prologue by confessing his intense distaste for prologues. Likening the genre—spatially—to ‘antechambers of the palaces of the mighty’, he ties literary convention to socio-political convention of hierarchy and of servility to form. The only exception he is willing to make are the prologues of Korais’s classical text editions, which constitute ‘the only valuable philological memoranda of our people during the centuries of its enslavement’. The benchmark of usefulness, in other words, is an uncompleted project of Hellenism that avoids mention of any speciWc Greek territory: Korais’s educational project, begun in the early 1800s and run from Paris, was based on re-editions of ancient authors as a series entitled ‘The Greek Library’, complemented with detailed introductions containing his views on the present state of Greek culture and learning, and advice for its future improvement. The Wrst publication under that heading was an edition of Heliodorus’ prose narrative Aithiopika (1804), a work of the third century ad, that is, the period of Greece under Roman rule, when Greek culture was a question of transfer as much as of territory; in addition, it is a work set on the margins of the Greek world as it was known then. Rangavis confesses that he himself could have elaborated on the

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history and origins of the Greek language in his prologue, the language of poetry, and the notions of Classicism and Romanticism, beginning from ancient literature. Yet, he claims, this would render his book inaccessible to a broad readership. Pedagogy is counterbalanced by market forces. The very existence of the prologue, he continues, was the result of an accident: it became necessary after he spilt ink across the Wnished poem while enthusing about the imaginative qualities of the Greek people and its good government. Phrased in that way, aesthetic sensitivity, which emerges from a tentatively hopeful political context, is seen to engender an act of destruction. The fragmentation of the literary work, he continues, jeopardizes the author’s hope for success: ‘The spilt ink and the extinguished light enraged me to such a degree that the light of my golden hopes was extinguished within me too.’ Disillusioned by the ‘accident’, he reXects on the illusion of a keen readership whose economic situation, he claims, barely allows them to live, let alone to read. Faced with such doubtful prospects, the author tells of his decision to burn his work. Yet reading over some pages before embracing them, ‘as Brutus [embraced] his son’, he falls asleep, to awake refreshed and strengthened by his sweet dreams and to hand the poem over to the printer instead of relegating it to the Xames. With the act of quasi-republican martyrdom not carried out, the illusions of sweet dreams are suggested as the real reason that ensures publication and circulation.34 Not to forget, the prologue serves as the introduction to a poem (on which more below), whose characters, displaced from their social order and expectations, are just as much faced with an environment of changing and ambivalent reality, narrated in a poetic voice that Xags the experience of ambivalence as part of the act of narration itself. Rangavis repeats this kind of role-play in the prologue to the volume of Collected Poems (1837); here, in the dialogue between an authorial ‘I’ and an opposing ‘He’ about a work ready to be published, the Wrst-person speaker argues for the need for new poetic forms, especially at a time of political innovation when education of 34 We can only speculate about the content of those ‘sweet dreams’. On the structural similarity of dream work and the process of nation building, Gourgouris, Dream Nation, esp. 10–46.


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the people is needed. Poetry is the most basic and most ancient form of expression for man’s own perception of himself in relation to nature. Therefore Greece, like a child, is Wrst and foremost in need of ‘songs to pacify her’, and he supports his claim by the following argument: While nature, in singing, greets with the melodies of the awakening birds, with the sacred songs of the pious, the dawn of every day, so is the awakening of every community celebrated with odes, and the Wrst epoch of the literature of each people begins in poetry. The son of nature, still artless, echoes in his virgin soul the great harmony before which he exists and the products of this harmony which surround him on all sides, and he feels the urge for harmonious outpourings, and he rejoices in odes and writes poetry.35

The argument that every epoch has its own mentality (nous), expressed in its literature (Wlologia), recalls the determinism of Herder’s, or, slightly earlier, Montesquieu’s theory of history, which nevertheless pair the shaping force of environment with the task and power of human inXuence to extend or correct that relationship. Literature, therefore, has to adapt (as politics and legislation do) to new needs and a new focus on the individual (p. 19). Besides juxtaposing the processes and aims of literary and political creativity, which is an issue continually Xying the creased banner of unity, Rangavis claims that creativity must be based on a composite structure and its varied formal principles. What is a version of the call for a mixture of genres, part of a general Romantic aesthetic programme,36 is presented in terms of a natural and hence realistic representation of nature. As a corollary, but a paradigmatic one, the Greek case can be

35 ‘ŒÆŁ Ø łººıÆ ÆØæ Æ ºøÆ ø ı ø ; Æ ŁæŒ ıØŒ ø ı ! ÆÆ; Æıª Œ æÆ; ø ŒÆØ Œ ŒØøÆ; æø Æ Æªıæ ÆØ; ø; ŒÆØ æ ØººªÆ Œı Łı æ ÆØ Æ Ø ø: ˇ ºÆ ØØ ıØ ø; ÆÆÆŒº Ø ÆæŁ łı ı ªº Ææ Æ Ø Æ ıæ Ø; ŒÆØ Æ ÆæÆªªı Æı Ææ Æ ÆØ ÆÆ Ł æØØ ; ıÆØŁ ÆØ ÆªŒ Ææ ø Œ ø; ŒÆØ æ ÆØ Ø ø; ŒÆØ ªæ ÆØ Ø Ø’ (p. 7). 36 ExempliWed in Friedrich Schlegel’s Gespra¨ch u¨ber die Poesie, which, in its dialogic genre and content, bears comparison with Rangavis’s prologue. It is likely that the ‘intermediary’ between the two dialogues is one of Victor Hugo’s programmatic prologues either to his Odes et Ballades (1824) or to his play Cromwell (1833).

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read in terms of nature, because it is universal, the natural realm again bridging the gap (when it is not opening it) between the particular and originary, and the transferably universal: ‘[Poetry], relating both to actually existing nature and the human being and thus, so to speak, ‘‘humanized’’ by us, presents the comical next to the serious, just as nature in its shadow-writing connects light and shadow; it ties in the base with the sublime, since otherwise light would not be light, the sublime not the sublime and nature not nature.’37 The resulting poetic program and the function of the poet are reformulated in political imagery: I do not know the emblem of faith of either the Classicists or the Romantics. But if the former are arrayed under the banner of tradition, I suppose that the latter carry protest as their sign. . . . a Romantic on the other hand is one who concentrates on the idea itself, searching out its true contemporary expression and undertaking on his own to draw it out in all its effects according to the entire individual nature of his sensibility, limited only by the natural borders of good taste [lit.: love of the beautiful]. The Classical writer is a loyal and obedient subject, the Romantic a legislator and reformer.38

This, it should have become clear, is not mere illustration by way of metaphor. Rangavis postulates a necessary and analogous natural development of both poetic and political expression. For sure, this line of thought, the claim of a moral and hence political function of art and aesthetics mediated by the artist and poet, is not peculiar to Rangavis. To link the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere with both autonomous subjectivity and the political state—in a kind of 37 ‘˜Ø ÆŁæøØŁ Æ; ø Ø ; " ; ŒÆØ Ø ıÆæŒ ÆæÆ Ø; ŒÆØ Ø ø Łæø; æºÆ ! Ø Ø Æ ÆæÆ Ø ØºÆæ º ı !æØŁ ; ø Ø Ø Æ ŒØÆªæÆÆ ıªŒØæ ø ŒØ; ı Ø Æ ı ıłº ; Ø Ø ººø ø ŁÆ ø; ı ıłº ıłº ; ı Ø Ø’ (p. 19). 38 ‘˜ ªøæø !º ø ø ŒºÆØŒ ŒÆØ ø æ ÆØŒ: `ºº" Æ Ø øÆØ ı ÆÆ ø ÆæÆ ø; Ø Ø ººØ ıØ Ł Æ ØÆ Ææ æØ: . . . æ ÆØŒ Æ!ºø Ø ØÆ Æı; æ ı ÆºŁ Æı ª æ Ø; ŒÆØ ÆÆØŁ Ø Æı ŒÆØ Æ Æ Æı Æ ı ØÆ ŒÆ Æ ııÆ ı Æ ØŒ Æ; ŒÆØ æØæØ ı ø ø ıØŒ æø ØºŒÆºÆ: ˇ ŒºÆØŒ ÆØ ıŒ Ø ŒÆØ Øº ; æ ÆØŒ Ł ŒÆØ ÆææıŁ Ø’ (p. 21).


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‘aesthetic statism’39—is a familiar feature from current European aesthetic discourse as exempliWed in the theoretical writings of Schiller—whose treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man was a reply to the political and social situation after the decline of the French Revolution as much as a contribution to the philosophical discussion of how reality is constituted. The latter was a debate of great consequence in determining the role of the artist, and Schiller’s work became paradigmatic insofar as it suggested the aesthetic as the central operator in the moral education of free individuals constituting, and even in its literal sense constructing, the political state: [W]hen the spirit of philosophical inquiry is being expressly challenged by present circumstances to concern itself with that most perfect of all the works to be achieved by the art of man: the construction of true political freedom. . . . [I]f man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.40

The aesthetic, and with it the work of art, is the one sphere that partakes of both worlds: that of natural forces and material conditions, and that of reason and ideas.41 In its detachment, it can freely reconcile the spheres of the sensuous and the rational which have become separated, or at least unbalanced, in modern, civilized society; art reconciles the particular and the universal, and, by analogy, the development of both the individual and the political ‘state’, in Schiller’s wording even more strongly underlined in the spatial metaphor of the construction (‘Bau’) and the making of one’s path to freedom. To reform society is therefore an act structurally linked to the creation of a work of art. Why should Schiller be important to Greek literature of the 1830s? Its Wrst generation of national writers fashioned themselves as 39 The term is that of David Aram Kaiser, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1999), 4 V. 40 ‘[Da] der philosophische Untersuchungsgeist durch die Zeitumsta¨nde so nachdru¨cklich aufgefordert wird, sich mit dem vollkommensten aller Kunstwerke, mit dem Bau einer wahren politischen Freiheit zu bescha¨ftigen. . . . Daß man, um jenes politische Problem in der Erfahrung zu lo¨sen, durch das a¨sthetische den Weg nehmen muß, weil es die Scho¨nheit ist, durch welche man zu der Freiheit wandert.’ Werke, xx. 311. 41 Schiller’s object of aesthetic perception and creation is the beautiful object. It is worth noting that aesthetic thought after Kant largely neglects natural beauty in favour of artistic beauty and artistic creation.

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engaged in constructing a path to freedom based on linking two worlds, with a particular resonance on the territory of present-day Greece whose appreciation had come to rest on the attractive promise to integrate the particular in the universal and vice versa. The intention is not to make an argument about the immediate inXuence of Schiller’s theoretical writings on Rangavis, although there is, incidentally, enough evidence of Rangavis’s long-lasting engagement with his poetry and drama, from very early on.42 What is certain is that the respective programmes of the German and Greek poets, however diVering in their degree of sophistication they may be, share their concern about the role of the poet and of art in a society perceived as cultured, hence unbalanced, and therefore in need of moral improvement, and both decide to do so through images that deliberately relate to the Greek world as a (once or future) material presence. Linking Rangavis, who is so obviously determined by the political reality of his time, to this particular aspect in the genesis of Romantic thought may help us Wrst of all to dispel the idea of the Romantic poet as being caught in a self-imposed solitary conWnement and a deliberate shunning of the political sphere, an idea that still appears to have purchase in the perception of Romanticism.43 More importantly, however, both authors share a diYculty in visualizing clearly the future state they have in mind. Of course, the ‘states’ in question are of a diVerent kind. For Schiller, the aesthetic education will inXuence the Stand of the individual in such a way as to make possible the true political Staat. Yet it is notoriously diYcult to determine whether this ‘state’, as it is envisaged by Schiller, can be realized and to what extent it is tantamount to a political or a cultural nation.44 Rangavis is engaged in the diYcult task of staking out a literary space within an uncertain geographical territory. He returned 42 Rangavis mentions his avid reading and watching performances of Schiller’s plays in his memoirs, ` ÆÆ, i. 80, 168–70, 182. He also translated, much later, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (Wrst published in the collected works of 1880). 43 Classic accounts of Romanticism, such as M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1971), foreground the separation of subjectivity from society and the isolation of the subject as programmatic, as do also some later Deconstructionist critics. Incidentally, Abrams’s works in particular are frequently drawn on in available Greek literary criticism, which nonetheless remains very concerned with the national and social involvement of individual authors. 44 Kaiser, Romanticism, 54 V. SuYce it to say that the pursuit of the free balance implied in the aesthetic state is one of approximation rather than fulWlment.


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to a liberated, new Greece that was sounding its position, after he had received his education in a country where Schiller’s inXuential question: ‘But does such a State of Aesthetic Semblance really exist? And if so, where it is to be found?’ still had repercussions. Schiller’s answer underlines the need not for imitation but for free re-creation, a statement compatible with Rangavis’s own advocacy of the artist as shaping, not following rules: ‘As a need, [the aesthetic state] exists in every Wnely attuned soul; as a realized fact, we are likely to Wnd it, like the pure Church and the pure Republic, only in some few chosen circles, where conduct is governed, not by some soulless imitation of the manners and morals of others, but by the aesthetic nature we have made our own.’45 Even if the contaminating and undeniable proximity of social and political growth and shedding would render Rangavis’s state still too far oV Schiller’s baseline of the realizable aesthetic state, it is still fruitful to read Rangavis in the light of such a poetic self-understanding, as it emphasizes the necessity of aesthetic and hence artistic perception—and, in turn, shaping—of the natural, phenomenal world as the basis for social progress. At the same time, there is a sense in Schiller’s aesthetics that the path to an ‘aesthetic nature’ is predicated upon the non-identity between the perceiving individual and his surrounding nature.46 Rangavis’s poetry focuses on the aspects of destructive and deserted nature not only as a readily adopted European Romantic conceit, but as a similarly integral part in the self-understanding of the poetic as well as political individual. What is more, he does so in the context of a new state of Greece, whose external image is already heavily shaped by the imagery and dynamic of a Romantic Hellenism that does insist on the materiality of the ideal, because it allows for structures of transcendence and readability, even if it is speciWcally not a materiality that makes correspondence to a clearly visible or bounded Greek territory easy or indeed possible: that dynamic is realized and 45 ‘Dem Bedu¨rfnis nach existiert er in jeder feingestimmten Seele; der Tat nach mo¨chte man ihn wohl nur, wie die reine Kirche und die reine Republik, in einigen wenigen auserlesenen Zirkeln Wnden, wo nicht die geistlose Nachahmung fremder Sitten, sondern eigene scho¨ne Natur das Betragen lenkt.’ Werke, xx. 412. 46 Schiller contrasts wirkliche Natur, the real forces of material nature, with wahre Natur, true nature, discovered in the aesthetic act (Werke, xx. 716 V.).

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revisualized again in Greece, compounded with a painful awareness of the impossibility of creating something entirely new.

IN THE WILDERNESS The insistence of Rangavis’s poetic choices, and their indulgence in the sheer destructive potential of Romantic nature imagery, may seem contrived in retrospect. But the aporia of creating a new literature was apparently acutely felt. In his extensive memoirs Rangavis mentions how, as an aspiring writer and just arrived in Nafplio, he was advised, by a local notable well-versed in the expectations of philhellenic sentiment, to go out and converse with the ancient monuments so as to write, in this environment, on the recent heroes of the War of Independence. Much as he tries, though, Rangavis admits, all his honest eVorts to make continuity and revolution converge on a common Greek ground come to naught.47 The tone of gossipy melancholia that characterizes his memoirs, makes the bewilderment created by the dynamic of Hellenism grotesquely, and individually, realistic; yet this should not detract from the structural challenge of representing Greece more generally, as it translates into the themes of this Wrst national poetry. Rangavis’s early works render problematic both the integration of his characters into their environment and the role of the poet, vis-a`-vis the nature he represents and the society or readership he presents it to. The early ballad ‘The Travelling Girl’ (‘˙ ÆØ æØÆ’) is a variation on the plot of the young girl in search of her lover, calling him up from the dead and accompanying the revenant on a nightride back to his grave,48 and is heavily indebted to folk-song themes, although not exclusively to Greek ones.49 In line with the European faible for folk traditions, Rangavis carefully grafts a selection of verses 47 ` ÆÆ, i. 273 V. 48 Rangavis includes the group of poems modelled on folk songs in the Wrst volume of his complete works (1874), albeit in a form slightly more adapted to katharevousa; ‘The Travelling Girl’ appears in the second volume, grouped under ‘Narrative and Dramatic Poetry’. 49 See Beaton, Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (Cambridge, 1986) on the ballad of the Dead Brother.


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taken verbatim from a variety of Greek folk songs (whose collection and constitution, of course, was itself to a large extent the result of that very interest in them) onto a set of his own, new, demotic lines, modelled on known songs and a Western European Romantic repertoire.50 Most of those passages correspond to material from Fauriel’s collection,51 where they are grouped as ‘chansons Romanesques’ or tragoudia plasta, a category comparable to the ballad and as such undoubtedly understood by Rangavis with regard to ‘The Travelling Girl’.52 The farewell dialogue between the girl and her lover, who joins the band of pallikaria, is also reminiscent of the parting scene between two lovers in the early seventeenth-century Cretan verse romance Erotokritos.53 Beyond the paradoxical dynamic of artistry already inscribed in the act of collecting, Rangavis’s ‘folk poems’ diVer signiWcantly from those folk models available to him. One such diVerence is the prominent use of argument and reasoning. The detailed accounts and justiWcations of their actions which all participants oVer, ghosts, girl, and hero-lover alike, Wnd no equivalent in the folk ballads (paraloges) and their more curt presentation of narrative facts. Likewise, the internal motivations are shifting. The paraloges usually portray a social unit or community, most often that of the household, as disturbed or out of balance due to the improper action of one of its 50 Ilias Anagnostakis and Athina Georganta, ‘Æ ‘‘ ØŒ’’ Ø ÆÆ ı `ºÆæı $ı $ÆªŒÆ!; `’: ‘‘˙ ÆØ æØÆ’’ ŒÆØ ª ÆºªÆ ’, ºı!Œıº º Œ, 1 (1989), 56–73; Georganta, ‘ ‘‘ˇ ˚º’’. Rangavis’s linguistic changes lie especially in his frequent use of (abstract) nouns as well as the addition of adjectives, which stands in contrast to the rather more economical use of descriptive epithets in the traditional folk songs. 51 Anagnostakis and Georganta, ‘˜ ØŒ Ø ÆÆ’, 61–5. Apart from the song ‘The Travelling Girl’, from which Rangavis has probably taken the title, if not much else, there are linguistic parallels to the songs ‘The Evil Mother’, ‘The Farewell’, ‘The Stranger’, ‘The Snatching’, and ‘The Sound from the Grave’. The most obvious parallel is to ‘Song of the Dead Brother’ (in Fauriel under the title ‘Le Voyage nocturne’). 52 Rangavis, Histoire litte´raire de la Gre`ce moderne (Paris, 1877), ii. 69: ‘La ‘‘Voyageuse’’ est la ballade d’une jeune Wlle qui meurt sur la tombe de son Wance´ tue´ a` la guerre. C’est un reXet de chants populaires. Elle est ećrite dans la meˆme langue et le meˆme rythme de vers, mais rime´.’ 53 Anagnostakis and Georganta, ‘˜ ØŒ æÆª ØÆ’, 64; the Renaissance work, written in a highly literary idiom based on the Cretan dialect, was one of the few ‘popular’ literary works available; a rewritten New Erotokritos was published by the Phanariot Dionysios Photinos in 1818 in a more learned Greek register, indicating the contentious nature of what was considered demotic.

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members in relation to the others.54 It is this disruption of social order which provokes the overturning of the natural order, that is, the element of the supernatural, be it that of animals endowed with a human (warning) voice or other miraculous events. Although it can be argued strongly that the nature of Rangavis’s poems does also correspond to an unbalanced or destroyed social order, his characters are nevertheless presented in isolation and without any social context whatsoever. The village or the house has no place in his ballad, and the setting is exclusively a nature devoid of society.55 In ‘The Travelling Girl’ it is the commitment of the young man to join the brigands that leads him to desert his bride; in other words, it is the aspiration itself towards freedom which is oVered as the cause for both protagonists’ isolation. For the female character, too, is roaming a landscape of desolation and wilderness, after three years spent alone, matching her interior state to the inhospitable environment into which she has been propelled and which forces her outside her usual bounds. Like Bu¨rger’s popular ballad ‘Lenore’ (1773), which Rangavis almost certainly knew,56 ‘The Travelling Girl’ builds on the motif of the girl’s night-ride with death disguised as her lover, who is presumed lost in a war; but such a comparison is not far-reaching enough where the function of the motif is concerned.57 The furious 54 See e.g. Margaret Alexiou, ‘Sons, Wives and Mothers: Reality and Fantasy in Some Modern Greek Ballads’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 1/1 (1980), 73–111. 55 The only other two ballads in Fauriel’s collection which share the motif of a single girl travelling or wandering are ‘The Travelling Girl’ and ‘The Lovers’. In the Wrst case, the independent sea-journey of the girl is brought back to a social context when her dead body colours the waters of the local village well blood-red; in the second case, it is the girl friend of the female lover who travels to the male lover’s home village to bring him back. Thus, there remains a close social framework. 56 Giorgios Veloudis, Germanograecia, 220; Linos Politis, ‘¯ººØŒ $ ÆØ ’, 119, links especially the natural settings of Rangavis’s poems to the German ballad. Apart from ‘Lenore’ he mentions Goethe’s ‘Erlko¨nig’, a translation of which by Rangavis was published in the second volume of his Selected Poems (1840). For the many translations and adaptations of ‘Lenore’ in Greek literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Kirke Kefalea, ˇæª ¨ : ˇØ ººØŒ Œ Ø ‘¯º æÆ’ ı æªŒ æ (Athens, 1999). 57 Critics and scholars of folk poetry have been equally keen to point out the parallel between the ‘Song of the Dead Brother’ and Bu¨rger’s poem, among them Fauriel (Chants, ii. 405) and Wilhelm Mu¨ller in an essay ‘Bu¨rgers ‘‘Lenore’’ und ein neugriechisches Volkslied’, in Morgenblatt fu¨r gebildete Sta¨nde, 26/7 May 1825. See also Katerina Krikos-Davis’s critical bibliography ‘The Song of the Dead Brother’, Mandatoforos, 6 (1975), 23–30.


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ride towards the grave in Bu¨rger’s closing turn of the ballad is the deserved punishment for blasphemy (Lenore doubts her lover’s return and God’s wise judgement). ‘The Travelling Girl’ pronounces the cataclysmic overturning of nature, when, on the lost lover’s appearance from his grave (and a wild, natural grave it is too, as opposed to a graveyard), the stars fall and the earth shakes. As the couple, united in death, sinks into the ground, though, the violence of nature is not accompanied by admonishing ghostly voices, as is the case in ‘Lenore’; instead, nature’s voices are rising to Heaven: ˇı! ˇ Æ æ !Øº Æ ŒıÆæØÆ æ Ø! ˇı! ˇ !æØ ºÆ ææØø Ææ Ø! ˚ÆØ Œº ÆÆ; ŒÆØ ! ŒÆØ ! ! " " Ø ªæıØı; ŒÆØ łÆº ıØ " !æØ &łØ ı; ŒÆØ Æ ŒÆ ÆıæÆ ıæı ŒØ Ææı: (ll. 129–34) Ah! how the whirlwind beats the cypresses! Ah! how the northern wind uproots the plane! Groaning and clamouring, oh! ah! in the wind of the south, and in the northern wind psalmodies are praising the Highest, while deep black clouds whistle and Xash.

As opposed to the Last Judgement awaiting Lenore, ‘The Travelling Girl’ envisages the joint transition from the realm of the living to that of the dead as the only possibility to reward a true love, in a unity which cannot be fulWlled in this present life, nor, by extension, in this present space: ‘Leave them; they loved with virtue and in faith. They are at least united in the grave, if not while they lived’ (ll. 137–8). It is not the supernatural encroaching upon the real, but rather the benevolent (Christian) otherworld, indicated by the songs of praise, that appears as the only place where union and order can be realized. A future vision for the needs of a contemporary environment is reformulated through images of a spiritual beyond. This translation, whereby the Christian otherworld becomes the only real place for (Greek) freedom, emerges as a general alternative to making space for the contemporary world, and not just for Rangavis. Where does this leave the Greek poet facing the task of accommodating his real environment within a national literature? Besides the indication that a social order, disrupted by the struggle for liberation, is irreversibly suspended and expressed through a threatening nature, it is also the

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kleft as the singer of natural and immediate poetry,58 and by proxy the contemporary author relying on such poetry, who cannot be integrated and who may not be compatible with the idea of successful unity. An even stronger subversion of the theme of the kleftic hero singing and Wghting for freedom is found in Rangavis’s 1837 poem ‘The Singer’ (‘ˇ 'º’). The opening lines repeat the motif of the lonely wanderer (‘Alone walks the singer, and alone he roams, alone, in the world, alone’). It is, however, not the solitude of a nature conducive to poetic expression: ‘he sighs, he calls to glades and mountains, mute is the answer of the rock.’ Nature remains unresponsive and silent, as does the singer poet to her supernatural charms and threats. Nor is his environment the free wilderness, where he seeks and Wnds companionship, in opposition to oppressive society. The singer, in his deliberate decision from unrequited love not to live any longer, joins a band of brigands whose Wghting he takes part in without real conviction or participation, to die while his mind and song are still straying elsewhere.59 Rangavis’s treatment of the role of the poet within a framework claiming to emulate the poetic tradition of the folk song is notably self-reXective. Not only is he in favour of adapting the older form of the folk songs to diVerent circumstances (a procedure he had justiWed in the 1840 prologue), but his poetry also renders the function of the poet as a mediator of (any) literary tradition problematic in itself. Folk poetry, as an ostensibly authentic medium of Greek (national) poetic expression, rooted in its soil, is attributed a positive value, while at the same time it is perceived as historically superseded and strangely uncoupled from any contemporary place. This notion is responsible for some of the ambivalences pertaining to the Wgure of the singer as he corresponds to his natural environment, or fails to do so. Rangavis’s 58 Rangavis’s (dead) hero is characterized as a singer even before his identity as a freedom Wghter is revealed: ‘and like a nightingale he sang on the lyre he played’ (l. 14). 59 There are historical precedents from Crete and Cyprus of professional singers in the service of a band’s captain at the time of the revolution. See D. A. Petropoulos, ‘ˇØ —ØæØ ˚æ ŒÆØ ˚ æ’, ¸ÆªæÆÆ, 15 (1954), 374–400, 389. Rangavis, however, makes the role of the singer within that social context his central theme.


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Histoire litte´raire de la Gre`ce moderne contains an account of Greek literature after the fall of Constantinople and before the 1821 insurrection, where some of this is echoed: Meanwhile, in this bleak desert, the attentive eye could still on occasion discern a light murmur, which showed that life there was not entirely extinguished; and on the withered trunk some feeble shoots, stroked by a short-lived ray of light every now and then, would appear and come to a sickly Xowering, making it clear that the sap, which had withdrawn at the frosty onset of winter, was not dried up beyond return. Like liberty reXecting on the steep mountain tops or on the cities alive with the industriousness of the Greeks, we could witness the emergence both of rustic songs, which are like a fresh mountain breeze and a distant echo of heroic antiquity, and also of attempts at a learned literature to predict and at the same time prepare the future.60

Despite their encouraging aspects, he captures the poetic forms of the Ottoman years in a natural imagery that frames the nature of Greece as a (spiritual) wasteland (ce morne de´sert), where literary eVorts are likened to remote refuges, and that also stresses the threats of decline and sickliness which result from confrontation with an unaccommodating nature. The originary simplicity and natural primitivism of song, and the degenerated natural Weld from which it arises, are themselves dangerously close when compared with the somewhat more external arrival of ‘attempts at learned literature’. Peckham has laid out the dilemma of institutionalized folklore in the second half of the nineteenth century to square notions of national culture as originary and popularly emergent with notions of ‘enculturation’, that is, modiWcation and education. This debate is accompanied by equal worries over backward Greek culture on the one hand, and education and social development eventually undermining the basis of folk song on the other.61 In the early poetry of the nation state, preceding the institutionalization of folklore, we already glimpse an expression of that dilemma: the artist Wgures populating those poems, such as the singer, fail to respond to their environment, and vice versa. In Dimos and Eleni we Wnd the point reiterated, as early as 1831, that nature is not the seat of a distancing and hence 60 Rangavis, Histoire litte´raire de la Gre`ce moderne (Paris, 1877), 145–6. 61 Peckham, Natural Histories, ch. 6.

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emancipating creative solitude, nor of an otherwise positive correspondence, but that it is marked by inherent ambiguity about the sterility of the poetic voice in the face of nature. Dimos, a young monk-turned-freedomWghter, abducts his beloved Eleni from a Turkish harem and takes refuge with her at the hut of the old hermit Liakos, a former kleft too. When Liakos refuses to wed them, Dimos kills him in anger. Dying, he reveals that both Dimos and Eleni are his children. Within the space of two more years, so the epilogue implies, Wrst Eleni and then Dimos, who stay in the wilderness to tend Liakos’s grave, follow him in death. The opening words, ‘Hide, shepherd, your Xute, and cease your songs’, that introduce the reader to the harem garden where Eleni is praying alone, beyond a nod to the ostensibly context-free world of pastoral poetry, immediately signal the potential of disruption which poetic song or expression will have to contend with.62 The male hero, Dimos, is not a singer this time. Nor is he, for that matter, a ‘proper’ kleft: from a monastery where he was biding his time, likening his unfulWlled life to a river running through a desert and mirroring an empty sky, he is propelled into the kleftic existence of his dreams only after his sacred abode is plundered and burned down by the Turks. Life as a fugitive in the wilderness, in consequence, is not goal-directed and meaningful, but instead driven by chance; the bleak rocks are not his bed and shield, as they are in the kleftic songs, but markers on the road to sin on which to wreck his life—and that of others. The only true representative of a once kleftic existence, Eleni’s father Liakos (to the sound of whose name nature is now unresponsive, we are told) has retired in repentance and has in similar fashion turned to the solitary life of a hermit. Neither does Dimos react to the promise of unity in or through the solitary kleftic community: when his men come to his rescue he sends them away. His wilful separation from them, he argues, will lead him on to a new life in society—‘I’ll be returning to society (kosmos), friends. I shall live’ (l. 527)—yet in fact it leads him to the guilty solitude of shattered dreams. Not even the remote hermitage is a place where union or peace is possible any 62 This may also echo the line ‘Cease war, my Yanni, and cease shooting’ (‘—ł ; ˆØ " ; º ; ŒÆØ ł Æ ıŒØÆ’), from the kleftic song ‘On Boukovala’, Fauriel, Chants, i. no. 2.


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longer. The Wgures that roam the early poetry of the Greek nation state are constantly in motion, set in motion by their past, yet they have quite literally nowhere to go; as in ‘The Travelling Girl’, confused social relations match a lack of any real ground on which to play them out, and any resolution of conXict is deferred to a spiritual otherworld. Implications for the role of the poet are not lacking either. The narrative perspective shifts throughout the nine sections of the poem, interrupting the Xow of events by frequent addresses to the reader and the reXections of a strong-voiced Wrst-person narrator. Most noticeable is the tendency of that voice to call into question the accuracy of sense perception, while at the same time appealing to the imagination (fantasia) of the reader (ll. 331–4). Incidentally, it is also imagination, which, in the prologue to the poem, was said to distinguish the Greek people: ‘what could hinder [my work’s] success? The poetic imagination of my nation is well-known and famous’. With the poem itself, imagination now somehow has to compensate for insuYcient perception. This quality of uncertainty echoes in the structural motif of question and answer, familiar from the folk songs. Rangavis’s usage diVers from his model, though. Using the trope of the ‘false question’, a folk song would open with a wrong assumption about either a natural event or the setting, which is then corrected. Here is the example of ‘Death and the Souls’: % ÆØ Æ æÆ Æ !ı ŒÆØ Œı !ıæŒø Æ: " Æ º ; !æ Æ æ Ø; ˚Ø" " Æ º ; ŒØ ı !æ Æ æ Ø: ØÆ!Æ Ø æÆ ı ÆŁÆ ı. Why do the mountains stand so dark and gloomy; is it wind Wghting them or rain beating them? Neither wind is Wghting them, nor rain beating them; but Death is passing by with his dead.63

Rangavis, on the other hand, exchanges such deWnite answers for a vagueness overlying the perception of events and places and their description. In the opening section he takes the play with such insecurity to extremes: the identiWcation of the shadow of Eleni as Eleni and not as alternately a cloud, a nymph, a mist, or a houri is 63 Fauriel, Chants, ii. no. 27.

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drawn out along well over Wfty lines. He adds one more qualiWer, once she has Wnally been identiWed: that his account of the interior state of his characters depends on physiognomy being able to mirror the soul of man.64 Both aspects together, the ambivalence of perception and the question of an accurate analogy between outward appearance (landscape or face) and internal state, are matched in the description of old Liakos: he recognizes Eleni, yet he hides his feelings, while the strength of his suppressed emotions is linked back to natural upheaval, in the image of a violent storm: ‘As winter clouds, brimful with storms, redden the evening, so do rushing feelings colour the brow marked by the furrows of time; but who can know the soul, who knows language, that traitor of physiognomy? . . . Since he himself does not discern what he feels, how can I discern it?’ (ll. 565–70; 578–9). Although Rangavis presents his characters and his settings as conforming to the familiar correlation of exterior (natural) world and interior state, the stress is Wrmly on the destructive aspects of nature as mirroring and mirrored in the state of the characters. Dimos is introduced following a scene of desolate and sterile nature, without hope for regeneration—a highly evocative and provocative gesture at a time when political and national regeneration was a central issue. It continues: ‘And such is man; once passions’ storms have withered his heart and life’s struggle dries up its sap and burns it to ashes, it will never bring forth yet another gentle feeling’ (ll. 68–71). Eleni, who appears to be the only viable exception to this account of human nature, in nature, is herself introduced as having been uprooted at a (too) young age. Although she is visualized by the narrator as the young bloom still susceptible to nature, her only hold on the world surrounding her, so to speak, lies in the harmony, achieved through prayer, conWned to the environment of the garden enclosure. The opening scenario of the poem implies that stability can be attained solely in an act of transcendence. Eleni’s natural grave marking the end of the poem conWrms that this will have to amount to separation altogether from the material world. 64 ‘If the face of man does paint an image of the soul’ (l. 189). Even stronger, later: ‘and if his heart shows the world as a mirror does, neither in his heart nor in the world will a steady trace remain’ (ll. 248–9).


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Similar imagery conveys the death-in-life of man deprived of human contact and love, in a state of solitude (ll. 252–62). Not only is it a destructive and rather desolate nature here that corresponds to the human condition; the possibility that human emotion is unresponsive altogether to any outer stimulus casts doubt on the analogy with nature, as the objective correlative, as a means of expressing the human condition. In other words, the disharmony that is the object of literary representation is itself on the line when it comes to its viability in the Wrst place. The narrator Wnally oVsets the life of man deprived of feeling with a vision of life shared with a companion, enabling him to brave life’s storms and to replace them with a calm and steady sailing through a sequence of permanent springs and summers (ll. 267–80). That prospect of a harmonious union with and in nature, however, remains potentially a delusion too: the poem ‘Thoughts in Desolation’ (1837), which neither shares content nor structural motifs with the folk songs or kleftic songs, is the monologue of a young male speaker, who seeks refuge in nature (physis) as opposed to society (kosmos). While harmonious nature, as the open book of creation, is given a positive value, the self-perception of the speaker is one of estrangement from nature, rather than solitude, of a mirror reXecting the world, yet in itself stripped of all qualities and cut oV from its surroundings: `ºº" ª; ŒÆŒøÆ Ø ªÆ º, Ø º ø Æ æıŁ æ ŒÆØ Æø, ØıæªÆ ÆØ ÆŒ Œ º, Œ" æ ŒÆØ Ø Œ . ¯ ÆØ Ø " Œ ŒÆŁæ ø ıø,

Ø º!ø ØŒ Ø ı æ ÆÆ ØŒºÆ ŒÆØ " Æ æ æÆ ; ŒÆØ ı Ææ Æ ººÆ, Æºº" Ø æ ÆØ ØŒØºÆ ŒÆØ æø ø. (ll. 20–7) Yet I, a discord in this great harmony, a useless and gaping rhythm in the song of creation, I am a limb cut oV from the creation, alone and solitary within it and a stranger to its melody. I am like the mirroring surface of water, which glitters and reXects a variety of colours, the airy clouds, and the foliage of spring, yet is itself deprived of all variety and colours.

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The imagery of the speaker as an out-of-tune element in the song of creation, rendering him of little usefulness for its aims, echoes Rangavis’s exploration of the value of poetry in his prologues: there, dreams, albeit shattered dreams, are marked as a deWning feature in the perception of the poet (subjective and objective genitive). In ‘Thoughts in Desolation’ the dreams are no longer mentioned as positive, even if failed, visions; now they are identiWed as part of the mistaken and self-deluding perception that characterizes society (ll. 111–17). In summary, the aspects of solitary individuality and of a changeable (physical) nature seem to overstep the boundaries of Rangavis’s Romantic poetic programme, just as the pent-up waters of Greek character, as he has described them, will overXow their banks, when need be. They are not merely a poet’s building-blocks for a mixed genre, where opposite elements can stand alongside each other as they do in nature: instead, under the pressure of writing in and for a new state that relies on the signiWcance of its unresolved territory as an active agent in its national genesis, they turn to foreground destructiveness and instability. Likewise, and despite the positive role attributed to literature as national expression within society and the political process, the relation of the individual both to nature and to society as areas of reference and representation are beset by a threat of irreversible disintegration and sterility. The deWnition of the poetic role is inseparable from the instability that besets the perception of the natural environment. The locale deliberately associates the natural environment of the klefts, as it would be rough and unaccommodating, yet a refuge and a basis for future liberation. At the same time it is a locale that stakes out a literary territory: that of the modiWcation of the folk song, a genre full of associations with the ostensibly authentic voice of the people tied to their native soil. This locale, modiWed as it is, provides the foil for a variety of imagery taken from the realm of nature that conWrms the correspondence between exterior world and interior state, but that subverts it into a corresponding dissolution. In other words, the locale of Rangavis’s early poems only alludes to the Greek nature of the freedom Wghters. An unclear or unspeciWc description of place goes hand in hand with a use of nature imagery pointing to Xawed representation. In the course of his attempt to forge a positive role for the Greek poet, his


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ethics and aesthetics, Rangavis encounters diYculties that Wnd an equivalent in the struggle to represent an appropriate setting.

PA NAG I OT I S S O U TS O S ’ S WA N D E R E R S In his memoirs, Rangavis mentions, not quite in passing, a passing judgement by the German philologist Christian Brandis, who had evaluated Rangavis’s play Phrosyne as simply another Romantic work, thereby showing, it would appear, too little appreciation.65 Brandis’s remarks are worth a closer look, as they state clearly one of the deWning features of Greek writing of the 1830s: the close link and overlap between the topics of political and emotional unrest and their consequences for Wnding an appropriate Greek setting for them. His detailed chart of Greek literature of the previous decade is part of a larger, three-volume account of the state of Greece, with the section on literature following that on the character of the Greek people. Interestingly, Brandis makes a point of not tracing the ancient in the contemporary, but instead warns against the fallacy of analogies based on locality, climate, and surroundings.66 What he does identify as a continuous trait is the Greek talent for speech, or rhetoric, with the implication that literature, as an expression of this gift, is closely bound up with national, even if this time not so much natural, character. In this way, he comes to describe Greek literary production, shaped as it is by national events, as its most characteristic feature: 65 ` ÆÆ, ii. 45 f.; Christian A. Brandis, Mittheilungen aus Griechenland (Leipzig, 1842), 197 (page references in text are to this edition). Brandis was a classical scholar, of Aristotle and of the history of philosophy in particular, who was appointed one of the Wrst Professors of Philosophy at the newly founded University of Athens; see Ch. A. Brandis, Autobiographie (n.p., 18——); Fritz Valjavecˇ, Geschichte der deutschen Kulturbeziehungen zu Su¨dosteuropa, 5 vols. (Munich, 1953–70), iii. 145. 66 ‘. . . da es sehr schwer ist, in solcher Vergleichung das Zufa¨llige vom Wesentlichen, und durch Analogie der Verha¨ltnisse, durch Gleichheit der Localita¨ten, des ¨ hnlichkeiten von den durch StammHimmelsstrichs und Klimas hervorgerufene A verwandtschaft bedingten zu unterscheiden. Noch weniger kann es uns einfallen, in den gegenwa¨rtigen Athenern, oder gar in den Thebanern, Argivern u.s.w. die alten wiederWnden zu wollen’ (p. 13).

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The events of the past two decades could provide immediate subject-matter only for war lyrics and political song, and they certainly did inspire those. The regeneration of the people had grown from a new dynamic force and, by necessity, this force was mirrored Wrst and foremost in poetry; more speciWcally, it showed itself in the double form in which it had originally manifested itself: Wghting both an outward and an inward struggle, at once unifying and corroding. The destructive force of the interior struggle, however, was founded on a blind, uncontrolled passion that has inXicted such deep wounds on the country. When love was added as the third topic of poetic inspiration . . . it comes as no surprise that it was at Wrst presented as a form of passion that paralyses all energy and action. From this point of view it was closely related to inner-party strife; the only diVerence is that passion applied to hatred cannot be rid of motivation and energy, whereas the passion of love, as pure passion, can paralyse all movement. (pp. 88–9)

For Brandis, the political regeneration of the Greek people, mirrored Wrst of all in its literature, is of a twofold nature: the uniting force of defence and liberation on the one hand, and the disruptive force of (political) internal strife on the other, which both, in literature, are complemented by the topic of love.67 Brandis next applies to practical literary criticism his insight that both an activating and a paralysing eVect are at work in the literary conXation of the political and emotional forces; he sees his thesis proven by works such as Panagiotis Soutsos’s verse drama The Wayfarer or by Alexandros Soutsos’s equally lengthy narrative poem The Roamer, published eight years later (1839). On Alexandros Soutsos’s work, Brandis stresses the destructive force of freedom; the idea of freedom is reduced to ‘an empty phantom’ (p. 136) and leads in consequence to a shadow existence of the mobile yet mentally unfree wanderer, the title hero. The physical and mental state of Panagiotis Soutsos’s protagonists, on the other hand, reveals a stagnation which leads to a death-in-life existence unable to articulate itself, as they attempt to regain the lost paradise of their love.68 67 Brandis summarizes the nature of the literary development of the preceding decade in his introductory paragraph: ‘the forms most peculiar to them are the war songs, the political party songs, and the representation of unhappy, invincible passion’ (p. 88). 68 ‘Both [the wayfarer and Ralou] resemble those unhappy characters who live, perceive and feel, yet are unable to give note of their lives by means of any reaction or any recognizable sign’ (p. 138).


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Following on from Brandis’s observations, what distinguishes this illusory reality of The Wayfarer and The Roamer is indeed the vehemence with which a causal link is established between a political death in a speciWc environment, linked to historical events, and their internal, emotional counterpart: lack of spiritual freedom is a direct result of political unrest, enacted in a real, speciWcally recognizable Greek world which at the same time has the potential to signify a general, all-encompassing loss. The contemporary Greek scene, in which this losing battle is enacted, is at the same time the repository of antiquity. As opposed to the Greek landscape of European Hellenism, however, this present environment is not created through dynamic oscillation between nostalgia and an elusive future that makes modernity. Spatially, the Greek present is seemingly pulled between opposite, linked, and yet mutually exclusive directions, to the point of annihilation. In 1834 Panagiotis Soutsos published the novel Leandros, the Wrst of its kind in the new nation, so he claimed, which sheds light on the self-deWnition of the poets of his generation. In the (often quoted) prologue, Soutsos suggests a map of literary reciprocity: The greatest writers, poets and philosophers have written novels; Rousseau in France, Walter Scott in England, Goethe in Germany, Foscolo in Italy, and Cooper in liberated America, either because works of that nature were considered valuable, as they combine the delightful with the useful, or because raging imaginations need to Wnd an outlet for their burning impressions. In regenerated Greece we are the Wrst to dare and so we present Leandros to the public.69

The classic Horatian formula of ‘delight and usefulness’ implies an educational role for the poet; but there is also a strong appeal to the imagination, a self-understanding in other words that is similar to that of Rangavis, straddling Enlightenment and Romantic poetics. 69 ‘˙ ªÆº æØ ıªªæÆ ; ØÆ ŒÆØ Øº Ø ıªæÆłÆ ıŁØæØŒ ÆÆ: $ı Ø ˆÆººÆ; ´Æº æŒ Ø `ªªºÆ; ˆŒ Ø ˆ æ ÆÆ; # Œº Ø ÆºÆ ŒÆØ ˚ıæ Ø º ıŁæÆ ` æØŒ: Ø Ø ŒæŁÆ º Ø Æ Æ ØÆ ø ÆÆ; ø ı Øª Æ ı ø º ı; Ø Ø ÆÆªŒÆÆ Æ!Æ Ø Ø æªÆ ÆÆÆ Œ ı ø ºª æ ø ı ø. ¯Ø ÆÆª ø ¯ººÆ º æØ Æ ø Ø ŒØ ¸Ææ’. ˇ ¸Ææ, ed. A. Samouil (Athens, 1996), 43. References in the text are to the page-numbers of this edition.

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Leandros, however, ‘is also a Greek, and he lives around 1833 and 1834’ (p. 45). Incidentally—and surprisingly—it is only recently that the political nature of the novel has been suggested more forcefully.70 Further on in this programmatic prologue, Soutsos explicitly links the ideas of his work to its natural setting, or rather he transforms ideas into natural imagery as the appropriate setting: ‘The existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the love of a rural life, the love of freedom, these are the ideas and feelings of Leandros; the rising of the sun and moon, the calmness of spring, the high mountains, the stormy sea, amongst such images is set the scene of Leandros.’71 Far from being mere images setting the scene for Leandros’s emotional wanderings and reXecting his moods, the novel appears at a point when Greek nature is being mapped onto Greek territory, while territory becomes the dominant sign of nationhood.72 ‘In the same period that nature and landscape become a physical scene the meaning of the word nation is also imperceptibly transformed so that it comes to be applied to a politically deWned territory, rather than to the native race of people inhabiting that territory.’73 The closing reprise of the prologue addresses Soutsos’s target audience: the new generation, whose duty is to continue what his generation has accomplished. In the phrasing he uses, the identity of his generation as one of Wghters, politicians, or poets becomes multiple and indistinguishable: ‘Youth of Greece! What you could have demanded from our own generation has been done. We wonder-workers have built you a future, given you a homeland and freed the earth of your ancestors.’74

70 See Alexandra Samouil’s introduction to her edition of Leandros, or Nasos Vayenas’s introduction to Alexandros Soutsos’s novel The Exiled of 1831 (ˇ ¯ æØ ı 1831) (Athens, 1996); Peckham, National Histories, 22–5. 71 ‘˙ ÆæØ ı ¨ ; ÆŁÆÆÆ łı ; Æª æ ÆªæØŒ !; æø º ıŁ æÆ; Ø ÆØ ØÆØ ŒÆØ Æ ÆØŁ ÆÆ ı ¸Ææı: ÆØ ÆÆºÆ ı ºı ŒÆØ º; ªÆº ı Ææ; Æ ıłº æ; ÆØ æØŒı ÆØ; Ø ø ø ØŒ ø Ł ÆØ Œ ı ¸Ææı’ (p. 46). 72 On the circulation and large number of publications of largely foreign books on geography, see Peckham, National Histories, 1–20. 73 Olwig, ‘Sexual Cosmology’, 319. 74 ‘ˇ ºÆÆ ¯ºº; ; Ø Æ " ÆÆØ Æ ØØŒ Æ ª ºŁ: ŁÆı Æıæª " ºÆıæªÆ ºº; " ŒÆ ÆæÆ; ŒÆØ ª ø æª ø ı ºıæÆ ’ (p. 47).


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The blurring continues beyond the margins of the text. With the direct address to the new generation, recounting the labours of his own, Soutsos uses almost verbatim material from a speech he delivered before King Otto, on the occasion of a memorial being erected in the Argolid, in January 1834.75 Given the dating, as much as the role of the public poet Soutsos implies, it is futile to debate which manifestation of the sentiment came Wrst: the material occasion, itself shaped by ideals, or the reinsertion into a literary product that deals in materiality. The overlap of functions, the uncertain footing of Leandros, as character and text, on shifting political and literary platforms, characterizes the genesis of the novel as a whole. Sections of the novel, particularly the observations on the state of agriculture, industry, and the political life of Greece, were pre-serialized in November 1833 as travel letters in the periodical O Helios, founded and edited by the brothers Soutsos.76 The fatal love story that makes Leandros comparable to the literary models the prologue invokes, was then only gradually imposed as the framework to turn social and geographical observation into narration.77 The novel is the story, told in a series of letters, of Leandros, who, born in Constantinople but through his involvement in the Greek insurrections displaced throughout the Balkans, Europe, and Greece, eventually has arrived in Athens. Here he chances upon his childhood love Koralia, who is now married and a mother. Their love is resuscitated by the encounter, yet Koralia holds to her marital vows; the impossibility of their reunion and Leandros’s suVering lead Leandros’s friend to trick him into making a journey through Greece, on 75 ¸ ª ŒøŁ Ø Æ ªæ ø ı ŒÆ" `æªºÆ ı (Gennadius Library, Athens, phyll. 69 T.6 no 19), 2. The Soutsoi were part of a politically very active family; one brother was killed in the battle of Dragatsani right at the beginning of the War of Independence, another cousin was a judge in Nafplio. Alexandros, the activist and satirist, viewed the monarchy as necessary, yet remained scathingly critical of it, which led to multiple lawsuits against him. 76 The sections were published under the title ‘My Wanderings’ and signed ‘The Traveller’. As a publication with a literary as much as a socio-political agenda, the paper oVered a forum for social criticism and political ideas, particularly along the lines of the utopian socialism of Saint-Simon. His communitarian ideas were widely discussed during the time the brothers Soutsos spent in Paris in the late 1820s. Some French Saint-Simonists were also resident in Nafplio at the time; see Vayenas, ‘ˇıØŒ ØÆºØ ’, 11 V. 77 Ibid. 23 f.

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an itinerary that includes memorial sites of classical as well as of recent political signiWcance. His route commemorates the Greek War of Independence by explicit comparison with the desolate contemporary situation of chaos and corruption, and it mirrors the memories of the short past and prematurely failed future with Koralia. Leandros returns to Athens to Wnd Koralia dying of her conXicting emotions and her moral steadfastness. After her death, Leandros, like a good Wertherian, commits suicide. The novel is clearly written with Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Ugo Foscolo’s Wertherian The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortiz in mind, both of which Soutsos had read (Werther, at least, in French translation) and unapologetically makes reference to in his prologue. And yet, the theme of the fulWlment of the past made impossible not just in the present but because of the present, and its interference in the romantic union, is also what distinguishes Leandros from his ‘models’. Although the unsuccessful relationship and the suicide of the protagonist are the themes both of Werther and Jacopo Ortiz, the past is given less of a motivating and hampering role in either of the two novels. Werther and Lotte are ostensibly kept apart by a social code, and although the Werther story of Jacopo Ortiz, told around the fate of a dissident in the secessionist upper Italian provinces of the Napoleonic era, is already of a more openly political nature (here too it is the state of a disuniWed country that mirrors the impossibility of a happy match), neither of the literary ‘models’ equates a tale of intertwined erotic tension, territorial disorientation, and political situatedness between East and West, ancient and modern, quite so explicitly as Leandros does. What is more, Athens is a foreign place for both characters. Here the past is suddenly foregrounded again: just as Athens is the place that is quite literally rediscovered as the capital, and awaiting rebuilding, so Leandros and Koralia rediscover each other in a situation of displacement. Quite apart from the excavation of a personal past throughout the novel, there is abundant direct reference to archaeological sites. Ruins, as ‘memorials’ of the ancient past, serve as settings for a number of signiWcant meetings between the protagonists, who oscillate between positive and negative interpretations of the scene, stressing the value of memory or the absence of past glory, depending on whether the predominant mood is one of hopefulness or despair. This is the place where the lovers are free and able to


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communicate their past, their present desire, and the impossibility of their future. Nature is on the one hand the ostensibly harmonious environment, which, as opposed to the restrictions of social space, allows the meetings of the protagonists to take place, if only for a time (Leandros and Koralia meet for long walks around Athens), and which also lets them experience their meeting of minds in the light of the material remains of ancient Greece and the natural, unchanged beauty of Greece present. The aspect of Athenian nature, on the other hand, in which its ruins are embedded, precipitates both the passionate longing and the impossibility of union between the two. Koralia is directly aligned with the past, both the individual past and the national past: in a night walk which they take around the ancient sites of Athens, her ideal beauty is set next to the temples’ ideal beauty: Looking at the memorials of antiquity, I said: ‘See how man vanishes, yet how his great works persist. Temple of Theseus! How smooth, how recent your two-thousand-year-old marble! . . . And the Parthenon, how fresh still his substance!’ The ancient and grand ground on which she stood inspired her with great ideas too, and when she formulated them with enthusiasm, her eyes were sparkling Wre. I could not keep silent but had to tell her: ‘Koralia! From the very earliest beautiful days of my youth I formed for myself the idea of the perfect woman; this type I only found in you, wherever and everywhere I went. I do not know the secret decisions of fate; but if these moments when I can see you are the last stage of my life, then, Koralia, I accept my future and death will be sweet’ (pp. 58 f.).

The impossibility to re-create the past is, however, the overriding (European) mode(l) and there are other scenes where the absence of ancient grandeur is foregrounded, while in another vignette of Athens attention is drawn to the Parthenon marbles taken away by Lord Elgin (p. 78). Happiness, or any form of liveable or representable experience, are impossible inside and outside the capital alike. It is the combination of Leandros’s desire and Koralia’s resistance which eventually sets him, against his will, onto the path to roam the territory of the new state and the material traces of its ancient past. The itinerary, which takes up a good part of the book, doubles as a foil for the paradoxical emotions of its observer (rich with memory, or derelict, as was the

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case with Athens) and as an educational survey for the good of the reader. It is the education of the reader, and the role of the writer, after all, on which Greece’s competitiveness in relation to Europe depends. Outside Athens, and the force-Weld of Koralia’s presence, and in a territory that is more compatible with the tenets of admiration for unconWned Greek nature, Leandros engages in repeated praise of the country life, once more far from society, that is presented as the home of freedom and innocence: ‘O innocent freedom of farmers! . . . Freedom! O sweetest and glorious leader of men! You live in the mountains and your snow-white gown is unblemished’ (pp. 53 f.). Still, Leandros’s wanderings and reXections on nature, even more so because he is essentially cheated and wheedled into them, cannot console him. Nature, the sphere of protection for the loving couple and the matter that separates them, is prominently characterized through its force of enchantment (mageia), the threat of illusion that borders imagination, in other words, not far from its power to charm and transform. The concept which binds together the characters and events of the book is that of memory (and, by its extension in either direction, the trust in immortality), and Leandros himself integrates that memory with Greece’s panorama as its mode of representation and expression: ‘In Greece, of the intellectual powers only memory Wnds nourishment, and of the senses only sight: the view that is lifted up to the extraordinary sky and comes down on the equally extraordinary nature’ (p. 52). As with Rangavis, for Soutsos imagination (fantasia) is the linking mechanism that has the power to connect and progress against the background of Greek nature. The familiar transcendence is still in the oYng, while the stress remains on the absence of a future vision as the plot unfolds against a landscape whose momentum seems to grind slowly to a standstill. The imagination of this Wrst Greek novel lays bare the idle machinery of a saturated symbolic environment. While Leandros’s rovings recall the trajectory of the Grand Tourists, the Greek travellers, as opposed to their European counterparts, are not just itinerant but are propelled onto a path of Xight because they have—and quite literally, too—nowhere to settle. Leandros has his own progenitors, further distressing that same theme of Xight, within the work of Soutsos. The Wayfarer is one of them: a lyrical


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drama written in 1827 and Wrst published in Nafplio in 1831, it is the story of a Constantinople-born freedom Wghter and wayfarer who has sought exterior and spiritual refuge in the community of Mount Athos. Here he encounters Ralou, his former love whom he had deserted in Constantinople when joining the uprising, and whom he had, upon his return to the city, believed dead. The Wayfarer leaves Constantinople, aimlessly roaming the world in consequence. The drama portrays their eventual encounter; their mutual recognition, however, is beset by failure, doubts, delusion, and a hint of blasphemy, Wnally leading to their joint suicide. The alien character of the Wayfarer and his sudden arrival on Mount Athos are captured in the familiar image of the comet that so naturally aligns the violent and visible aesthetic momentum of the political and poetic spheres, and that Rangavis re-employs only a few years later: ‘Where is the newly arrived, the strange wayfarer? Like a meteor he suddenly appeared on the Mountain’ (I. 1).78 The setting throughout is the undisturbed and sparsely inhabited spring nature of Mount Athos, which, in personiWed form, reaches from the sky to the underworld, pronouncing the smallness of human cultivation from an elevated point of view both in terms of location and ancestry: Mount Athos has seen the history of mankind (I. 2). In that, Mount Athos also enforces the eVect of verticality that, despite all the desperate roaming across space, seems to characterize the settings of the 1830s. The desertion and loneliness of surrounding nature, outside the boundaries of human society, mirror the protagonist’s alienation from his time, from contemporary society, and from his place of origin: ‘The present poisons me (me pharmakeuei) . . . I am a loner in the wilderness and a stranger in foreign lands’ (I. 2). The fact that pharmako, in modern as in ancient Greek, semantically covers the remedial as much as the poisonous, makes the challenge of the present yet more pressing. The alienation is formulated even more explicitly in the Wayfarer’s Wrst words: `ı !º Ø Ø …ı æ Ø Łºø ; `ı !º Ø ŒÆº Ø 78 The Wayfarer is quoted after the edition by K. Th. Dimaras (Athens, 1954), 76–111. Numbers in brackets indicate act and scene numbers.

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The Ambivalence of Nature æ Œıæø ; ¯ª ÆØ ŒÆº Ø. " " ø ı ˚ÆØ ºº ı; ÆØ Ø æ Æı æ ı. (I. 2)

Do you see this river, which runs along, muddied; do you see the reed, dry and bent? I am the reed, the river is my life, and my future is the sands of this dry desert.

Like the Wayfarer, Ralou characterizes herself as being in a state of simultaneous inner and outer exile: ‘Recognize me, I have lived so many years a stranger in foreign lands, and in the desolation of my soul I carried my pain’ (V. 3). Eremos (‘solitary’) and ere¯mia (‘desolation’), a favourite term also in Rangavis, appear here over thirty times in total, usually in the self-characterizations of the two protagonists.79 In the case of Ralou, there is a pronounced tendency on her part to reverse the organic analogy between exterior and interior in her wish to become an inanimate, unfeeling object (such as a stone). Likewise the Wayfarer: he captures his state by analogy with destroyed nature (likening himself, for example, to a torn-oV branch); but he also, driving that analogy over the edge of its logic, describes the discrepancy with his environment as the failure to correspond to nature at all: (; Ø ŁºÆÆ ŒÆŁæ! . . . (; Ø ªºÆ ıæÆ ! ` " Ø ØÆ Æ º ı Ø !ı, !º ÆÆ Œæ!ı Æ " Æ ı æØºÆ: ˇ ı Œ ı " ıæÆ Ø: ; Œæ Æ łı ı Ø ª Æ Œºº Ø. (III. 2) Oh what a mirror the sea is! . . . how azure the sky! From woods to the plains, from hills to the mountains my eye casts deathly, extinguished glances. Not a being in the world delights me; my soul remains alien and cold towards the beauties of the earth. 79 The wilderness and the desert (indicated by the same word) as an ambiguous place denoting a paradisial solitude and a spiritual threat is also a particularly strong concept in the patristic writings of Eastern Christianity; the hermit is its suitable inhabitant.


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The speciWc location of Mount Athos itself, in its most literal materiality, highlights the utter impossibility of realization, as opposed to the hope for a romanticized world (in Schlegel’s sense of infusing reality with a new perception of it). It is not only removed from society as the home ground of a spiritual community (in the shape of several monastic communities), it is also, for that reason, a place which had remained a semi-autonomous unit outside the unfree territory of the Ottoman Empire.80 Soutsos is certainly aware of the strictly enforced monastic regulation, which denies women entry to the peninsula.81 To make his characters meet here is therefore hardly an oversight on the part of Soutsos (it seems to have exercised some of his critics), but rather a deliberate pointer to the impossibility of a successful union, inscribed into the material setting. We are faced with a real, yet geographically and politically removed, environment, whose part-realistic, part-Wctive selection identiWes the ideal of a diVerent spiritual cosmos beyond and behind (or rather, above) the visible world; this potentially ideal location, however, cannot be claimed by the Wayfarer and Ralou, since it is already founded on a principle of exclusion.82 Just as the correspondence between exterior and interior states is a correspondence of failure, so the mutual recognition of the protagonists can only be completed or fulWlled in the act of suicide. The element of lethal failure is also repeated on another level of analogy, that between the protagonist’s feelings for the Greek country and his love for Ralou. In the present and the future now lost to the Wayfarer, Ralou would have been his world: ‘I would have forgotten the whole earth in your wondrous beauty, your sweet embrace would have been my universe (kosmos)’ (II. 5). Their happy courtship was interrupted by the War of Independence, caught in the imagery of the wind turning to a storm, and, with good philhellenic precedent, the 80 It had retained that status after the cessation of Athos to the Ottomans in 1430, and continued to keep it after the founding of the Greek state. 81 Giannis Lephas, —ÆÆªØ (Athens, 1991), 162 f., puzzles over Soutsos’s problematic choice and suggests his family history as an important factor. Soutsos’s father spent some time in exile at Iviron Monastery on Mount Athos in 1803–5, together with Patriarch Grigorios V; Athos would therefore be a place commemorating the author’s ancestral political credentials. 82 Her presence on Athos has no disciplinary consequences for Ralou, although her visit is surely described as something extraordinary (I. 4).

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‘support’ by nature in the act of liberation translates into nature not impeding the course of the aspiring Wghter: ‘No river bed, no ridge or rock, did ever stall the course of a Greek’ (I. 3). Although the success of the political campaign is implied, the consequential paths of the two main characters, linked in the motif of the developing national course, throw doubt on the idea of stability. The assumption of Ralou’s death (which, it turns out, has been an illusion), has propelled the Wayfarer into a series of roamings across Europe and Arabia which have eventually brought him to the wilderness of Mount Athos, where he does not even integrate himself into a monastic community but remains outside its (physical) conWnes—‘A strange monk . . . Why does he shun his fellows and hide in the unlit spaces of caves?’ (I. 1). Liberated Greece, in fact, is only described either by reference to the smallness and insigniWcance of human society or by the Wayfarer’s reminiscences of the Wghting, which are not presentable other than in the mediated form of a dream address to his fellow Wghters, appealing to the ancient patrimony of Sparta and the Persian wars (IV. 4). The implications of Ralou’s fatal delusions are her love and her seeking for a country that likewise end in an out-of-place, if not to say unreal, location— Athos—as close to an implied ‘other world’ as possible. Not only, then, is the dichotomy between the material world and a spiritual otherworld constantly articulated, but the main character is fashioned as a builder of new worlds himself, a task and a personal quality which appears a distinction as much as a threat to the Wayfarer and the poet alike. When the monk Paisios compares the Wayfarer to the dying Byron, whom he himself once attended, the parallel to the poet of the new state is deliberate: ‘Your large forehead encloses a world of ideas; your Werce and melancholic character reminds me of Byron who, when Xeeing the Almighty’s gaze, opened before me the Hades of his soul’ (I. 3). This not only ranks the Wayfarer and his creator with the literary and political authority of the poet, but also hints, through the Greek confessor, at a newly appropriated and privileged access to interpret Byron the mortal Wgure. The Wayfarer’s reply remains within the same semantic Weld of artistic production: like a mis-tuned lyre, he is unable to articulate his mind: ‘As when the strings of a lyre loosen and the instrument does not produce a tuneful voice, but pours out


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the wailing and howling of unordered sound, so all strength of my mind has gone and none of my thoughts has order or rhythm’ (I. 3). The Wgure of Byron, in fact, authorizes the analogy between political and poetic activity. Military energy and creative imagination justify each other, as we can see plainly in the introductory remarks by Koromilas, in the 1864 edition of the work: ‘Whom does the Wayfarer present in the play? A soldier of the Greek Struggle, like Byron, and like Byron melancholy and full of imagination; thus the grand drama of Greece is touched upon and at the same time it excuses the wealth of images in the expression of the Wayfarer.’83 What distinguishes the world-making of the Wayfarer from that of Byron, be it Byron the poet, the Wghter, or the literary Wgure, is its added religious element. Soutsos himself, in a dedicatory letter to Stourdza that accompanies the Wrst edition, calls his poem ‘a product of a new and Christian poetry’.84 The ‘other world’ suggested as a solution, so to speak, is close to the other world of Christian metaphysics, and Paisios’s Augustinian ‘two-worlds’ speech in Act V, scene 3 is its climactic vision. A quasi-political vision for the Wayfarer, as he lives in 1827, is thus not simply reinforced by a religious parallel; on the contrary, a deferral to the spiritual beyond is envisaged as the only possible result. The invisible world is the real patris, the real homeland. Koromilas further claims that the Christian aspect distinguishes the poem from the Byronic model. However, Soutsos’s spiritualized other world is as much tied up in a Romantic aesthetic and imagery as is the Byronic one. Not even a place as close to the spiritual other world as Mount Athos is any longer a ‘heaven on earth’ or a place of easy transition. Instead, it is a place of confused boundaries. Beaton has concluded about these Wrst works of Greek Romanticism that ‘in [The Wayfarer and Dimos and Eleni] a recognizably imported confection is solidly anchored to the Greek world’.85 Quite apart from the question of what the economic model of importation 83 ‘ˇ Ø ø æ ÆØ ÆæÆÆØ ˇØ æ: æÆª ı ¯ººØŒ Æª ø ´ æø ºÆª ºØŒ ŒÆØ ºæ ÆÆÆ: ø Łª ÆØ ªÆ æ Æ ¯ºº ŒÆØ Æ ıª øæ ÆØ ºæ ØŒ ø ŒæÆØ ı ˇØ æı.’ Andreas Koromilas, preface to his edition of The Wayfarer (1864), 9. 84 Panagiotis Soutsos, —Ø Ø (Nafplio, 1831), 1. 85 Beaton, Introduction, 41.

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does for a conception of literary crossings, it is certainly true that the setting and characters are deliberately signposted as belonging to the contemporary Greek world. The very solidity of this Greek world, though, is constantly put to the test, and usually found wanting, if one considers the choice of location and use of nature imagery to reXect characters and events. The Wrst young generation of and in the Greek state develops a proWle for their literary characters as much as for themselves against the mobile backdrop of political and geographical realities. The sketches of their Wctional heroes double as exercises in political and national autobiographies, which need to be written into existence. Their professional lives are very much taken up with professing and cultivating a certain function within their new, national environment, where not only do they have to choose, but where they have to establish the nature of their choices in the Wrst place. For those writers who literally had to move into new territory and who saw their territory come into focus through the images of Greece already available and necessary to hold it in place, the building of Greece, its realization as a material and an aesthetic and representational undertaking, is beset with the same diYculties which the Philhellenes of neighbouring Europe encountered. Twenty-Wve years of poetry- and state-making on, and a stone’s throw away from the deposition of the Bavarian king in 1862, Greek literature had kept the basic stock of imagery recruited partly from European literary models (mainly French and English literature, especially Byron) and partly from Greek literature, especially the folk song and folk tale tradition. What had changed was the language, moving from spoken Greek, with a ‘folk simplicity’, to a puriWed, more constructed Greek following strict rules and patterns. Panagiotis Soutsos went on to become the writer of Christian dramas and a tract on a new poetics in favour of a puriWed language, and had at the time of his death rewritten The Wayfarer Wve times, with a growing tendency towards a formal and archaizing style. By the 1860s Romanticism had earned itself a bad name. Rangavis, who in his early poetry had experimented with models from the folk-song tradition, enriched with and shaped according to Romantic aesthetic elements, claimed in 1860, as the chairman of a regular poetry contest held by the University of Athens, that ‘Byronism’, with its


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destructive poet-warrior heroes, had been detrimental to the shaping and the uniWcation of a new society and ought to be replaced once more by the function of poetry as a link to morality and ethics.86 He comments on the evaluation of one of the poems submitted: [T]herefore civilized societies have a need not only of material, but also of spiritual nourishment, and they improve morally when they taste the noble delights of the beautiful and the sublime. . . . Maybe we would not have spent so much time relating the anguished adventures in this poem, if we did not think it good to remark that in time most of the heroes of our poets, having fought for better or worse for their homeland, Wnd their lover, who has arrived in male disguise to Wght along with them, then they become monks, then they confess, next they discover that they are the brothers of their lovers, then that they are the sons of their confessors, and then they die. They all have a related physiognomy, they all seem to have been born under the same star, a star, however, whose rays dissolve the atmosphere surrounding it of cold rhetoric and improbabilities. . . . And apropos of passions, let us remind ourselves that amongst our young poets there is a great use, and over-use, of the passions, a sentimental inheritance of the Wayfarer, that stepson of Byron.87

86 The poetry contest, called Ralleios Diagonismos after its founder, was Wrst established by the University of Athens in 1851 and continued until 1861. During its eleven years, the literary forum it sought to provide became a small yet prominent battleground of linguistic debate and a foundation for later critical works; see Panagiotis Moullas, Les Concours poe´tiques de l’Universite´ d’ Athe`nes (1851–1877) (Athens, 1989). 87 % ˇ ø ŒÆØ ÆØ ıª Ø ÆØ ŒØøÆØ ıØ ÆªŒ ı ıºØŒ æ; Æºº ŒÆØ ØÆØŒ; ŒÆØ ŁØŒ ! ºØ ÆØ ª ı ÆØ ø ıª ÆºÆ ø ŒÆº ŒÆØ ı ıłº : . . . ø ŁÆ Ø æ! Ø Ø æØ ø Æªøø æ Ø ı Ø Æ ı; Æ ŒÆº Æ ÆæÆæø Ø æ ı Ø º Ø ø Ø æø ; Æ ŒÆ ºº º Ø ıæ Ææ; ÆØ æø ø; æ ı ÆæØŒ ı Æ Æ ı º " Æı; ØÆ ªÆØ Æ ; ØÆ ºª ÆØ; ØÆ ÆÆªøæÆØ Æ º ø æø ø ø ŒÆØ ıØ ø ºªØ ø; ŒÆØ ØÆ ÆŁŒıØ: " ˇºØ ıØ ıªª ØŒ ØÆ ıØªø Æ; ºØ ÆÆØ ı Æı ª Ł ÆæÆ; ÆæÆ ø ı ÆØ ÆŒ ØÆº ıØ æØ!ººıÆ Æı Æ ÆæÆ łı æºªØ ŒÆØ ÆØŁÆø: . . . ˚ÆØ Ø æ ÆŁ º ª; Æ Łı ø Ø Ææ Ø Ø ØÆ ª ª ÆØ æØ ŒÆØ ŒÆ æØ ø ÆŁ ŒÆØ ø ı æ; ÆØŁ ÆØŒ Œºæ Æ; ; ı ˇØ æı, Ł ıØ ı ´ æø.’ Rangavis, ‘ˇ ØØŒ ØÆªøØ ı 1860 ı’, —ÆæÆ, 242 (1860), 26–33.

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We do not know well enough what social life in the literary circles of Nafplio was like, but it is unlikely to have aspired to the eccentricities of high Romantic France, where Ge´rard de Nerval reputedly took a lobster for a walk on the streets of Paris.88 Not only was Greek Romanticism less exhibitionist; most of the Greek Romantics did not share the fate of the Byronic hero in quite another sense: they lived to an old age. What is more, as opposed to the ambivalent promise of liberation and the promise of Greek materiality we Wnd in Romantic Hellenism, the Greek writers saw themselves confronted with a place that now was, technically, considered liberated. Still adhering to the notion that the poet can and must form his environment and his nation, a notion which had engendered the Romantic aesthetic and imagery they engaged with, they had to struggle beyond a Byronic youth to cope with its eVects and to create a new world which ought to be steady and inhabitable. Literary history, later, has sweepingly accused them of ending in a poetic world that came to a paralysed standstill in a linguistic prison and that, by the late nineteenth century, was once more not free. When Rangavis reminisces on Brandis mentioning him only in passing as an author of Romantic works, we should attach importance not to his dissatisfaction but rather to Brandis’s inclusion of his writing within that category. (Incidentally, one suspects that not even the alleged slight is out of tune, since it chimes in with Rangavis’s pet motif of possible failure and destruction of his own work.) Brandis marks out the political urgency as an intrinsic, dynamic part of the literature as well as its characters, and Rangavis’s characters are often shown as involved not only in the act of necessarily political, but also indirectly of poetic activity, thus responding to the question of the self-deWnition and positioning of the (national) poet. The undercurrent of professed anxiety as regards the response to his poetic activity points to the central issue of the role and function of the poet within an unsettled state that is faced with the challenging task of establishing a future vision and a national tradition at the same time. To give his characters a ground of liberated Greece to 88 The accounts by Bettina von Savigny, Briefe and Ludwig Ross, Erinnerungen und Mitteilungen aus Griechenland (Berlin, 1863) give vivid impressions of lively and gossipy intellectual and social circles, set on establishment, however, rather than innovation, which was a creative and innovative act no less.


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stand on, Rangavis does not simply operate with a generic and vaguely deWned ‘Romantic imagery’; he chooses elements of a nature and locale that are supposedly ‘authentic’, but inherently unstable. The ‘combination and hasty averaging of features’89 that Nemoianu singled out as a character of the ‘tamed Romanticism’ of Eastern Europe leads not to a weakening, but to a stretching of Romantic aspects of nature to their limit: to the point of illusion. At the same time it is the present situation, that is, the political and historical situation that has made a continuation of the past into a fulWlled present (with Koralia and Leandros as a couple) impossible. Not only has it caused both protagonists’ displacement from their homeland and Koralia’s social reorientation. It is the world of the new state in general that reXects the instability of social relationships. The present situation is one of internal strife and a young society not just in a state of Xux, but already in a process of corruption before any stability has been achieved, and in those passages Koralia, on the verge of dying, is also allied with Greece present. Partly, this instability is attributed to the intrusive, undermining inXuence of European fashions. Hope and fearfulness mark the ambivalent stance towards the new point of reference for Greece’s acts of self-reXexivity. The new literature, envisaged by its young authors, displays a highly ambivalent attitude towards the models of its land, which it found in foreign accounts. Their use of some of the philhellenic motives is often complex, but they cannot avoid the necessary split into a Greek antiquity and a German, French, or English modernity, which leaves Greece in a limbo where it tries to stake a claim to both sides. ‘Belatedness’ has been suggested as a trope of Greek literature, and of Greek literary self-conceptions in the nation state; and a strong awareness of reaction as an operative mode is certainly one part of the complex interchange of external and internal images that distinguishes the case of Greece faced with the precepts of Hellenism.90 What is visible in the literature of the 1830s is an aporia to resume the thread of Hellenism such as it was available in the Western European texts, which is altogether in line with the aporia 89 Nemoianu, Taming Romanticism, 127. 90 Jusdanis, Belated Modernity; Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge, 1987)—on the paradoxical interdependence of external and internal image, esp. 95–122.

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that is written into them. Calotychos, with reference to Leandros, speaks of the ‘exhaustion of a particular Ideal that has structured the Greek experience’, with Leandros’s hope that it might be overcome in the future.91 The spatial dynamic of Romantic Hellenism, however, makes a mapping of this future unexpectedly diYcult. The result seems to be a shift to a vertical line of past, present, and spiritual ‘other world’, rather than any horizontal extension. The vistas and roamings there are merely conWrm the impossibility of living in them. Responsiveness and inXuence continue to be used as persistent models for situating Greek Romanticism. It is ironic, then, but not without precedent, that an unresponsiveness, reXected in Greek nature, is the extension of Romantic Hellenism and its aesthetic that should become most manifest in those writings of the 1830s. Rangavis includes a sonnet in his Collected Works (1874), entitled ‘The Poet’, and subtitled ‘after Schiller’;92 in it, the god Zeus distributes from on high human fate and qualities to all mortals, while one character, the singer, remains standing aside. In the Wnal round of divine distribution the poet is told: ‘ Œ ’, , % øŒÆ: ÆÆÆ ºÆ!; ŒÆØ º Œ ºº. Ø Ø: ¯ ˚ºÆ Œ" Œ ŒÆŁ ; º ŒºÆø ıÆØ Ø’. ‘The world’, [Zeus] said, ‘I gave; imagination only is left. Take it to keep, and build another world. Cry there, as you do here, but in your crying happily fulWl your fate.’

It seems, however, fatal suVering that has gained the upper hand in the world built by the new Greek poets. The new world is highly ambivalent about its revealed foundations, and there is a subtle irony when Dimaras, in his history of Greek literature, entitles the chapter on the Athenian Phanariots ‘To Telos enos Kosmou’—the end of a world. 91 Calotychos, Modern Greece, 117. 92 If Rangavis refers to a speciWc poem by Schiller, it is most likely ‘Die Teilung der Erde’ (1795), which shares the same plot. Schiller’s poem (not a sonnet) diVers insofar as Zeus does not bestow upon the poet the gift of imagination and the order to ‘build a new world’; rather he reprimands the poet for having escaped to the ‘land of dreams’ instead of asking for his share; when the poet defends his absence as having taken refuge in the god and his immaterial world, Zeus grants him access to heaven in return.

5 Between Idyll and Abyss: The Greek Land, as seen from the Ionian Islands Poetry, in friendship, binds all minds that love her with insoluble bonds. . . . In this region they are all one and at peace through a higher force of magic. Each Muse searches for and Wnds the others, and all the rivers of poetry Xow together into the one common sea. (Friedrich Schlegel, Gespra¨ch u¨ber die Poesie)

As if to reinforce the point about the sometimes ill-Wtting contours of signiWcant landscape emerging from materially determined territory, the Ionian islands lie precisely on the other side of where we might expect them: as remote from Ionia (i.e. the Levantine coast) as is possible. Geographically speaking, the Ionian, or Heptanesian, islands lie oV the West of the Greek mainland, halfway to Italy, towards which they were strongly oriented at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since the Wfteenth century the islands had by and large continued to stay outside the Ottoman Empire, mainly so under Venetian rule. The language of culture, commerce, and education, predominantly used by the upper and middle classes, continued to be Italian, reXecting the close contact with Italy in those Welds (for many of the local elite it was the unquestioned choice to attend Italian universities). In 1797 the islands were ceded to Napoleonic France, although only a year later they came back under Ottoman and Russian suzerainty, a moving back and forth which was to continue for the next two decades until the Wnal establishment of a Septinsular Republic or ‘United States of the Ionian Islands’ under a British protectorate in 1815. It was only in 1864 that the Ionian Islands were eventually ceded to the state of Greece to

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become part of its national territory. To categorize Heptanesian literature in terms of its geographical location and therefore cultural context, as has been the case in Greece, is therefore not unreasonable. After the Venetians ceded Crete to the Ottoman Empire in 1669, the Ionian Islands took in a sizeable number of refugees who brought with them a vibrant literary and cultural tradition that, in turn, had been shaped through interaction with the Italian presence that had lasted in Crete since 1204. The literary culture of the Ionian islands knew, therefore, about well-developed literary traditions in Greek that were less prominent in the culture of the Greek state-in-the-making, which renders the islands not only what we would now tend to call a hybrid culture, but a culture whose components already had a rich history of exchange and interaction.1 Maybe not surprisingly, the exponents of Heptanesian literature who witnessed the War of Independence also diVer considerably in style; the poetry of Andreas Kalvos and Dionysios Solomos, both born on the island of Zakynthos, in that sense represent two choices within the experimental climate that the political changes inaugurated, which also brought the Greek state into being. By way of introduction and contrast, let me begin with Kalvos, who, although less prominent than Solomos in the Greek canon, has at the same time been more openly praised for his representations of Greek nature.

THE CONTESTED HOME GROUND OF THE MUSES: ANDREAS KALVOS’S ODES Kalvos is the Ionian whose name and main work has in Greek criticism been most closely associated with the discovery of the Greek landscape.2 When, at the end of the nineteenth century, Kostis Palamas rediscovered Kalvos as the poet most susceptible to the 1 On Italian culture as the dominant factor in the environment of the Ionian poets, see Erotokritos Moraitis, ˜Ø Ø ºø : Æı Æ ŒÆØ —ØØŒ (Kerkyra, 1999); Sokratis Kapsaskis, Æ ØŒ Æıæı Ø — æØÆ ˚æŒıæÆ: ˜Ø Ø ºø —`æÆ ˚º! (Athens, 1998). 2 The small size of his literary oeuvre has not prevented an extraordinarily large bibliography of criticism: see George Andreiomenos, ´Ø!ºØªæÆÆ `æÆ ˚º!ı (1818–1988) (Athens, 1993).


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beauty of the Ionian island nature, the tone was set for a tradition of choice appreciation: Kalvos became identiWed by a certain exclusivity, a somewhat alien but alluring literary style and a linguistic idiosyncracy that rendered him attractively oV-canonical.3 In the 1940s the poet Odysseas Elytis identiWed Kalvos’s ‘consciousness of the sea’—an immediate, almost mystical understanding of nature expressed in daring, idiosyncratic poetic language—as the origin of the detailed references to the archipelago in the Odes and as the source of Kalvos’s (as well as of Elytis’s own) poetic inspiration.4 Like the more or less contemporaneous poets of the ‘Old Athenian School’, Kalvos is usually discussed within the categorical parameters of Classic and/or Romantic;5 but while his poetry acknowledges a Romantic spirit, it draws from a rich and diverse repertoire of styles whose imagery owes much to classical and neoclassical models, biblical language, and the idyll. The imagery of landscape, locality, and nature are likewise inspired by these sources. Again, if we think of the exchange with the language of Romantic Hellenism as a dialogue, there is a sense of reduction, of clipped speech and partial engagement, that leads to compression and a sense of involution, a shorthand, where stenography really means ‘writing narrowly’: Greece, while its extent and sheer presence is the condition of writing, is narrowed down to the point of invisibility. Born on Zakynthos in 1792 and brought up in Italy from the age of 10, Kalvos lived from 1812 as a private secretary to the poet Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827). Foscolo, a native of Zakynthos too, himself enjoys a rather varied and instructive history of literary classiWcation: Greek literary histories have claimed him as the ‘third’ Ionian poet (besides Kalvos and Solomos), writing in Italian and deeply rooted in 3 Kostas Palamas, ‘˚º! ˘ÆŒ ŁØ’, ¯Æ, 726–9 (1889), repr. in Nasos Vayenas (ed.), ¯ØÆªøª — ı ˚º!ı (Heraklio, 1999), 1–34. 4 Odysseas Elytis, ‘˙ ÆºŁ ıØªø Æ ŒÆØ ºıæØŒ º ı `æÆ ˚º!ı’ (1946), in Vayenas, ¯ØÆªøª, 71–119, 108; in the same volume also Nasos Vayenas, ‘˙ ÆæÆ æø ı ˚º!ı’, 293–315. 5 Some classic studies are K. Th. Dimaras, ‘—ª ı ı ˚º!ı’, in ¯ººØŒ $ø ÆØ (1982), 76–115, who terms Kalvos’s stance a ‘Romantic puritanism’; Dimitris Tziovas, ‘˝ ŒºÆØŒ Æ Ø ŒÆØ øı ØŒ Ø ( ı ˚º!ı’, in Vayenas, ¯ØÆªøª, 241–78, stresses neoclassical tendencies; for the antinomy informing Kalvos’s work, Mario Vitti, ‘ˇ ˚º! Æ Æ Ø ÆØ ı ŒÆØæ ı’, ibid. 197–211.

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the neoclassical idiom; recent Italian criticism, on the other hand, classiWes him as a liminal but still Italian Wgure, born on the margins of the territory of later Italy, and posed equally precariously between Classicism and Romanticism, although nearer to the latter.6 When Foscolo, in 1816 and in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, sought political exile, Kalvos accompanied him over the next four years, Wrst to Switzerland and then to Britain. Shortly after their arrival there, Kalvos, for reasons that are not entirely clear, severed the ties with his mentor and eventually returned to Italy by way of Switzerland and France. After earlier attempts at neoclassical poetry and tragedy in Italian,7 and a Greek translation of The Psalms of David (from the Greek of the Septuagint) in 1820, Kalvos published his Greek Odes in two volumes of ten poems each, the Wrst in Geneva in 1824 (under the title Lyra), the second in Paris in 1826 (Lyrika). In 1826 he visited the Greek mainland for a short while, but eventually he settled on Kerkyra, employed as a teacher of philosophy by the Ionian Academy that had been established under the British. He returned to Britain in 1852, where he set up as a schoolmaster until his death in 1869; after the publication of the Odes his literary activities apparently ceased, with the exception of grammatical and liturgical writings, as well as his teaching on philosophy at the Ionian Academy.8 Kalvos’s literary development reXects an interplay of values of the Greek Enlightenment with a neo-Hellenism that promoted linguistic archaism, a French classicism with a strong didactic tone and appeal to virtue, and Italian neoclassical rhetoric, with its disdain for rhyme and a tradition of politically didactic odes. In addition to his classical schooling in Italy and the particular interest he expressed in Homer and Pindar, it is likely that he was brought up on the literary tenets of English sentimental poetry (particularly the works of Edward Young) and the still-potent fashion for Ossian, partly through his longer stay in Britain, and partly because of its general European prevalence.9 6 See e.g. Paula Ambrosino, Ugo Foscolo (Naples, 1993). 7 Kalvos’s Italian works are edited by G. Zoras, Andrea Calbo: Opere Italiane (Rome, 1938). 8 Now edited by P. Alibrandis as `æÆ ˚º!ı ÆŁ ÆÆ #ØºÆ (Athens, 2002). 9 Dimaras, ‘—ª ı’; earlier Giorgos Seferis, ‘—æ ºª ªØÆ ØÆ Œ ø ˇ" (1942), in ˜ŒØ , i (Athens, 1974), 56–63; on Ossian’s fashionability, Gaskill, ‘Ossian in Europe’, 643–78.


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Moreover, with Foscolo as a mentor, Kalvos was inXuenced by a writer who himself was working from within the tension of Classicism and Romanticism to deWne the role of the young intellectual in a changing social and literary world. Political liberation and aesthetic emancipation and the redeWnition of core values that came in the wake of the decades following 1789 are issues carried over into Kalvos’s own work. The Odes are essentially a poetry addressed to the places and people of Greece, making political freedom conditional upon virtue, clothed in a Homeric imagery and Pindaric allusions, borrowing from Classicism, Romanticism, and the Bible, and spoken by a post-1789 prophetic voice. Kalvos’s topographical desire, in other words, is expressed through a repertoire of images from diVerent traditions, while the diYculty of approach to the homeland is mirrored in the uncertainty, or rather indeWnite character, of style and genre. A range of largely foreign approaches results in a fragmented representation. The images of Kalvos’s islands, accordingly, in a similar variety of styles, form a topography of both personal and artistic development, and political aspiration played out on a real geographical plane. Kalvos’s nature, and islands in particular, too, cater to a variety of literary tastes and expectations, which include the appeal to the artiWce of nature as much as the appeal which is exerted by their sheer, rough materiality, and the appeal to the metaphorical quality of nature imagery as much as the real local concern. Despite Kalvos’s ostensible ‘consciousness of the sea’, that implies, with Elytis, a natural and somewhat more immediate foundation of his art, I suggest that Kalvos can be read proWtably within the frame of an ‘aesthetics of distance’10 as it characterized the appeal of the Greek islands for their philhellenic audience, before and during the War of Independence. Kalvos, too, uses the potential of islands to play out the distinction between nature and art. The opening ode ‘The Lover of the Homeland’ (‘ˇ #ØºÆæ’) addresses itself to Zakynthos as the source of Kalvos’s life and of his poetic gift: ‘you gave me breath, and Apollo’s golden gifts!’ The ode is interspersed with references to the poet’s life in other climes, and it oVers Zakynthos as both a seat and an object of 10 The term is Nigel Leaske’s, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford, 2002), 23.

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poetry, owing much of the imagery with which he pictures this past and future homeland to the classical idyll: ˘ÆŒ Łı Æ , ŒÆØ Æ !ı ŒØ, Œı ÆÆ Æ Ł Æ `æ Ø Ææªıæ Æ. ˚ÆØ æ Æ æÆ, ŒÆØ Æ ª !ÆØ æ æ Ø Ø : Æı ºÆÆØ ÆŒ Æ ˝æ . (st. 13–14) The woods of Zakynthos, her shadowy mountains, were once echoing with Artemis’ divine silver bows. Even today the shepherds venerate the trees and the cool springs; the Nereids still wander there.11

Kalvos was undoubtedly familiar with idyll as a genre,12 but the tradition appears in the Odes not only in classical allusions: the genre also Wgures in the laments on Chios and on the death of Byron, reminiscent of nature’s lament on the death of a shepherd, and in the awareness of artiWce in general.13 Pastoral idyll, of course, has a particularly high degree of self-referentiality, and is a genre that traditionally allowed the possibilities of literature to be exploited.14 Kalvos’s pastoral, though, is a shorthand that signposts its pedigree all right, but that cuts away at some of its strongest components, leaving a bared, starkly minimalist setting without turning that setting into an interactive stage. His Greek world has no living populace and no microcosm of shepherds reXecting their environment: although shepherds, at least in passing mention, still populate the Zakynthos of the Wrst ode, these poems are not pastoral in the 11 The odes are referred to by their translated title. Greek quotations are given following the edition by Stefanos Dialismas (Athens, 1988), the numbers indicate stanzas. 12 Apart from his classical education he had translated a selection of idylls by Giovanni Meli (1740–1815) from the Sicilian dialect into Italian in 1814. 13 A well-rehearsed motif with classical precedent in the Greek bucolic poets, Theocritus, Idylls 1; Bion, ‘Funeral Lament for Adonis’; Moschos, ‘Epitaph for Bion’. 14 Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago, 1996).


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sense of pretending to an artful normality of shepherd reality or of the ‘simple people’. The life of delightful simplicity and a Xowering earth are for the most part visions of the past or the future, and in the ode ‘To Psara’, for example, such scenes of blissful and playful nature, full of memories of its classical past, are Wrst elaborated and then rejected as inappropriate for the present situation. Similarly, the barren landscape of ravaged Greece is also the place where literature has been uprooted and exiled. Poetry is implicated in the landscape it describes and promises to re-create. Poetry is, likewise, implicated in a dialogue with Europe, its literary and political language, and its perceived audience. The lack of a broad and sympathetic readership, inside or outside the boundaries of Greece, may be one of the reasons for Kalvos’s neglect prior to his rediscovery by Palamas.15 And yet his Odes did not emerge out of a vacuum; they were mainly responding to an intended readership and sponsorship found in Swiss and French philhellenic circles (a French glossary was attached to the 1824 edition, and the work was translated into French the same year, while a French translation was attached to the edition of 1826).16 Of the Ionian poets engaged with the Greek War of Independence, Kalvos is therefore probably the one who is most immediately attuned to the European philhellenic discourse.17 Athina Georganta, who places the Odes, especially the second volume, Wrmly within the climate of philhellenic Paris and its Romantic aYnities (and its minor poets), particularly after the death of Byron, here identiWes also the fertile literary ground for projecting the poet-warrior motif onto political activism in the name of Greece.18 15 SoWa Skopetea, — ÆŁ ÆÆ ªØÆ `æÆ ˚º! (Athens, 1985), 23 f.; on the reception of Kalvos’s work in his own time and by Palamas, Vayenas, ‘ˇ Ø ø ŒæØØŒ : ˇ `ºÆæ ; —ÆºÆ ŒÆØ ı ˚º!ı’, ˜æ, 67–8 (1992), 50–74. 16 ‘His odes he wrote mainly for the Philhellenes and maybe for himself ’, Nikolaos Andriotis, ‘˙ ªºÆ ı ˚º!ı’, ˝Æ ¯Æ (Christmas 1946), 157–67, 159; on Switzerland, Nikolaos Veis, ‘˚º!ı æªÆ ŒÆØ æÆØ ¯º! Æ’, —æÆª ÆÆØ `ŒÆ Æ `Ł, 23/2 (1959). 17 On the philhellenic sentiment of Kalvos’s mentor Foscolo and his Hellenism as an artistic and political stance see S. Skopetea, — ÆŁ ÆÆ, 18. 18 Athina Georganta, ‘`æÆ ˚º!: ª ı Ø---º Ø ŒÆØ Øæ ÆæÆ’, in ˇØ Ø ı ˆ: —: Æ!! (Athens, 1998), 227–76.

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The appeal of exchanging the lyre for the sword, a frequent topos of philhellenic writing, becomes no less of a guiding image in Kalvos.19 The poet speaks as a witness, on behalf of a Greece waiting to be liberated, and there are several instances where the encounter with Greece (in its geographical as well as its cultural sense) enables the poetic voice to come forth in the Wrst place (as in ‘Lover of the Homeland’ or ‘To Death’). The poet, charting the Greek land, comes to fulWl a function equal to that of the active Wghter. Greece is the oldestablished (and hence natural) seat of freedom to be regained by the Wgure of Liberty. Freedom in turn is equated with virtue. Freedom and virtue are linked to the Greek earth through myth, memory, and poetry, with speciWc locality and people as points of contact. Within this framework, it is especially islands as a seat of freedom that are a familiar topos of the philhellenic discourse. The islands and places addressed in the Odes, in addition, conform to the catalogue of locations of speciWc philhellenic signiWcance. In ‘Okeanos’, the god of the sea, personiWed in Homeric style, is appealed to by Liberty, who has become his daughter: classical citation and neoclassical allegory are intertwined. Hydra, Spetses, and Psara, although not names ringing with classical allusions, are familiar from philhellenic literature and are praised in the same ode as proud rocks that have stood free of fear. ‘To Chios’ is a lament on the ravaged island whose destruction by the Ottomans in 1826 did so much to reinvigorate the European interest in the Greek cause. Parga on the coast and Souli on mainland Epirus, names synonymous with the Christian Albanian resistance against the Ottomans, provide the titles of two further odes. In the ode ‘To Glory’ mention is made of the Persian wars and the battle-sites at Marathon. Samos and its surrounding isles, although not evocative of military fortitude, are marked as the proper home ground of classical poetry, particularly that of Anacreon and Homer. With this last case, in addition, the chart of Kalvos’s own (standard) literary education is superimposed on the map of Greece.

19 The prevalence of the motif would also account for the tone of Kalvos’s letter ‘Au Geńe´ral Lafayette’ which introduces the second volume of the Odes: ‘Je quitte la France avec regret; mon devoir m’appelle dans ma patrie, pour exposer un coeur de plus au fer des Musulmans.’ Georganta, ‘˚º!’, 234 V., interprets the letter as a concession to literary expectations rather than as true intention.


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Kalvos was well read in the classical authors, and the nature simile as a rhetorical Wgure of his choice is another element of the Homeric, and later of the neoclassical, traditions. The simile is a Wgure of speech which openly Xags its status as an artiWcial agent, and openly indicates the comparison between, not the conXation of, two distinctly diVerent elements. Thus, even if the content of the nature similes found in the Odes may be similar to some aspects of Romantic lyrical nature,20 the degree of comparison is a diVerent, and more gratingly outspoken, one. In ‘To Victory’, for example, the enemy is likened, in an elaborate syntactic structure, to a preceding image of reeds quickly cut down and scattered to the wind: —ıŒ; ıŒ ø ŒÆº ØÆ Æ Ø Æ !ºÆ " Æ ŒØÆØ Ø ı Œ ı Æ ø º ø Æ " æ ÆÆ, Œ" Æ ºÆ. (st. 9) Thick, dense like swaying reeds we saw them moving on our Welds, the arms of our enemies, and they all fell.

Compare to this simile the anguished poetic identity conXating the boundaries of outer and inner world in the following lines from Soustos’s Wayfarer, analysed above: `ı !º Ø ŒÆº Ø æ Œıæø ; ¯ª ÆØ ŒÆº Ø, " " ø ı: (I. 2) Do you see that reed, bent and dry? I am that reed, that river is my life.

Kalvos’s engagement with the language of Romantic nature is more reluctant in other respects as well. Images featuring prominently in his similes are lions and eagles, animals with a Wrm place both in the biblical and the Homeric canons, and weighing on the side of the emblematic tradition rather than that of Romantic nature poetry, 20 Georgia Farinou, ‘Æ æ ÆØŒ Ø Æ Ø Ø ı `æÆ ˚º!ı’, —ÆæÆ , 18 (1976), 104–15, with particular reference to similes.

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while still achieving a great sense of self-referentiality as a writer of Greece (e.g. ‘To Death’, ‘To the Muses’, and repeatedly in ‘Okeanos’). The eagle in particular is an emblematic animal of authority, that of Matthew, the evangelist most strongly characterized as a writer, or that of the classical poet (e.g. Pindar, Ol. 2. 91). What is more, it opens a perspective that stresses height and a distanced far-sightedness over a position within the place that is, notionally, at the centre of these odes. In the places where the strong paraenetic quality of the odes combines with a Wrst-person voice assuming a bird’s-eye perspective to survey its real and poetic ground, height and images of verticality are equated with sublimity and freedom. ‘To Parga’ provides one such example, that is interesting in more than one respect. The location already answers to a philhellenic interest. Originally part of the ‘United States of the Ionian Islands’, Parga, on the mainland, was in 1819 ceded by the British to Ali Pasha of Ioannina, the Albanian Muslim pasha of Epirus, while the subsequent exodus of the Pargiots to the nearby island of Kerkyra quickly became part of the philhellenic repertoire.21 The ode opens with an appeal to the lyre for a hypselon tonon, a sublime tone; man is endowed, among other virtues, with the ‘wings of the mind’, so that, when faced with the fall of fortune’s chariot over the precipice of life, ‘we’ (man and poet) can assume the position of the eagle soaring on high, its cries echoed by the clouds above or by the torrents and rocks below (st. 3–6). Not only is the view over a landscape Wrst linked here with the metaphor of life’s abyss and then sublimated into the free vision of the poet; in the following section Parga itself is introduced as a site overlooking the land in motion, thus instantly elevated to a place of sublimity and liberation:22 &Œı ÆØ ı ÆÆ ºÆØÆ —æªÆ ıłºŒæ

21 Foscolo himself was involved, through correspondence, in political matters regarding Parga on Kerkyra; see Elizabeth Constantinides, ‘Language and Meaning in Kalvos’s ‘‘Ode to Parga’’ ’, Journal of Modern Hellenism, 1 (1984), 1–14. 22 The lofty view corresponding to a free mental state is also reminiscent of Rousseau’s Nouvelle He´loı¨se (see Ch. 2 above). Kalvos, judging from his letters, engaged with Rousseau’s writings around 1814 while still in Italy. For the intertwining of language and imagery to stress the loftiness of poet and Pargiots alike, see Constantinidis, ‘Language and Meaning’, 11 f.


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!º Ø: ŒÆØ Æı ¢æ ı æ º Ø. (st. 7) Upon the olive-groves swaying down below looks Parga seated high above; Ares loved her especially too.

Kalvos does not stop here but develops the image of Parga to make plain the position of Greek poetry: no verse or echo in praise of freedom was heard across the land when servitude reigned; now is the time for the exiles to return. The images of verticality, underlining the free soaring of virtue, recur in the opening conceit of the ode ‘To Samos’. Icarus’s Xight to sublime heights, driven by virtue and freedom, took place here, as did his fall: `" ıłº ø , ŒÆØ ÆŁÆ º Ł æ.— ` ª ªØ Ø ıæı; Ø æØŒ . Æ ŒæØ ºÆª Ø ªø : ˝Æ — Æ ÆØ ˚æÆÆØ; Œ" ˚ºı Æ ı æ Ø Æ ºÆ " ÆŁæØÆ Ł. (st. 3–4) Yet he fell down from high and died a free man.—Whereas when dying honourless, slaughtered by a tyrant, know your grave to be terrible. Muse, you know the Icarian sea well. Here is Patmos, the Corassian islands, and Calymnos feeding the bees with unharvested Xowers.

In defence against tyranny, Kalvos raises the islands in return from the free grave of the Icarian sea and marks them at the same time as sites of poetry. In ‘The Volcanoes’ (‘Æ ˙ÆØÆ’), the natural scene becomes the substitute for the description of a battle scene. All that can be heard and seen is wind and waves: ÆŒ ø Æ ı Æ ı æÆ Ø Æ ŒÆæØÆ Æ Æ ŒÆØ Ø Æ ØÆ Ø !ØÆø ıæ Ø.

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Between Idyll and Abyss ÆŒ ø ŁºÆÆ ı ø ªÆ Ø Æ Æ Ø ı !æ ı Œı Æ ıæ ıæ Ø ª æø Ø Æ Œ. (st. 33–4)

All I hear is the blowing wind whistling ferociously through masts, torn by the sails. All I hear is the sea, like a big river hurtling past rocks, surrounding the ships.

The pattern is repeated in ‘To Souli’: `Œ ø; ÆŒ ø Ł æı! ø Ææ : Œı!æ Ø Ø ø,

ø Ø ı !æ ı æ ÆØ ŁºÆÆ. ˜ ! Ø Ø ø, Æ Æ ª Æ Œºæ æ Ø : æ Æ ººÆ ªıØ Ø ÆæÆ. (st. 21–2) I hear, I hear the sound as of a battle beginning; thus the sea thunders when it hurls itself against the rocks. Thus the forest roars when through the clouds the wind whips it ferociously; the dry leaves take Xight in the air.

This is Kalvos’s version of the ‘nature in arms’ motive found in philhellenic literature. It is also what Elytis has called Kalvos’s ‘acoustic imagination’;23 the stress on aural images, apart from visual ones, is in keeping with the aesthetic preferences of Romantic writing; yet this is not so much metaphorical speaking, envisaging a corresponding nature in arms, as it is a choice of metonymy: items of nature serve as substitutes for a larger scene of battle, just as much as the roll-call of places opens the question whether there is a unity behind these excerpts at all. The metonymic selection may, like the emperor’s new clothes, be in fact the total of what of Greece is representable, and the synaesthetic combination of sense perception may likewise 23 Elytis, ‘`ºŁ ıØªø Æ’, 99.


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betray a disturbing absence, or ab-sense, of vision, applying Calotychos’s terminology to Greek writing itself. Within Kalvos’s cosmos of partial perception, the focus on wind imagery, in particular, may well relate to its centrality in other Romantic (especially British) poetry too, where the breeze is the element that mediates between the external world and the spiritual world of the poet; as ‘inspiration’ it is the link between the physical and the metaphysical, the ‘correspondent breeze’.24 As an aspect of the physical world that is inseparable from the projection of poetic identity, the references to air and wind are particularly numerous in the Odes.25 Yet despite its steady blowing, the scene reviewed in most odes has a static and emblematic quality. Kalvos’s nature does not follow the dynamic of the Romantic symbol. Despite all their Romantic borrowings, the Odes never lose a feeling of daring, but still allegorical composition. The partial and complex organicism of allegorical personiWcation, however, is not the same as the generative nature–nation equation; for all the particular and all the direct naming of Greek places that structures Kalvos’s poetry, there is a strong sense of the emblematic to suggest that, beyond the enabling frame that holds and creates the emblem, there really ‘is no there there’, to quote Gertrude Stein. Kalvos’s imagery is not easily subsumed under the Romantic challenge of representation. Dimaras, arguing for the inXuences of a European pre-Romanticism on Kalvos, has presented a comprehensive count of Romantic keywords;26 yet, as Skopetea points out in a study on the ‘centripetal’ poetic voice of Kalvos as constantly ‘Xeeing’ or witnessing scenes of Xight and retreat, not every night is a Romantic night and not every roaring lion and foaming river is an instance of inimical nature.27 The image of nature and landscape of the Odes is not one to be ambivalent in itself. It is not the challenge of 24 M. H. Abrams, ‘The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor’, in id., English Romantic Poets, 37–54. 25 Athina Georganta, ‘˙ æ ÆØŒ Æºł ; ø æ ÆØŒ ŒÆØ Ø ( ı `æÆ ˚º!ı’, in M. Stephanopoulou (ed.), ˇ $ ÆØ ¯ººÆ: ¯Ø ØŒ ı Ø (Athens, 2001), 69–85. 26 Dimaras, ‘—ª ı’, 106 f. 27 SoWa Skopetea, ‘ˇ ˚º! Æ $ ÆØŒ æ’, — æºı, 34/5 (1993), 138–44.

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appropriate representation as symptomatic of poetic self-deWnition mirrored in nature. Here the confusion and indeterminacy of perception that we saw in Rangavis is not experienced by the speaker, but instead wished upon the enemy: Æ ÆæÆª ø Łæ Ææ ı Æ º ! æ ªªÆÆ; ŒÆØ Æ Æ ÆØ Æ Æ ÆæÆ. (‘To Souli’, st. 10) May the confused mind of the enemies of my country fabricate horrible giants and imagine knives all around.

Neither do we Wnd the dream reality associated with that form of Romantic ambivalence. The visions of Kalvos’s Odes come and go with clearly marked transitions. The opening sequence of the ode ‘The Spectre’, for example, indicates the kind of Romantic perceptual confusion that we encountered in Rangavis and will again meet in Solomos: Æ ı Œ ÆØ: ª ı Æ æØÆ ı ªæ Ø: ÆŁ ºø æ ø ø Æ Æ æÆ !ı ; Ø ºÆªªØ. (st. 1) My spirit is confused; the earth beneath my feet moves; involuntarily I run as if from a mountain top into a valley.

Yet the scene is framed by the end of the preceding ode ‘The Prayers’: ‘No passion can blind me; I strike the lyre and stand erect,’ while by the end of ‘The Spectre’ the apparition has disappeared like a dream, replaced by the freshness of air reviving body and soul; the main horriWc vision of the interlude thus stands between the claim to clearsighted steadfastness of the poetic ‘I’ in ‘The Prayers’ and his reassuring look upon the real Greece still Wghting in ‘The Spectre’: ‘O Greece! . . . I see you still alive and Wghting, and I take new spirit’ (st. 18). The spectre of disunity, which hovers over the visionary scene, is more reminiscent of Virgil’s black-feathered fama and the


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apocalyptic visions of the Old Testament than of the Romantic nightmare, where the border between dream and reality is blurred.28 The visions of Greece and Greeks caught in inWnite slaughter are signiWcant, yet they are emphatically not suggested as an alternative reality from which the poetic ‘I’ has diYculty in disentangling himself. Far from moving towards the spectre of empty exhortatory verse,29 Kalvos fully integrates his awareness of the workings of poetry into his thematic programme. The penultimate ode, ‘To Victory’, opens with a concession to the artiWce of the imagination; man always envisions victory as a person: ˇ; ı ı ÆÆÆ ºª ø Ł " Æ æø !º Ø ÆæŁ % ÆæÆ, ıæØ æª. (st. 1) You, whom the Wery imagination of mortals sees as a winged virgin in the air, heavenly creature.

Yet this is not the Romantic delight and agony over the discovery of self-reXectiveness and the involvement of the imagination permeating all levels of reality. It is an assured gesture towards artiWce and poetic diction as a Wxed convention. Like his contemporaries, Kalvos too is engaged in the struggle to Wnd a shape for his vision of a Greek land, and there is in the Odes a very real, material aspect to his representation of Greece. The word ge¯ is used most often to indicate the Greek earth, as the material world opposed to a spiritual one (in ‘To Death’), as the ‘earth of the Gods’ in ‘Okeanos’, and as the site of virtue and freedom. The places or 28 Kalvos was well acquainted with biblical language and imagery; in 1820 he had translated and published part of the Psalter of David. See also Giannis Dallas’s introduction in Andreas Kalvos, ˇØ 'Æº ı ˜Æ! (Athens, 1981). The importance of nature imagery, especially in the personiWcation of nature, in the Psalms and in Kalvos would warrant a detailed study. By the late eighteenth century, of course, some biblical writing, especially prophecy and the Psalms, had seen a positive reevaluation as lyrical poetry. 29 Philip Sherrard, ‘Andreas Kalvos and the Eighteenth-Century Ethos’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1 (1975), 175–206, thinks there is a lapse into the empty phrase overriding ‘real’ poetic-Romantic sentiment towards the end of the Odes.

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topoi chosen are described in their precise environment, yet they also relate to a philhellenic literary discourse. They are concrete images set in a carefully crafted frame. Undoubtedly, Kalvos is concerned with the present political situation and its immediate eVect on a geographical territory, but his choice of images and the line of his poetry are shaped by literary expectations of several kinds. It is therefore futile to try and press him into either category of Classic or Romantic; instead, each reading has to examine anew the balance and the eVect produced by his considerable repertoire of literary styles, according to the questions posed by interpretation. As far as the representation of locality and landscape and the use of nature imagery are concerned, Kalvos diVers from the young writers of the Athenian circle. Theirs is a struggle with the logic of the objective correlative and with the structure of analogy, both that between nature and observer and that between Greek writing and European writing. In Kalvos’s case, by contrast, we have a diVerent tendency, which tallies with privileging neoclassical forms and Wgures that are rewritten into Romantic discourse. Tziovas has claimed that Kalvos’s imagery is largely metonymic rather than metaphoric,30 thus locating him within a neoclassicist aesthetic more than a Romantic one, conforming more to a harmonious parallel between the physical world and the human being—even though the formality of neoclassical Wgures of speech may leave as much of a void at the centre of representing Greece as the tension of Romantic analogy does. Overall, though, the Odes oVer evidence allowing for neoclassical and Romantic readings alike. Kalvos’s use of landscape and location may be one of appropriateness rather than of approximation, the latter in the sense of striving to Wnd a symbol or image to represent ideas, a striving that can never be entirely achieved. The high degree of aesthetic consciousness, though, that the Romantics problematized in nature imagery, appears in Kalvos as an awareness of artiWce and aesthetic values, which manifests itself in the corresponding artiWce of nature imagery. That imagery, in turn, is occasioned by the real locations oVered by the Greek homeland. Instead of a material symbol, the Greek land, as a topos of freedom, may be a material metonymy—yet be no less signiWcant for that. 30 Tziovas, ‘˝ ŒºÆØŒ Æ Ø’, 258 V.


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T H E TO P O S O F F R E E DO M : I D E A L I S M , RO MANTIC LANDSCAPE, AND THE P OE TRY O F D I O NYS I O S S O LO M O S In contrast to the diYcult and intermittent reception of Kalvos, Dionysios Solomos is and was regarded as one of the founding poets of the Greek state, with the lasting and undoubtedly cumbersome stature of a ‘national poet’, even though the course of true national poethood did not run smooth in his case either.31 Certain features of his work, however, for example the treatment of landscape, suggest both that this is a problematic role for him, and that he shares diYculties with the European Romantic movement in general, and its German variety in particular. Solomos is known to have had access to some of the theoretical and poetic works of Idealism and Early Romanticism, among them those of Schiller and Schelling, whose philosophical dilemmas Wnd an equivalent in Solomos’s representations of a Greek landscape and the subsequent question of its contribution to a national identity. The result is a stuttering logic of representing Greek space as signiWcant nature, national or individual. As with Kalvos, we see a breaking down of the imagined Greek land into its components and into modes of perception, exposing its parts, and intensifying the logic of the Romantic symbol. Like Kalvos, Solomos was born on the Ionian Island of Zakynthos in 1798, a mere year after the Ionian islands had been ceded to France.32 (The overwhelming lack of evidence, incidentally, that the two poets ever met continues to exercise Greek writers and critics.) The son of a Zakynthian aristocrat and a Greek-speaking local servant (Solomos’s father married her on his deathbed, thus bestowing legitimacy and the title of count on his son), he was sent to Italy in 1808, to be educated at Cremona and Pavia. In 1818, with a half-hearted law degree and whole-hearted poetic aspirations, he returned to Zakynthos, by then 31 e.g. Dimaras, æÆ, 27 V.; Beaton, Introduction, 34. 32 On Solomos’s life and work see, in English, Peter Mackridge, Dionysios Solomos (Bristol, 1989); Theodore Stavrou, ‘Dionysios Solomos: The Making of a National Poet’, in Louis Coutelle et al. (eds.), A Greek Diptych: Dionysios Solomos and Alexandros Papadiamantis (Minnesota, 1986), 3–37.

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a British protectorate. Thus he too witnessed the struggle for Greek independence from a distance—by all accounts, more cultural than geographical. The publication of Solomos’s Wrst volume, Rime improvizzate, in 1822, a collection of sonnets and largely religious poetry composed in Italian, coincides—at least as far as the biographers are concerned—with his encounter with the Greek historian and politician Spyridon Trikoupis. Whatever the exact nature and degree of this key scene may have been, Solomos after 1822 shifted his attention to the Greek language, literally his mother tongue, as a poetic medium and a political issue alike.33 The debate over Dante, especially his advocacy of the vernacular, that was gaining momentum in Italy prepared the ground for Solomos’s prose Dialogue (1824), which— against the backdrop of the roaring cannons over at Missolonghi in the distance—treats the Greek-language question in the context of political freedom, leading the narrator to side emphatically with the demoticist position. Those sounds from the mainland remain the backdrop for most of his early poetry in Greek (this particular image of geographical distance and proximity alike is still enjoying a healthy afterlife in critical accounts of Solomos); among them the ‘Hymn to Freedom’ (1823), ‘On the Death of Lord Byron’ (1826), and early satires, most famously ‘The Woman of Zakynthos’ (begun in 1826), which are concerned, at least as a foil in the last case, with political freedom and the call for political unity. In 1828 Solomos moved to Kerkyra. However one wants to construct the development of his writing, what seems certain is that metaphysical abstraction in his texts becomes more pronounced. The triptych of poems ‘The Free Besieged’ (‘ˇØ ¯º Ł æØ —ºØæŒØ Ø’), in three consecutive drafts dating from 1823 to 1847, ‘The Cretan’ (1844), and ‘The Shark’ (1847–9) employ diVerent poetic forms, but share the theme of spirituality and transcendence, albeit in very diVerent manifestations: as moral freedom in ‘The Free Besieged’, the contact with divine love in ‘The Cretan’, and (lethal) self-knowledge in the face of natural beauty in ‘The Shark’. After 1849, however, and until his death in 1857, Solomos, who had continued to use Italian in 33 For a view which attempts to assess Solomos’s bilingualism not as a linear heroic struggle away from Italian towards his ‘native’ Greek, but instead as a symbiotic yet precarious balance of the two, see Peter Mackridge, ‘Dionisio Salamon/Dionysios Solomos: Poetry as a Dialogue Between Languages’, Dialogos, 1 (1994), 59–76.


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parts of his manuscript drafts and comments, returned to the exclusive use of Italian for his last shorter poems.34

READINGS OF SOLO MOS Since the Wrst publications of Solomos’s poems, and certainly since the Wrst edition of his works in 1859, two years after his death, by his disciple Iakovos Polylas, any reading of the literary and philosophical inXuences on Solomos has been shaped by a reading of his artistic personality. Polylas’s edition not only established authoritative versions of the poems from the unpublished and overwhelmingly fragmentary manuscripts, such as there were;35 it was also prefaced with a long biographical account—the ‘Prolegomena’—which has remained a foundation-stone for all further readings, both to build upon and to stumble over. Polylas’s ‘Prolegomena’ oVers essentially the structure of artistic education and acculturation familiar from the Ku¨nstlerroman.36 He sketches the development of the young poet’s sensibility and imagination, Wrst in his Italian education, while in their overall structure the ‘Prolegomena’ are teleologically directed towards Solomos’s readings of German thought and literature. The study and assimilation of German philosophy in his mature period (whose beginning Polylas marks by Solomos’s move to Kerkyra in 1828) is presented as the high point of his moral and intellectual education, complementing the ‘essential Greekness’ of his character and art, which would have crumbled under the impact 34 Solomos’s manuscript drafts and comments, edited as `ı ªæÆÆ ‚æªÆ (further shortened, AE), 2 vols., ed. Linos Politis (Thessaloniki, 1964), are literally a mosaic of drafts, fragments, and translations in Italian, Greek, and French. For the diYculties of the transcriptions by Polylas and Politis see Peter Mackridge, ‘ˇØ Æ æ Ø ø ‘‘¯º Ł æø —ºØæŒØ ø’’: Æ Æ Øæ ªæÆÆ Ø Œ Ø’, ¯ººØŒ, 51 (2001), 109–39. 35 The fragmentation of Solomos has incurred a large range of interpretation, from biographical circumstance, to deliberate Romantic programme, to, most recently, Vangelis Calotychos’s analysis of Solomos as a complex ‘oral’, performative poet; a concise summary of the positions in Calotychos, Modern Greece, 73–87. 36 Vassilis Lambropoulos, ‘The Fictions of Criticism: The Prolegomena of Iakovos Polylas as Ku¨nstlerroman’, in Literature as National Institution (Princeton, 1988), 66–84.

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and ‘moodiness’ of German thought had it been encountered at any stage before.37 Polylas concentrates speciWcally on the inXuence of Schiller’s aesthetics and ethics on Solomos, and, what is more, he uses a Schillerian model to describe and evaluate Solomos’s environment and his response to it. Schiller is seen to be attributing to man an essential, limitless freedom, manifesting itself in human will as it conquers or transcends nature (in the sense of natural determination). Polylas reads Solomos’s conscious choice to return to the Ionian islands after his education in Italy as just such an act of moral will: ‘The same gratitude . . . he now felt as a sacred duty towards the land that had instilled in him his great love for the Beautiful and the True . . . a debt he was later to repay not with empty words but with deeds and benefactions . . . He chose to decline a brilliant career as a poet that was temptingly beckoning to him in Italy. And he did this of his own will.’38 Identifying beauty and morality, Schiller is held to be calling for an aesthetic and hence moral re-education of man, with the Wnal goal of an aesthetic state, composed of free, that is, morally autonomous individuals. The deWcient society, which is responsible for the present alienation, can also provide its remedy in the form of the aesthetic. Polylas projects this model of history onto the contemporary political situation; moreover, he uses it to explain and justify Solomos’s refusal to actually visit the state of Greece, when he continues an extensive quotation from Schiller’s On Aesthetic Education, regarding the antiaesthetic nature of the state, as follows: ‘It was mainly due to his awareness of all this that he had restrained himself from setting foot on the liberated part of Greece, knowing very well that he wouldn’t have been able to remain indiVerent to the many improper actions that always characterize the behaviour of a newly created nation.’39 Solomos’s choice of life in a Greek land is thus identiWed with an aesthetic concern for, and representation of, Hellas as the objective correlative to his artistic and personal inner world. The identiWcation of Solomos as a national poet, which set in soon after his publication, kept him especially tightly linked to the question of

37 Polylas, ‘Prolegomena’, in Solomos, ¢ÆÆ, i, ed. Linos Politis (Athens, 1948), 11 f. 38 Ibid. 13. 39 Ibid. 29.


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the realization and location of the idea of freedom.40 Polylas’s account makes Solomos relate, as far as this is possible, to a political and geographical reality by making use of the historical aspect still quite prominent in Schiller. The interpretation of his reading of the German Idealist sources that is put forward here focuses on spiritual-moral and aesthetic freedom in so far as freedom is still somehow linked to a material reality. Solomos’s poetic activity—since the publication of his works by Polylas, almost inevitably considered in relation to his German readings—has usually been interpreted as coming from within a context concerned with the re-evaluation of freedom and the redeWnition of national space. Although the emphasis on Schiller as an important source for Solomos is to a large extent justiWed, this concentration results in a lop-sided account of Schiller’s thought, for one thing, and consequently of his relevance to Solomos, for another. The tradition of Idealist thought is not wholly compatible with this focus on ‘real’ territory, and this tension, which lies beneath the surface not only of Schiller’s work, but also of other Idealist and Romantic writing, has often been eased by elevating Solomos to the status of founder of a true spiritual culture, whose work represents a second step of neo-Hellenism after the initial political liberation.41 However, the tension remains unresolved, especially since the poems explicitly concerned with freedom (such as the ‘Hymn to Freedom’, the ‘Ode on the Death of Lord Byron’, and ‘The Free Besieged’) treat very recent historical events and their historical locations, which were quickly adopted as quite literal landmarks in the imagination of the Greek state. Criticism, then as now, has been Wrmly determined by the string of replies to the exegetic tradition beginning with Polylas, who interpreted Solomos’s sources in relation to the question of artistic and Hellenic integrity and authenticity.42 The ‘German problem’, and a 40 One of the earliest examples is probably Spyridon Trikoupis’s review of the ‘Hymn to Freedom’ in the General Newspaper of Greece (21 Oct. 1825). Trikoupis not only praises Solomos for his service to Greece in his international success, he also links the rehabilitation of freedom—charted in poetry—to the rehabilitation of Greek poetry as such. By following Solomos’s image of freedom as having been buried in the bones of the ancients, he reaYrms the alignment of Solomos’s poetry to the Greek (material) land. 41 See e.g. P. Charis, ‘ Æ ¯º ıŁ æÆ æª ı ˜Øıı ºø ’, ˝Æ ¯Æ, 104/1253 (1978), 47–54, 48. 42 On the interpretation of Solomos as a ‘national poet’, see Dimitris Tziovas, ‘The Reception of Solomos: National Poetry and the Question of Lyricism’, Byzantine and

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‘German murkiness’, which many take to epitomize the intellectual traditions he studied,43 has since been a constant feature in that critics have made Solomos’s ‘Germanism’ a criterion of literary and political value. Zambelios’s attack, circulated around the same time as Polylas’s edition, puts it bluntly: ‘I am grieved indeed that I am bound to give the repulsive name of apostasy to the desertion of the author of the Hymn to Germanism, foreign in substance and in shape.’44 Whether later critics were endorsing or condemning this turn, they shared the focus on the period after 1830, giving pride of place to the translations of foreign, especially German, works carried out for Solomos by the brothers Nikolaos and Ermannos Lountzis.45 To see how important the German sources were, though, they ought to be placed within the overall context of Solomos’s studies, including evidence for contact that preceded or transcended this important yet limited perspective on the Kerkyra period. Juxtaposing Solomos’s work and his German ‘sources’, as sharing and, in Solomos’s case, Modern Greek Studies, 23 (1999), 164–94. Tziovas claims that European-Romantic and national tendencies of interpretation maintain a balance: ‘The historical and the aesthetic approaches to Solomos, although often opposed to each other, sustained in eVect his image as national poet since they supported the two basic components of this constructed image: the celebration of the national struggle and the demotic literary and linguistic tradition on the one hand, and the Romantic belief in the genius of the great and lonely artist on the other. It was the latter with its aesthetic, idealistic and European dimensions which prevented the former from sliding into ethnocentrism and ultra-patriotism’ (p. 190). 43 Giorgos Veloudis, ˜Ø Ø ºø : $ ÆØŒ ŒÆØ ØØŒ: ˇØ ª æ ÆØŒ ª (Athens, 1989), 13. 44 Quoted by Coutelle, ‘Dionysios Solomos: Poetry and Patriotism’, in Coutelle et al. (eds.), Diptych, 38–59, 57. In the 1890s, while debunking the Athenian Romantics, Palamas was at the forefront of restoring Solomos as a national poet; see e.g. Venetia Apostolidou, ˇ ˚ø —ÆºÆ ØæØŒ ººØŒ ºª Æ (Athens, 1992). Varnalis’s important Solomos Without Metaphysics (1925) approached the problem of both the work and the idolization of Solomos (exempliWed by Apostolakis, ˙ ø Æ (Athens, 1923)), by way of an openly Marxist-inXuenced reading, diverting the focus on to the historical-material background, yet still identifying Schiller and Hegel as inXuential sources. The last pairing is probably that of Veloudis, who sees Solomos as strongly inXuenced by German Romanticism, and Louis Coutelle, Formation poe´tique de Solomos (1818–1833) (Athens, 1977), who stresses the early formation of the poet in an Italian neoclassicist environment. 45 The brothers Lountzis, of half-Ionian and half-Danish parentage (their grandfather was the Danish consul in Venice), had both spent time at German universities, with a particular aYnity for Hegelian circles. See Zisimos Synodinos, ‘æºªØŒ

ØªæÆ Æ ¯æ ı ¸ ’, — æºı, 38–9 (1994), 23–38.


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intensifying a dynamic of spatial signiWcance in aesthetic representation, allows us to examine the communication between German aesthetics and the spatial dilemmas of Solomos’s representation of Greece. The focus on Schiller’s theoretical works in analysing Solomos’s later writing does not do credit to the scope of his reading, which spans a far broader period, to begin with. If we look outside the period between the mid-1830s and the late 1840s, there is ample evidence for Solomos’s earlier contact with German thought and literature, ranging from the fashion of Sturm und Drang to early Romanticism, which had already been received (and translated) in Italy before and during the decade of his studies there.46 The twentyWve now-extant manuscript notebooks of translations by Nikolaos Lountzis almost certainly do not represent the complete corpus.47 Among the volumes are selective translations of Kant’s and Schiller’s philosophical works.48 This is matched by a corpus of poetry from the same period, ranging from poems by Klopstock and Bu¨rger to a selection of Schiller’s poems and ballads. There is an equally representative range of Goethe’s writings, but, as with Schiller, there seems a stronger interest in the lyrical rather than the dramatic works. In addition, there are also excerpts from Goethe’s diaries, correspondence, and, interestingly, a signiWcant number of selections from such 46 There is evidence that Solomos maintained contact with literary developments through the Italian reception of German thought and literature. A letter to a bookseller from Solomos’s friend Besenghi degli Ughi in 1830, for example, shows an order, on Solomos’s behalf, of Italian translations of Schlegel and Schiller, together with a request for a French copy of Lessing’s Laokoon; repr. in Linos Politis, ˆ æø ºø : º ŒÆØ æŁæÆ (1938–1982) (Athens, 1985), 324 f. Stylianos Alexiou, ‘ˆ æ ÆØŒ Øæ Ø ºø : ˙ ‘‘# ªªÆæı ’’: ØæØŒ

ı !ÆŁæ ı ‘‘˚æØŒ ’’ ’, in ºø ØŒ (Athens, 1994), 17–32, sees traces of Klopstock’s and Schiller’s poems as early as the ‘Hymn to Freedom’ and ‘Lambros’. 47 I follow the lists in Politis, ˆ æø ºø , 331–9 and Veloudis, $ ÆØŒ , 43–8. Also Louis Coutelle, ‘`Ø Ææ Ø ı ˝: ¸ ªØÆ ºø : ˇØ ŒØŒ ˘ÆŒ Łı’, ˇ ¯æÆØ, 3 (1965), 225–48. These translations, often excerpts of varying length and scattered over a number of Greek research institutions, have so far not been published or researched in depth, although they certainly deserve close attention. 48 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft. I. Abschnitt: Analytik des Erhabenen, and Schiller’s ¨ ber das Erhabene’ and ‘U ¨ ber naive Philosophische Briefe, together with his essays ‘U ¨ ber und sentimentalische Dichtung’. Polylas mentions another three works, namely U ¨ ber den Grund des Vergnu¨die a¨sthetische Erziehung des Menschen, and the essays ‘U ¨ ber das Pathetische’. gens an tragischen Gegensta¨nden’ and ‘U

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short forms, verging on the fragmentary and collective, as the aphor¨ stlicher Divan), and isms, the lyrics of the West-Eastern Divan (West-O the Tame Invectives (Zahme Xenien). Further, there is good evidence for readings of post-Kantian Idealism, all works characterized by religious and aesthetic themes.49 Literary works of the early Romantic period complement these theoretical writings, among them chieXy Novalis’s poetry (Hymnen an die Nacht, Gedichte, Geistliche Lieder), his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and the fragmentary novel The Apprentices of Sais (Die Lehrlinge zu Sais), together with a great number of his theoretical fragments. From the same period there are excerpts from Ludwig Tieck’s novel Franz Sternbald’s Travels (Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen) and poems by Uhland and Ko¨rner. The collection of philosophical works also contains substantial excerpts from Hegel’s own writings and reviews.50 To complement Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy, Solomos also had available sections from Wolfgang Menzel’s history of German literature (Die Deutsche Literatur), especially those on Schelling, Novalis, and German philosophy. Beyond those primary texts, a number of book reviews are included with the translations, among them a very long account of Fischer’s Somnambulismus, while he could Wnd further information on German thought and literature in volumes of the Italian periodical Biblioteca Italiana, which included regular reviews, for example, of Schiller’s dramatic works (1828), Lessing’s Laokoon (1833), and recent theoretical writings of Italian Romanticism. Are there general conclusions to be drawn about Solomos’s reading of German Idealism and early Romanticism? German sources were not his only Romantic models and precedents; these are certainly not restricted to any one national inXuence only, especially if ‘inXuences’ here implies conceptual inXuences and shared tendencies rather than speciWc textual parallels. Given the evidence of the 49 e.g. translations of Fichte’s Vorlesungen u¨ber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten and Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, as well as Schelling’s Vorlesungen u¨ber die Methode des akademischen Studiums, U¨ber das Verha¨ltnis der bildenden Ku¨nste zur Natur, and System des transzendentalen Idealismus, Erster und Sechster Hauptabschnitt. 50 Of Hegel, there are excerpts from Enzyklopa¨die der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Phenomenologie des Geistes, and Vorlesungen u¨ber die Geschichte der Philosophie; untitled reviews by Hegel of works by F. H. Jacobi, K. W. F. Solger, and J. G. Hamann, further the DiVerenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, as ¨ sthetik. well as the introduction to his Vorlesungen u¨ber die A


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manuscript translations, Solomos would likely have appreciated Goethe’s essay on the literary meteors and the imagery of movement, literary tendencies, and moods transmitted ‘in the air’ (as quoted in the Introduction), and Solomos, no matter how thoroughly he may or may not have read the translations, took an interest in them at least to the extent that he likely found them reminiscent of his own concepts.51 Criticism on Solomos, keen on synthesis and reconciliation itself, has tended to identify those elements as inXuential which relate to the theme of unity. Beginning with Leibniz’s harmonious relation of the particular and the universal, through to a Kantian notion of consensus and moral community, we arrive at the heights of Idealism with Schelling’s philosophy of identity and Hegel’s system of the Absolute and One. An image of Solomos emerges that portrays him as an artist concerned with new artistic form, searching for the particular symbol to represent an underlying universality. The aspect of deferral, however, inherent in the Romantic concept of symbolic representation, as well as the question of the representation and realization of the ideal in general, is in that scheme easily underestimated. Theories of transcendence, unity and synthesis in general are taken to be the overriding characteristic and main motif of Solomos’s sources, sometimes without proper acknowledgement that the German Idealists and Romantics, and Solomos after them, were fully aware of the diYculty of such synthesis and often struggled in vain to achieve it. In this light it is preferable to aim for an interpretation of Solomos’s imagery, especially regarding nature and Greek locality, that derives insight from those works corresponding in some respects to the poetic concerns raised in Solomos’s texts; I will limit the discussion to his poems ‘The Free Besieged’ and the ‘Hymn to Freedom’, although ‘The Cretan’ and especially ‘The Shark’ could proWtably be analysed in the light of Idealist and Romantic concepts of nature and self too. Those are also the poems most closely linked to claims about Solomos’s standing as the poet of the Greek nation, dealing with the literal, material landmarks of Greek national understanding. 51 Coutelle, ‘ Ææ Ø’, concludes from his examination of the notebooks that little use was made of most of them; the choice of material, though, with a large focus on themes of poetics, friendship, and the link between the author and his society, may yield new insights into the mechanism of selection by Solomos or, more likely, his translators’ circle.

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Beaton argues that ‘Solomos, like many Greek writers after him, resists and so modiWes the abstract separation between soul and body that he found in Schiller and the German Romantics’. In ‘The Free Besieged’, the besieged citizens are, in a distinct echo of Schiller, ‘subjected to a Wnal temptation by the beauties of nature in spring, in order for their souls to achieve true freedom in the renunciation of all earthly things’.52 Precedent is found, for example, in Schiller’s treatise ‘On the ¨ ber den Grund des Vergnu¨gens an Delight in Tragic Subjects’ (‘U tragischen Gegensta¨nden’), where he summarizes moral free will as the act of sublimating natural forces.53 Under natural forces Schiller subsumes everything that is not moral, that is, not governed by the laws of reason: desires and emotions, as much as physical nature and fate. In other words, this is again the ambiguity and increased hermeneutic complexity of ‘nature’ as a generative concept in that period: by locating nature, and oneself in relation to it, by assigning nature a place, nature is also overcome. As for ‘The Free Besieged’, to judge from the extant fragments sketching the end of the poem, ‘there is no ‘‘other world’’ in this poem. The ideal of absolute freedom is attained only in this world, in the decision of the defenders . . . to lay down their lives in an act of heroic deWance.’54 The question of an ‘other world’ and ‘this world’, and, more importantly, what the character and appearance of the ‘one world’ would be, is best addressed by looking at the way an ideal vision is translated into images of the real, material world. Here too, the relation between the ideal and real place is essentially predicated on the relation between subject and object, and the way they constitute reality; Romantic nature, subsequently, as both material and spiritual reality, came to be understood as an extension of the interior mind. As a space of the imagination, nature is shaped by it and shaping it in turn, mediated by the autonomous act of artistic representation. In the inWnite longing expressed in Romantic nature imagery, nature and art move closer together to the point of being indistinguishable: Solomos’s poetry partakes in this exploration of the relation between art 52 Beaton, Introduction, 41. 53 ‘Diese moralische Zweckma¨ßigkeit wird am lebhaftesten erkannt, wenn sie im Widerspruch mit anderen die Oberhand beha¨lt; nur dann erweist sich die ganze Macht des Sittengesetzes, wenn es mit allen u¨brigen Naturkra¨ften im Streit gezeigt wird und alle neben ihm ihre Gewalt u¨ber ein menschliches Herz verlieren.’ Werke, xx. 139. 54 Beaton, Introduction, 41.


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and nature, between divine spirit and mundane variety, or between freedom and death. Schiller’s aesthetic writings, if we extend the line of interpretation that willingly casts Solomos as a Greek Schiller, were foundational in formulating that condition of modernity in which ‘ ‘‘nature’’ as an aesthetic objectivation . . . always presupposes its loss or absence’;55 it marks its diVerence from the perceiving subject. His proposal of aesthetic education sought to combine the sensual and the rational and to achieve an aesthetic reality, pointing the way towards an increasing aestheticization of the way reality is perceived and represented. The aesthetic representation of concrete space in the form of landscape corresponded to the free (moral) action overcoming natural forces. In Solomos’s ‘Free Besieged’ we Wnd the same overcoming of nature as an act of emancipation. It is remarkable, however, how much literary care and attention, in what there is of the poem, is lavished on the point that here it is the beauty of nature that is the truly tempting element. The section describing nature in spring as it appears before the eyes of the besieged is entitled ‘Temptation’ and it appears in two versions in the second and third drafts (B2, C6).56 The opening section shows the allusions to formal elements such as allegory (the dance of April and Eros) or the idyll, as the beauty of nature is shaped into a work of art: ¯" ‚æøÆ æ ÆŁ `æº, ˚Ø" Ø æ ŒÆº ŒÆØ ªºıŒØ æÆ, ŒÆØ ŒØ ı ø ŒÆØ Œº æØ ŒÆØ ı ÆŒı ŒØºÆØØ ŒÆØ ºØŁı Ø . Love is treading a dance with fair-haired April, and nature’s good and sweet time has come round, and in the shade all swollen with cool and musk the exotic and swooning song of birds.

Beautiful nature, as artiWce, is liberating only insofar as it acts as a threat to be overcome: it diverts the Missolonghians’ attention from the situation and its moral duty at hand. In a movement that Solomos might well have found anticipated in Schiller, the aesthetic element 55 Schneider, ‘Nature’, 94. 56 For Solomos’s published works I rely on the edition by Politis (Athens, 1961), vol. i. For ‘The Free Besieged’ I use the standard short reference to the fragment or section numbers of the three drafts A, B, and C, with line-references added.

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eVects the sublimation that is necessary to overcome the temptation. The sublimation of the real to the ideal is of special political signiWcance if we remember Schiller’s explicit references to actual historical situations. Aesthetic education is necessary since the cultured contemporary state does not allow free aesthetic activity. Hence the aesthetic state assumes a utopian quality, with a regulative function. Schiller does not necessarily see this state as a realizable goal, but rather as an extrapolation into the realm of the ideal. This does not make his an apolitical vision. Instead, it displaces the actual, phenomenal, political reality in favour of an ideal vision of the aesthetic. In this light, the strong Schillerian thrust of a reading of Solomos’s life and works ever since Polylas underestimates the structurally and functionally necessary distance between the political reality and the ideal vision. Polylas’s interpretation gives the impression of a poet who is hindered only by an unappreciative and anti-aesthetic society, but nevertheless devotes his work to the presentation of national themes, yet it overlooks the rift between the ‘real’ extension of the nation and the ideal vision that is of ¨ ber das Pathetische’, necessity programmatic in Schiller’s theory. In ‘U Schiller repeats the contention that it is the ideal aesthetic vision which overrides and consumes, as form, the content of real places and events: Even concerning historical events and real people, it is not their existence but their potential, expressed through their existence, that is truly poetic . . . We believed for a long time that we would do our national literature a service if we recommended national subjects for its themes . . . only a barbaric taste needs the sting of private interest to be drawn towards beauty. . . Poetry . . . should aim for the heart because it comes from the heart, and it should not aim for the citizen in man, but for man in the citizen.57

Freedom is located in the aesthetic, that is, in the ideal vision of the real. The fact that Schiller too seems to operate with two concepts of freedom gives extra support to this tendency. First, there is the 57 ‘Selbst an wirklichen Begebenheiten historischer Personen ist nicht die Existenz, sondern das durch die Existenz kund gewordene Vermo¨gen das Poetische . . . Man hat lange geglaubt, der Dichtkunst unsers Vaterlands einen Dienst zu erweisen, wenn man den Dichtern Nationalgegensta¨nde zur Bearbeitung empfahl . . . Nur ein barbarischer Geschmack braucht den Stachel des Privatinteresse, um zu der Scho¨nheit hingelockt zu werden . . . Die Poesie . . . soll das Herz treVen, weil sie aus dem Herzen Xoß, und nicht auf den Staatsbu¨rger in dem Menschen, sondern auf den Menschen im Staatsbu¨rger zielen.’ Werke, xx. 218 f.


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concept of freedom as the capacity for moral self-determination; secondly, the freedom of balance between sensuousness and intellect. Schiller seems to elevate the latter, the freedom inherent in aesthetic harmony, to the more inXuential position.58 With the Wrst concept— which has to do with morality—being incorporated into the second, the ideal aesthetic vision, subsuming reality, becomes the true and, quite literally, representative place of freedom. Solomos attempts to capture the idea of freedom in the real site of Missolonghi as its topos of freedom. Missolonghi is the material symbol, Novalis’s Ding to represent the Unbedingte, the thing found instead of the unconditional absolute. The artistic representation of the place of Missolonghi is governed by concerns parallel to those of Romantic aesthetics; Romantic Seelenlandschaften, the corresponding exterior and interior worlds, ranged from expansion and Entgrenzung, that is, the disappearance of boundaries, to the reduction and compression of space, as outlined in Chapter 1 above. The dissolution of the boundaries between the phenomenal and the transcendent opened up the landscape; just as the positing of an absolute which can never be quite reached sets in motion an almost magnetic sequence of movements, just as the mental horizon of the conscious ‘I’ expands, this dynamic of constant deferral is repeated in a landscape which stresses longing and movement. Likewise, it is not only the boundary of the horizon which gets pushed backwards; the limits transcended in the experience of space and its narrative or lyrical materialization are not only located in the horizontal view, but also between the natural and the supernatural world: nature is ultimately a dream, or else the dream, with its language of images, is the true reality.59 Dreams, apparitions, and the mystiWcation of the natural had acquired a new proWle and new purchase in Romantic literature, and they are all of them elements which will reappear with frequency in Solomos’s work. 58 For textual references regarding the diVerent concepts of freedom see Leslie Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge, 1991), 163. 59 G. H. Schubert, Symbolik des Traumes (Bamberg, 1814), 33, calls nature an ‘embodied dreamworld’; Schubert’s concept of dream reality was inXuential, especially on painters and theorists (C. D. Friedrich, C. G. Carus); see also Ernst Busch, ‘Die Stellung Gotthilf Heinrich Schuberts in der deutschen Naturmystik und in der Romantik’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 20 (1942), 305–39.

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For the German Romantics, the eye of the beholder experiences space as landscape; by contrast with Schiller, however, their guiding principle was not to overcome nature’s unordered state in the act of aesthetic vision, but instead to reincorporate it into a holistic view, since nature eternally points beyond itself. Schelling, for example, developed a highly inXuential philosophy of nature: in nature we can trace the return towards the initial unity with spirit, nature is its space and art shares in the quest as the attempt at interpreting nature.60 Accordingly, a new theory of mimesis and aesthetic representation emerges, which draws attention to the semantic polyvalence inherent in the experienced space. Schelling’s anti-naturalistic concept of mimesis, which is probably more accurately called a super-naturalistic concept, is perhaps most succinctly expressed in the following excerpt from his System of Transcendental Idealism, section 6, a passage that is included in Lountzis’s translations: The view of nature, which the philosopher achieves by way of art, is for art the original and natural view. What we call nature is a poem encoded in a secret, wondrous script. The riddle could unveil itself were we to recognize in it the odyssey of the mind, which, marvellously deceived, searches its self while turning from it. Through this world of the senses, as through words, meaning is glimpsed, and through a half-transparent fog we glimpse the world of the imagination (das Land der Phantasie) which we so long for.61

With the institution of a land of fantasy or imagination behind the real, sensible world, the Romantic search for unity cannot disguise the fact that it rests on the old dualism of the ideal and the real as opposites. Despite the opening of the phenomenal and immanent towards the transcendental, the experience of space becomes again Wrmly aYxed to the space or land behind the phenomenal—just as in 60 Schelling’s Naturmystik and that of others is informed by Neoplatonism and the mysticism of Bo¨hme; Solomos took an interest especially in the latter, see Veloudis, $ ÆØŒ , 102–9. 61 ‘Die Ansicht, welche der Philosoph von der Natur ku¨nstlich sich macht, ist fu¨r die Kunst die urspru¨ngliche und natu¨rliche. Was wir Natur nennen, ist ein Gedicht, das in geheimer wunderbarer Schrift verschlossen liegt. Doch ko¨nnte das Ra¨thsel sich enthu¨llen, wu¨rden wir die Odyssee des Geistes darin erkennen, der wunderbar getaüscht, sich selber suchend, sich selber Xieht; denn durch die Sinnenwelt blickt nur wie durch Worte der Sinn, nur wie durch halbdurchsichtigen Nebel das Land der Phantasie, nach dem wir trachten.’ F. W. J. Schelling, Werke, ed. Manfred Schro¨ter, ii (Munich, 1927), 628.


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the logic of Hellenism there is not an ‘ab-sense’ of Greece, but a necessary place for it, even if it is a conXicted one. We can sense a distrust in Schelling, which cannot quite remain contained, of the enigmatic and unclear ‘scripture’ of the phenomenal world, and ultimately it is the ideal preferred to the real, or rather the search for one world in which the real becomes almost, but only almost, superXuous. Schelling’s account of the ideal within the real and vice versa shows a bias towards alternative representation that is characteristic of Romantic nature imagery. On the sliding scale of real and ideal and its necessary mutual inWltration, the full range of the sensual is to be acknowledged: ‘This [implantation of the ideal within the real] is the case with matter, where the corporeal soul is revealed by colour, by lustre, by sound; this [repetition of the real within the ideal] is the case with light, which for that reason, as the Wnite represented in inWnity, is the absolute schematism of all matter.’62 We can see that both the fear of non-intelligibility and the simultaneous attempt to provide an all-encompassing sensory panorama have a bearing on the landscape represented and must, eventually, tear at the fabric of phenomenal reality. The attempt to achieve completeness allows a concentration on pure sensory elements, such as colour, sound, or light, to an almost exclusive degree. The phenomenal world is broken down into a collection of individual, almost independent, and in their pure concentration abstract items and images. Solomos too employs techniques that explore such ‘alternative’ representations of place. My contention is that the problem of commensurability between the ideal and its manifestation in images of real place appears in Solomos’s work not in a strongly utopian, but in a positively a-topian sense, breaking any vision of Greece down into partial, intensiWed, and unhinged senses, into vignettes of containment, compression, and reduction, which render the siege of Missolonghi the appropriate subject-matter of Solomos’s form of representation, 62 ‘Jenes ist in der Materie der Fall, wo die der Leiblichkeit eingebildete Seele in der Farbe, im Glanz, in Klang oVenbar wird, dieses ist in dem Licht der Fall, welches daher, als das Endliche im Unendlichen dargestellt, der absolute Schematismus aller Materie ist.’ Ibid. 109. See also Helmut Rehder, Die Philosophie der unendlichen Landschaft: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der romantischen Weltanschauung (Halle a.d.S., 1932), 109 V. For the Romantic use of colour and sound to describe landscape see also Marianne Thalmann, Zeichensprache der Romantik (Heidelberg, 1967), 31–54.

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rather than the other way around. As a result, in his attempt to visualize totality and uniWed absoluteness in one symbolic image, the vision of the autonomous free land is only ever implied and remains, of necessity, not described, while its image is condensed to the point of collapse into a single concentrated point, teetering on the brink of annihilation. The Romantic symbol represents the semantic expansion, if not explosion, from the (phenomenal) signiWer to the (transcendental) signiWed, but leads, when we reverse the direction, to such saturation of the phenomenal world with meaning that representation as such verges on the impossible. The two-way dynamic inherent in the symbol, the dialectic between the part and the whole, is one of expansion and contraction, as the following excerpt from Novalis’s fragmentary novel The Apprentices of Sais captures: Whatever man intends, he has to turn his undivided attention or his Self on it . . . and when he has done so, soon thoughts will arise, or a new kind of perception, which seem nothing but the gentle movements of a colouring, clattering pen, or the peculiar contractions and Wgurations of an elastic Xuid, and which will appear to him in wondrous fashion. From the point where he Wxed the compass of his impression, they will expand vividly in all directions, and they will carry his Self with them.63

Solomos’s Missolonghi tries to visualize that very dynamic.

T H E LO S S O F L A N DS C A P E A ND ALTE RNAT IVE L ANDSCAP ES The overriding perspective of ‘The Free Besieged’ is the narrator’s visionary view of Missolonghi and its besieged citizens. As in Kalvos, the poetic voice appears in the form of the quasi-apocalyptic, and 63 ‘Auf alles, was der Mensch vornimmt, muß er seine ungetheilte Aufmerksamkeit oder sein Ich richten . . . und wenn er dies getan hat, so entstehen bald Gedanken, oder eine neue Art von Wahrnehmungen, die nichts als zarte Bewegungen eines fa¨rbenden oder klappernden Stifts, oder wunderliche Zusammenziehungen und Figurationen einer elastischen Flu¨ssigkeit zu sein scheinen, auf eine wunderbare Weise in ihm. Sie verbreiten sich von dem Punkte, wo er den Eindruck fest stach, nach allen Seiten mit lebendiger Beweglichkeit, und nehmen sein Ich mit sich fort.’ Schriften, i. 96 f.


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spatially indeterminate, eyewitness account: the visual structure relies heavily on the perspective of the narrating ‘I’, which is not directly part of the scene or events, but instead recounts the visionary experience of witnessing the last stages of the siege (A1 and C2). The prophetic quality is enhanced if we consider that the opening description of ‘The Free Besieged’ is developed out of a sketch that is part of the earlier satire ‘The Woman of Zakynthos’; the speaker of this verse poem, modelled on biblical prophecy, is the anchorite Dionysios, who is transported to Missolonghi in a vision.64 Coutelle labelled the poem ‘an imaginary frieze of individual heroes’,65 and it has long been recognized that immobility and compression of one kind or another is a recurring motif (even if the focus of analysis has so far not been on the representation of space). The embodiment of the ideal, in this case of ideal freedom, takes place in the human Wgures and their behaviour. Such an indirect (artistic) representation of freedom as sublimity, with the sublime appearing in the human Wgure, is certainly true to some of the formulations in ¨ ber das Pathetische and U ¨ ber Anmut und Wu¨rde. Schiller’s essays U The supremacy over natural or non-rational forces by way of moral force and moral will is expressed on the level of the phenomenal world by dignity (Wu¨rde). Thoughts are expressed, exceeding their verbal communication, on the faces of the people: Æ ØÆ ŒÆØ æ ø Æ" Ø Æ ı: ı º Ø ªºÆ ŒÆØ ºº æ!ÆŁ łı ı. (B9, 5–6) In their eyes and on their faces their thoughts show through; their soul tells them many great things.

Dignity is found in the portrayal of the women of Missolonghi. There is ample evidence in the printed drafts and the manuscripts that 64 The role of the priest as poet may not only echo biblical precedence, but it may, in Solomos’s case, also connect to the importance given to the status of the poet. In a prose fragment on Schiller’s ballad ‘The Count of Habsburg’, at whose centre is a court singer who is really the eponymous count turned priest, Solomos points to Schiller’s indication of the noble rank of the poet: ‘Si presenta il cantore in mezzo ai principi—due tratti bastano a Schiller per farlo a noi venerato, senza dirlo.’ ‘Idee sulla ÆÆ, ii: —Æ ŒÆØ ÆºØŒ (1955), 183. ballata di Schiller ‘‘Il Conte di Habsburg’’ ’, ` 65 Coutelle, Diptych, 56.

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Solomos had intended a very detailed portrayal of the group of women, for example: tutte sedute una stava presso al Wgluolo morto, un altra moribondo. Terza la piu giovane . . . Ed ora stava presso al letticciuolo del Wgluolo moribondo, ad ogni tanto posava la mano sul suo cuore. (AE 417A 19–24)66 all are sitting down, one is holding her dead little son, another her dying one. The third is the youngest . . . And so she stands by the bed of her little one who is dying, every now and then putting her hand above her heart.

And, a little later: E tutte l’altre assentirono e circondarono con amore il di lei Wglio ch’era spirato (AE 417A 23–5) And all the others agreed and surrounded with love her son who has breathed his last.67

This sample shows not only the extent of detail, but also the tableau character and statuesque quality of the scene, which is quite possibly indebted to Schiller’s discussion of character portrayal.68 Solomos’s narrative is guided by conWgurations: the static character of the scene described above is highlighted explicitly in fragment C12, 4: ‘motionless, without sighing, tearless, untroubled they all remain’ (‘ÆŒ ; ÆÆ ; ø Æ æı Œæı’). This concentration on the motionless human form, however, although easily explicable by reference to Schiller, shows the direction ‘The Free Besieged’ is taking. Although the favouring of the human image would be in line with Schiller’s indiVerence towards the content of the physical world, that is, a concrete landscape, there is still a dynamic implicit in the ideal that seems immobilized in Solomos’s world. The utopian vision of Schiller’s aesthetic state is, if anything, essentially temporal. If aesthetic education is a process towards the future fulWlment and mending of the present aesthetic and political situation, any future vision that could relate to any real or political situation is rejected in ‘The Free Besieged’. The only option of future life grounded in 66 Unless otherwise indicated, AE refers to vol. 1. 67 The case made for communication through love, exceeding language, carries overtones of the Romantic ideal of absolute love. 68 In U¨ber das Pathetische he himself has recourse to the models of Lessing and Winckelmann, who centred their accounts on the Laokoon group and other examples of classical sculpture.


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physical nature would consist in the surrender to the power of natural beauty and, implicitly, the besieging Turks. In both cases the option is identiWed with heteronomy, of a moral or political kind. Just as there is literally no complete vision of the past, other than in fragmentary Xashbacks and visionary appearances, there is no prospect of an autonomous free land either. Its vision is only ever implied and its description is never attempted. The perspective of ‘The Free Besieged’ goes beyond the focus on the human form; yet in the poem the beyond is a surrounding that is fragmentary, threatening, and seductive only insofar as its future absence is the deWning part of its temporality: it is already lost. The proud panoramic views that are a necessary part of the philhellenic repertoire Wnd no equivalent in Solomos. If there are any expanding views they are reduced to the narrow eye of the narrating source, from which they are communicated. The impression of such immediate involvement is mirrored in the manuscript notes, where almost all the descriptions and narrative sketches take the shape of a Wrst-person account (usually by a Wctional sentinel, though, not the poet): the description of the women, for instance, opens ‘io le vedevo’ (‘I saw them’; AE 417A 9–10). The overall framing of spatial experience is not unlike the view over someone’s shoulder, familiar from the perspective of Romantic painting. The view over the shoulder of Solomos’s overall narrator, however, does not give access to a progressively expanding vista. Instead, it directs us downwards into chaos and the abyss of an overturned cosmos: what was, or is supposed to be, Missolonghi. What is more, the catastrophic view is almost devoid of content, at least as far as the visual sense is concerned: ŒØ" ıæŁŒÆ Œ Ø ŒÆØ !æ æ ; ı ŒØæ Æ Œºø æØ º ı ÆºŁ Ø ºªºªæÆ; ø º æ ı ÆÆ!æ Ø: ŒÆºÆ!Æ ø Œ Æ º ªªØ: Æºº !º Æ Œæ; æÆ ; º ; ŁºÆÆ; ª ı ıÆ; ıæÆ : ŒÆÆŒÆ ºÆ Æ Æ ÆıæºÆ ŒÆØ Æ; ªØ º ł; !æ ŒÆØ Ææ ºŒØ. (A1, 2–8). Then I found myself in a gloomy and thundering place that was shaking like a handful of wheat in a fast-grinding mill, like the bubbles in boiling water. Then I realized that this place was Missolonghi. But I could see neither fortress nor camp, nor lagoon, nor sea, nor the earth I was treading, nor the

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sky. Everything was covered by pitch darkness mixed with sparks, thunder, and lightning.

The loss of space, as conveyed by the general conWnement and restriction in the image of the besieged town and the recurring motif of emptiness, preWgures the actual loss of place implied in the citizens’ voluntary death. This death, signiWcantly, will be the consequence of an attempted exit through the barricades—another expansion cruelly thwarted. Although this is reconcilable with a type of sublimation echoing Schiller, it is also framed by a natural environment that is heavily indebted to the categories of Romantic aesthetics. References to empty space surrounding the ‘iron circle’ (B4, 12) around the besieged city are frequent. Only hope can traverse the horrible emptiness (B 46); in C8 the orphan girl addresses an angel, whom she has seen in a vision oVering her wings: ¢ªª º ; " Øæ ı Ø Æ æ ı; " " `ı ı " Æ " ºÆ ; " Æªª Ø æ Ø Æ Łº Ø. (C8, 1–2) Angel, are you giving me wings in my dream only? In the name of Him who made them for you, this vessel of desolation needs them.

Also, there is a corresponding passage of verse variants in the manuscripts, making mention of the ‘empty houses’, which dominate a scene of ruined Missolonghi (AE 395, 13–14). Even the musket of the soldier at the opening of the second draft is addressed with the epithets ‘desolate’ and ‘dark’ (B1, 5). In the ‘Thoughts of the Poet’ with which Polylas prefaces his edition of ‘The Free Besieged’, a collection of scattered reXections and notes gathered from Solomos’s manuscripts, Solomos deliberates the manifestation of the ideal in the real: Ma per poter giungere a questo e` necessario meditare l’ombra sostanziale che deve buttar fuora i corpi, a traverso i quali essa si manifesta con essi uniWcata. Nei quali corpi si veda di esprimer per tutti le condizioni dell’esecuzione—la nazionalita` il piu` che potrassi estesa. Cosı´ la metaWsica e` fatta Wsica. (AE 425)69 69 I quote in the following not from Polylas’s Greek translation, but from Solomos’s original Italian. The ‘Thoughts’ or ‘ Æ ’, i.e. Solomos’s fragmentary prose comments on ‘The Free Besieged’, are reprinted, with a scholarly apparatus, from AE in ˜Øıı ºø Æ , ed. Massimo Peri et al. (Athens, 1999), here p. 30.


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But to arrive there it is necessary to consider the substantial shadow that the bodies have to push outside, through which [the Idea] manifests itself united with them. In those bodies make sure that, within all the limits of execution, nationality is expressed, as far-reaching as possible. In this way the metaphysical becomes physical.

Although it is certainly true that Solomos acknowledges and incorporates the element of physical nature as inseparable from spiritual nature and vice versa, this unio mystica, that is, the transposition of the supernatural and divine into the natural, does not have to correspond to a spatial expansion. Often it is implied in the Wgure of the ‘Moonclad Woman’ bearing the features of a real person.70 A similar Wgure recurs in several of Solomos’s poems (most famously in ‘The Cretan’), and she is not absent from ‘The Free Besieged’ either, where she appears at the end of the ‘Temptation’ section in C6, at the height of the description of nature’s beauty. Importantly, however, such an apparition, connected as it may be to a corporeal model, is independent of any spatial environment, in the sense that there is no need for a corresponding landscape, real or imaginary. In a second fragment of the ‘Thoughts’, however, Solomos seems more clearly intent on the aesthetic creation of a physical world to represent its metaphysical content: L’anima incorporea del Componimento che parte da Dio, e fatto il giro corporizzata negli organi di luogo, di tempo, di nazionalita`, di lingua, coj varj [sic] pensieri, aVetti, sensazioni, etc. si faccia un piccolo universo corporeo atto a manifestarla possibilmente, di nuovo ypartey di tutto questo <e> torna a Dio (AE 402) The incorporeal soul of the Composition, which begins from God, when she has made the round of embodiment in the organs of place, time, nationality, language, with its diVerent thoughts, sensations, impressions, etc., in this way is created a little embodied universe capable of maybe manifesting her [the soul], ystartsy again all over and returns to God. 70 For the Wgure of the Moonclad Woman as the indicator of a unio mystica see e.g. Roderick Beaton, ‘The Tree of Poetry’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2 (1975), 161–82. For German precedent of the veiled woman in, for instance, Schiller’s poem ‘Das Verschleierte Bildnis zu Sais’ or Novalis’s The Apprentices of Sais, see Veloudis, $ ÆØŒ , or Alexiou, ºø ØŒ, 17–28. See also Eleni Tsantsanoglou, ‘˙ ‘‘Æı Æ’’ # ªªÆæı ‘‘˚æØŒ ’’ ı ºø ’, in ¸ı —º (Thessaloniki, 1988), 167–95, and Peter Mackridge, ‘Time Out of Mind: The Relationship Between Story and Narrative in Solomos’ ‘‘The Cretan’’ ’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 9 (1984–5), 187–208.

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Place, in this cycle of quasi-religious incarnation, serves as the particular, concentrated image that can capture the universal, reduced or abstracted to a degree of no visuality at all. In the rare cases where Solomos draws an explicit analogy between an internal process and a corresponding landscape image, for example in B9, 8: ‘[t]heir guts and the sea never Wnd rest’ (‘[]Æ ºª Æ ı ŒØ" ŁºÆÆ ı ı’), the image is drawn from a landscape to which access is, for the human subject(s) in question, conspicuously barred. Beyond the Romantic longing for the sea which would be within visual distance of the besieged, we have turned to a natural object that is out of reach, because of the siege, and is, too, marked by a void: the supporting Xeet expected does not appear on the horizon. Alternatively, the correspondence is with positively aggressive nature. The prose section introducing B2 (3–6) states the relation between physical nature and the soul as follows: ˙ø ÆŒæÆØ, da tutte le parti della natura che tende ad aVranger l’anima. Fusione di mare, cielo, terra, superWcie e profondita` fuse che a loro volta attaccano superWcie e profondita` umana. All of life, from all parts of nature, wishes to lay low the soul of man: sea, earth, sky blended together, surface and depth blended together, besiege the nature of man on the surface and in its depth.

Far from subjective expansion, the direction is reversed. Moreover, nature, threatening in its wholeness, appears stiXing and indistinguishable rather than as an ordered space. To sum up, no element of longing or restlessness is translated into a dynamic movement towards exterior space, unless it occurs in a dream. The dream sequence of the women is the only frame for the description of a movement that is expressed in corresponding nature:71 ‘A me <parea> che tutti noi uomini e donne fanciulli e vecchi fossimo Wumi di varie grandezze per luoghi luminosi—cupi—per valli e per I dirupi su giu`—giungessimo poi concordi al mare con impeto, ŒÆØ ŁºÆÆ ªºıŒ !Æ Æ Æ æ Æ.’ One said: ‘It appeared to me that all of us, men and women, children and the old, were rivers, some small, some big, and we were Xowing through places 71 I quote the passages here again from the mainly Italian draft (AE 402 B34–9), more characteristic of Solomos’ writing process than Polylas’s Greek translation.


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of light, places of darkness, narrow valleys, over precipices, now up now down, until we all reached the sea together in a powerful Xow, and within the sea our waters were kept sweet.’

Incidentally, the passage bears a remarkable resemblance to the poetic and topographic vision in the opening words of Friedrich Schlegel’s Gespra¨ch u¨ber die Poesie (Dialogue on Poetry, 1800), although there is no immediate evidence for Solomos’s familiarity with the work: ‘All minds which love her, poetry binds in friendship with indissoluble bonds. . . . In this region they are all one and at peace by a higher force of magic. Each Muse searches for and Wnds the other, and all the rivers of poetry Xow together into the one common sea.’72 Unsurprisingly, Solomos’s landscape of Missonlonghi houses a community whose ideal, like the ideal of a society of like-minded artists, is transposed into the immaterial sphere of dreams, creating alternative modes of spatial experience and its representation. To evaluate the modes of representation in ‘The Free Besieged’, the content of dreams and visionary images has to be distinguished from the representation of besieging nature and the besieged place. As in the example of the women’s dreams, the realm of ideal space is removed to a thoroughly immaterial level. The ‘intellectual and moral Paradise’, which Solomos envisages in the ‘Thoughts’, is, if at all linked to a visual experience, connected to the community of the shared dream vision. It is here that freedom, as will, is located: ‘concordi nei sogni come nella volonta` e nel dovere’ (‘united in dreams as much as in will and duty’; AE 417A 22). At the same time we Wnd a similar tendency for compression of totality into one image, when Solomos tells himself: ‘Fare che il Sogno della Bella sia la Totalita` dei sogni’ (‘Make it so that the Dream of the Beautiful be the Totality of dreams’; AE 417A 7). As for the place of siege and besieging forces, experience and representation are subjected to similar techniques of Romantic perception. Solomos seems to hold a belief in an anti-naturalistic mimesis 72 ‘Alle Gemu¨ter, die sie lieben, befreundet und bindet Poesie mit unauXo¨slichen Banden. . . . [I]n dieser Region sind sie dennoch durch ho¨here Zauberkraft einig und in Frieden. Jede Muse sucht und Wndet die andre, und alle Stro¨me der Poesie Xießen zusammen in das allgemeine große Meer’ (p. 283). From Besenghi degli Ughi’s letter we only gather that Solomos ordered a copy of Schlegel’s Vorlesungen zur Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (1815); on further ‘traces’ of Schlegel’s thought in Solomos (without mentioning the above passage) see Veloudis, $ ÆØŒ , 174–7.

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that echoes with Schelling. A section from the manuscripts, this time opening the space of the page to French, reads: Pour la rendre (la Penseé) il invente mille(s) [word deleted] moyens d’expression que son modele (la nature) ne lui donne pas; e [sic] s’ecartant sans cesse du Vrai Visible, pour s’approcher mieux du vrai de l’art, au moyen d’une copie inWdele il cree un [sic] imitation sublime (AE 483A 1–7) To render it (the Thought), [the poet] invents a thousand [word deleted] means of expression which his model (nature) won’t give him; and he distances himself without cease from the Truly Visible, in order to approach better to the truth in art, by means of an unfaithful copy he creates a sublime imitation.

As in the poetics of Schelling and Novalis, the creation of space by means of other senses, especially sound, features strongly. The terrain between Missolonghi and the enemy camp, for instance, is deWned by the sound and faint echo of the guards’ bugles (A3 and B3–4), later mirrored in the whistling of the approaching enemy soldier (A4, 1–2). SigniWcantly—as an indicator, perhaps, of spatial expansion—the bugle-call of the besieged is too weak to cover the distance. Similarly, nature in its onslaught on the soul and senses spins a web of echoing sensory stimuli (e.g. B 23–4), brought to its most compressed in the ‘Temptation’ section, where the line of images moves from the visual (including frequent references to light) to the acoustic, the olfactory, and the sense of taste. At the same time, however, this movement is overridden by a strong sense of stillness and immobility: øæ ª; ıæÆ ŒÆØ ŁºÆÆ Æ , ˇı" Œ" ºØÆ Œ ºıºıŒØ, ˆ æı ŒØ ÆæÆ " Ææ Ø º , ÆÆŒÆŁŒ æªªıº ªªæØ. (C6, 16–20)73 No breath of wind on earth, on sea or sky, not even as much as a bee makes close to the tender petals, all around an unmoving whiteness on the lake, the round moon mingled with it alone;

The all-pervading impression of silence as deadly is conveyed in the loss of echo: to the approaching enemy soldier of A6 not a single dog 73 For the recurrent motive of the calmness of nature in other poems by Solomos see Beaton, ‘The Tree of Poetry’, 169 V.


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is audible,74 and the beginning of B1: ‘Utter quiet of a tomb reigns ŒæÆ ı ı Øø Œ !ÆØº Ø’) is of a over the plain’ (‘` programmatic quality.75 Colour, part of the Romantic aesthetics that magniWes nature by breaking it down into its sensory elements, is equally employed as part of, eventually, a dynamic of reduction. The presentation of nature in spring in C2, 1–3 is reminiscent of Ho¨lderlin’s outburst of colour, as Solomos juxtaposes the poet’s thoughts and the hues of the natural scenery: ‚æªÆ ŒÆØ º ªØÆ; Æ —Œ ÆØ ŒÆØ ŒØø— ¸ ºıÆ æØÆ; ºıÆ; ı Œæ !ı ææØ, ˚Ø" æÆ; ªÆºØÆ; Œ ŒŒØÆ ŒÆº æı ºØ. Deeds and words, thoughts—I stand and stare—thousands of Xowers, blossoms, covering the grass, the white, blue and red inviting a golden swarm of bees.

Yet it continues with a restriction: ‘there with brothers, here with death’ (‘¯Œ Ł ı Æ º ; Ł æ’; C2, 4). In a similar way, the colours of nature become aYxed to the immaterial dream vision. B6 mentions ‘the most golden dream of all’ (‘ æı æ Æ Æ æÆÆ’), echoed in B27 by ‘the golden dream Xed’ (‘ıª æ " Øæ’). The appeal of the speaker to his fatherland, put in an image of reduction, is possibly the only, wishful, attempt to relate this immaterial vision to material space: ‘Your black rock and dry grass shine as if golden’ (‘˙ Æ æ æÆ ı æı ŒÆØ æ ææØ’; B6, 23). Contrast the building-blocks of Romantic sense perception in Ho¨lderlin’s Greece:76 the opening of the second book of Hyperion, 74 The implication is that all the dogs have starved or have been eaten, for lack of food. 75 The extent of desolation captured in Solomos’s imagery becomes apparent when it is compared with the scene of desolate, yet intact, Greek nature sadly depopulated in Kalvos’s ode ‘The Volcanoes’: ‘Your forests and groves, where the voices of hunters echoed, are silent; only dogs without masters are barking there now.’ 76 Comparison between Ho¨lderlin and Solomos has had a small but steady following. Vassilios Lazanas, ‘ºø ŒÆØ Ho¨lderlin’, ˝Æ ¯Æ, 104/1253 (1978), 213–32, identiWes similarities in both poets’ contemporary concern for freedom as, on the one hand, children of the French Revolution and, on the other hand, educated in the writings of German Idealism (concentrating on Ho¨lderlin’s poem ‘The Archipelago’). He focuses especially on the shared symbolic character regarding the Wght for higher, sublime ideals. Stefanos Rozanis’s more recent comments on the similarities between

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for example, parades the Romantic eVect of wholeness and all-encompassing sensuous completeness achieved by including particularities of sight, sound, and smell: there is mention of his hut situated on a promontory on Salamis, made of mastic branches, moss and trees surrounding it, the smell of thyme. Like the sound of stringed instruments playing, the personal past emerges into a harmonious atmosphere, ordered despite its contradictions, incorporated into the environment distinguished by green earth, open Welds, unlimited stretches of yellow wheat and cornXowers, together with treetops and chains of mountains rising in gradual succession towards the sun. In the clear sky of white light even the moon shows faintly. Yet the expansion can just as easily reveal the void beyond it. There is a notional borderline, as a recurring theme, the ‘Kantische Gra¨nzlinie’, to step beyond this world. In Solomos, there is almost no world to step out of.

T HE R ED U CE D LA N DS C APE O F THE ‘HYMN TO FREEDOM’ Solomos’s earlier ‘Hymn to Freedom’ (1823) is the piece that upon publication shot to international fame, and that came to stand for the Greek undertaking of national self-representation:77 yet this piece already operates the strategies and aporias of absence and non-representation that uphold ‘The Free Besieged’. The ‘Hymn’ precedes even the earliest drafts of ‘The Free Besieged’ by several years, yet it shows already in Solomos’s early poetry techniques of representation of Greece familiar from the later poem. This suggests that his artistic treatment of Greek places shows tendencies that are intensiWed in his mature poetry and possibly found conWrmation in his readings of foreign sources. In ‘The Free Besieged’ the black rock and dry grass, Ho¨lderlin and Solomos (‘‘‘ ØŒØı Æ’’ æª ı ˜Øıı ºø ’, ˝Æ ¯Æ, 144 (1998), 1302–6) focus instead on their common struggle, as poets between the divine and the human, to express the ideal in human form and language. 77 On the circulation of the ‘Hymn’ and its quick translation abroad, see Katerina Tiktopoulou (ed.), ˇ ‘& Ø ¯º ıŁ æÆ’ ı ˜Øıı ºø ; ŒÆØ Ø ªºø Ææ Ø ı (Thessaloniki, 1998).


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as metonymic substitutes for the Greek land and a common motif pervading all of his poetry, become the sole coordinates in the representation of national space too. This pattern of a schematic reduction, which we see mirrored in the metonymic images reducing Missolonghi to an alonaki (a little threshing Xoor; A1) and a kalyvaki (a small hut; C2), is pre-empted in earlier poems prominently mentioning speciWc Greek places.78 The ‘Hymn to Freedom’ pictures the Wgure of Freedom retreating over rock and grass (st. 13), and it illustrates quite strikingly the similarity of representation and the shared tendency in earlier and later works towards a threatening nature surrounding a place whose visuality is, if not suspended, then at least reduced. As in ‘The Free Besieged’, the landscape of the ‘Hymn’ is essentially one of desolation (st. 7). Outer nature poses a threat to freedom whose plight in the face of a lack of support from abroad and disunity from within recalls the threatened destruction of a stone by the natural elements (st. 30). In evaluating the land’s situation (given the sense of restricted vision here too one would hardly want to call it an ‘overview’) Solomos introduces the image of the Eagle (as the emblem of Austria this time), who has already conquered Italy, circling in the sky and ready to pounce (st. 26). Outer movement is already associated with a positive threat, as in the mirror image of the Eagle (st. 33), where Freedom, roaming the woods like a wild beast, spreads terror and waste. The loss of a visible space is anticipated too. The night battle at Tripolitsa, clouded in lightning and thunder, is a highly formalized description of a scene that takes place but is accessible to hearing only (st. 41–5): `Œ ø Œ ØÆ Æ ıŒØÆ, `Œ ø Ø ÆŁØ, `Œ ø ºÆ; ÆŒ ø ºŒØÆ, `Œ ø æØ Ø. (st. 44) I hear deafening guns, I hear clashing of swords, I hear wood and I hear axes, I hear the gnashing of teeth. 78 e.g. the 1825 poem ‘The Destruction of Psara’. In this epigrammatic poem, the personiWed Wgure of Glory treads on the desolate scene, crowned with a wreath ‘Made from some little grass that has remained on the desolate soil’.

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For the Wghters, ˇıæÆ ªØ" Æı ÆØ, ˇı ºÆª; ı ª: ˆØ" Æı ºı Æ ÆØ Æø Æ Æ Œ . (st. 62) There is no sky, no sea nor earth; for them everything is gathered together in this place.

Apart from a general atmosphere of claustrophobia in the scenes describing the series of sieges, we Wnd a growing sense of spatial concentration that anticipates the topos of Missolonghi. Already in the ‘Hymn’, nature is shaped by the events it hosts. The scene of hampered perception mirrors that introducing the siege of Corinth, where there is no sun or light nor any echo or sound on the plain (st. 75). Like the Wgure of Hope in ‘The Free Besieged’ (B 46), only the Wgure of Freedom can traverse the empty plain (st. 82); but even though Freedom seems, in this sense, able to be actually localized in a landscape, she is not only out of reach but also moving across a space which is either hostile or lost to visualization. Undoubtedly, the imagery of the ‘Hymn to Freedom’ owes something to other philhellenic literature, by Greek authors such as those of the thourioi (war-songs), or by authors of Western European provenance.79 More importantly, the nature of the ‘Hymn’, too, is distinguished by its threatening character, familiar from the ‘nature in arms’ motif of philhellenic literature, stretching its intimations of violence to a structural extreme. A powerful example is the long sequence describing the River Achelous at the Wrst siege of Missolonghi (st. 105–17), where the river envelops and drowns the retreating Turks;80 the episode incidentally leads on to another instance where the biblical voice—together with a biblical place—is recalled; 79 For comparison of motives between the ‘Hymn’ and Shelley, see Emmanuel Frangiskos, ‘ˇ ºø ØŒ ‘‘& ’’ ŒÆØ ºıæØŒ æ Æ ‘‘Hellas’’ ı P. B. Shelley (1822)’, ˇ ¯æÆØ, 11 (1974), 527–67. On the war-songs see Alexis Politis, ‘˙ Ø ø ÆÆÆØŒ Łıæø’, ˜ØÆ!ø, 235 (1990), 66–70. 80 The episode is described again by Trikoupis, æÆ, ii. 377–9; in comparison with Trikoupis’s rather more factual account of the successive failure of the Turks to cross the swollen river, it becomes clear how pronounced the personiWcation of the river as natural agent and how inescapable its overpowering encircling force are in Solomos.


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it reminds the poet of the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea (Exodus 15: 1–21), and prompts him to launch into exultation comparable to ‘the voice of Moses’ and the ‘song of the prophetess Miriam’ (st. 118–22). At a time when the classical past should, by Western standards, reveal itself in the nature of Greece, it is signiWcant that Solomos ostensibly, but in any case deliberately, forgoes another, maybe more ‘appropriate’, precedent of the episode: the rising of the River Skamander against Achilles’ unreasonable rage (Iliad 21).81 From the biblical topos that is part of the liberation narrative of the people of Israel, Solomos turns back to the (Greek) sea as a place as well as an image of freedom (‘And [the sea] is your bright image (eikona)’, st. 123 f.). Still, in its symbolic tendencies the ‘Hymn’ also preWgures a conception of natural and, by extension, national space, which Solomos will develop through his later readings of philosophical works, literature, mysticism, and science. There is a distinct move away from any spatial expansion towards extreme reduction and condensation, to the point of the complete vanishing of a concrete landscape that is actually within the reach of representation. As an artistic principle this pattern of concentration is verbalized in the prose comments to ‘The Free Besieged’, where, as so often, Solomos addresses himself: Bisogna fare che il circolo piccolo in cui si muove la Fortezza [apra] nel fondo anzi nell’Atmosfera sua i piu grandi interessi della Grecia (per la posizione materiale) . . . e per la posizione Morale i piu grandi interessi dell’Umanita`. Cosı´ e` posto l’Argomento in rapporto col Sistema dell’Universo. (AE 406B, 3–7) Make sure you do it so that the little circle, in which the Fortress moves, [opens up], by way of the place where it is grounded, or rather in its atmosphere, the greatest interests of Greece (for its material position) . . . and for the moral position the grandest interests of mankind. And so the proposition is in relation to the System of the Universe.

Regardless of whether the reference to a System of the Universe owes more to the models of German Idealism or Solomos’s experience 81 That Solomos had a certain familiarity with, and an interest in, the Iliad is clear from a number of fragmentary translations, probably related to the great interest which some of Solomos’s contemporaries in Italy took in Homeric translation. See ÆÆ, i. 316 f. `

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of a particular school of poetry in Italy,82 the notion of the condensed image implying and representing an underlying totality strongly recalls the theory of the symbol favoured in Romantic aesthetics. Tzvetan Todorov’s remark about the concentration of Romantic poetics in the concept of the symbol83 captures both the inherent dynamics of this mode of representation and the corresponding need of the Romantics to utilize it. The encapsulating of the spiritual idea of freedom in the symbol of Missolonghi leads to the downward view into the abyss: an exaggerated proof of Barthes’s claim that perception in terms of the symbolic correlates to a vision of depth.84 This aspect of a vertical expansion (or downward condensation) is an active part of the process of materialization of the ideal as envisaged by Solomos, in place and in the national (luogo and nazionalita`, AE 402) and in its corresponding poetic tone: Il tuono fondamentale tenga fermo il centro profondo della Nazionalita`, e si sollevi perpendicolarmente ed allargandosi nel grado il Pensiero della Poesia per il quale e` composta. (AE 474) The basic tone should sustain and hold down the profound centre of Nationality, and the Thought of Poetry, for whose sake it has been composed, should rise vertically while broadening little by little.

The result is a space that mirrors the drive of the symbol towards self-eVacement in its attempt to reach out. The permanent deferral caused by and reXected in the symbolic (i.e. indirect) mode of representation creates in its wake a landscape determined by the withdrawal and impending loss of space and, in its extreme, even its total dissolution. The inward-directed movement of the focus grinds to a visual standstill. Optical perspective normally sets the horizon as organizing the relation between the whole and the fragment. We have, however, no such attempt at ordering spatial vision in Solomos, quite the contrary. 82 See Coutelle, Diptych, 53 f., for reference to the philosophy of light, a particular poetic tradition with neoplatonic inXuences, taught by Giovanni Pini at Cremona. 83 Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol (Oxford, 1982), 155. 84 In ‘The Imagination of the Sign’ (A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London, 1982), 211–17), Barthes identiWes three modes of imagination visualizing diVerent sign relations. According to his theory, vision of depth corresponds to the symbolic as perspective does to the paradigmatic; the third, stemmatic (netlike) vision correlates to the syntagmatic.


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There is no horizon. The extreme condensation implied in the image of the encircled, stiXed, small space of Missolonghi has often been attributed to Solomos’s preference for a Hegelian pattern of opposition and synthesis, with reference to the following passage by Solomos: ‘Fa in tutto il seguito del poema ferma l’Idea della piccolezza Wsica del luogo perche risulti la grandezza morale e la yWsicay grandezza in mezzo a cui si trova’ (‘Make strong in all the rest of the poem the idea of how small the physical space is, because the moral greatness and the yphysicaly one, in the midst of which it is found, rely on it’; AE 404A 15–17). However, the resulting aesthetic agoraphobia is diYcult to explain by appealing to Hegelian (or any other Romantic) synthesis alone. A temporal, historical perspective and a future-oriented dynamic, as found in Hegel’s thought, are hard to detect in Solomos. A spatial utopia is immaterial and cannot be represented; a temporal utopia, past or future, seems likewise out of reach. The question of inXuence is therefore best replaced with one about the intensiWcation and obstruction of similar structures. It is futile to look for, let alone to blame, one inXuence. The retreat and disappearance of concrete landscape, for example, is clearly a motif drawn from more than one source, and of course in Solomos’s case there can always be found models besides the aesthetics of the poetry and philosophy of German Idealism and Romanticism. The visionary account of the empty space of Missolonghi and its fall, for example, are anticipated in Solomos’s ‘The Woman of Zakynthos’ (1826). The biblical forms of prophecies of apocalypse and paradise chosen by Solomos in this prose work (and elsewhere) do, however, already visualize spaces where all boundaries between a spiritual and material world are dissolved.85 Religious literary models (and contents) certainly have an impact on his poetic form, as do folk poetry and earlier modern Greek sources.86 In exemplary fashion Eratosthenis Kapsomenos illustrates the range of literary antecedents or intertexts: 85 Such allusions are not missing from the German models either, be it in Ho¨lderlin’s prophetic vision still showing traces of Pietist religious utopianism (strong at the time of his youth), or in the religious overtones of many German Idealists. 86 For Greek inXuences on Solomos see Emmanuel Chatzigiakoumis, ˝ ººØŒÆ ªÆ ı ºø : ˚æØŒ ºª Æ; ÆØøØŒ Œ Æ; ØŒ (Athens, 1968).

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ŒÆØ æ (‘the light in the line ‘#ø ı Æ Ææ ` which steps gladly on Hades and Death’; B 44), he identiWes a folkloristic motif (the wrestling with Death), a Christian aspect (victory over Death through death), a Hegelian perspective (setting of the Absolute spirit over matter), and an allusion to Schiller’s sublime.87 It is not suYciently emphasized, however, that all these forms share the schematic and somehow reductive representation of space. Folk poetry relies on few landscape markers and recurring motifs (the rock and dry grass), the prophetic biblical voice conXates the real and immaterial in visions of the beyond, and the German Idealist perspective wrestles to identify a concrete space to incorporate the ideal. What is important, therefore, is that the incompleteness and refusal of representation of Greek space, the shorthand of reply to European precedent that leaves only the barest of coordinates to delimit a Greek territory, whatever its debt to Greek precedents too, is an extreme response entirely in line with the structural requirements of Romantic representation, and it is a response that tallies also with a repertoire Solomos otherwise chose to draw from. In other words, it does not matter so much in and by itself whether Solomos’s imagery stems from a more or less ‘own’ (personal or national) or ‘foreign’ source; what matters is that his choice corresponds on a formal and functional level with the needs and challenges implied in the Western European representation of the Greek land, allowing for a reading that lays bare their foundations—and the diYculty to respond to them at all. Where does this function of landscape and represented nature Wnally leave us vis-a`-vis the nation? In Solomos’s writings its importance seems to lie in the awareness of its absence, its incomplete representation, its character as an image once removed. The awareness of absence might be part of the awareness of its identity, as Schiller’s and Goethe’s famous question exempliWes: ‘Deutschland? aber wo liegt es? Ich weiß das Land nicht zu Wnden’ (‘Germany? Where is it to be found? I cannot tell the country’s place’).88 Ho¨lderlin expressly felt that only the distant Greek landscape oVered enough space, and the necessary oblique angle, 87 Eratosthenis Kapsomenos, ‘˚Æº " ÆØ Æ æ æÆ ı’, in ¯æ ıØŒ Œº ØØ ºø (Athens, 1992), 165. 88 ‘Xenien von Schiller und Goethe’, no. 95, in Schiller, Werke, i. 320.


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to help negotiate its (absent) German sibling image. Just as he and many others had never actually seen and experienced the Greek landscape of his imagination, Solomos describes a Greece which, although in many respects closer, is literally unknown to him. He too never set foot on the mainland that made up the body of the newly founded Greek state. The absence, and more strongly the destruction and impossibility, of a Greek landscape in Solomos, incidentally, is as conspicuous as the absence of Solomos himself from recent discussions of the diYcult Greek process of nation-building in its artistic manifestation.89 The diYculty of reconciling Solomos to a real Greek landscape seems to persist. Is Solomos, looking at the precedents of German Idealism and Romanticism, a victim of the idealization of space we saw there? Or is he not rather following through the Romantic placing of Greece to its extreme? Recent work on nation and narrative, or literary, representation seems to have focused on the nation as necessarily a stranger to itself, whether this is the specular subject, the split subject, or the (internal) self-colonizing eVect, all this linked to the perception of modernity. In Solomos’s case, though, we get to the point of national space or any other space virtually and literally disappearing into itself. Remembering Polylas’s contention that Solomos’s poetic sensibility was at home only in a milder Mediterranean ambience, the notion that he is a poet shaped by the landscape seems to have guided the interpretation of Solomos’s relation to spatial representation. However, landscape depends on the eye of the author and beholder. In this sense Solomos is, despite his apparent theme, much more of a typical European (especially German) Romantic than a national poet. If there is, indeed, no ‘other world’ in Solomos’s poetics, then maybe it is not the abstract spiritual world that cannot be reconciled with the material world except in death, but the material world that cannot be incorporated into the aesthetic. Perhaps the imagination had to refuse a space for the mainland and the territory of the Greek state, which he did not want to visit. From a de-territorialized Italian ‘lacking any organic relationship with his native place’,90 Solomos 89 Both Leontis and Gourgouris, for example, give short shrift to Solomos, mainly because of the time-frames of their respective studies. 90 Mackridge, ‘Dionisio Salamon/Dionysios Solomos’, 67.

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turns into a Greek, who de-territorialized the object at hand almost altogether: by condensing it to the point of non-existence, through speaking the language of Romantic Hellenism enough to make its destructive logic visible. To keep the nation as a represented, meaningful place suspended, that language, spoken by the Romantic philhellenes of Europe, had been appropriate; to represent the Greek nation from the inside, that same logic made the destructiveness of place the appropriate response. In 1865 Solomos’s earliest and only Wnished version of a dangerously non-visualized Greece, the ‘Hymn to Freedom’, became Greece’s national anthem.

Epilogue Think of the noise that Wlls the air When autumn takes the Dnieper by the arm And skein on skein of honking geese Xy south To give the stateless rains a miss (Christopher Logue, The Husbands)

In Christopher Logue’s adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, it is the Trojans exiting the city who are likened to geese starting for their journey south. Over and above the Wght of two speciWc nations, carried out on the small territory of the plain of Troy, hovers the image of the stateless rains, future and past in their recurring annual cycle. Logue’s melancholy image captures the double vision of nature and history that moves Romantic Hellenism, too. Nature functions to denote the particular, the determinant and characteristic inherent in environment and place; at the same time, nature is transparent and translatable, shared, mobile, stateless. It is this double function that made Greek nature such a proliWc category, as it promised an eVect on the self through observation of another place. Unlike the geese escaping south, but like Ho¨lderlin’s geese, grounded against the Greek sky by their very modernity, the Trojans will be grounded on the battleWeld, the speciWcity of place winning out over the vision of stateless, adaptable nature. That Logue’s simile plays out in the context of peoples clashing over a highly signiWcant landscape underlines how nature can be both particular and nationally speciWc, but also a shared category, a potentially liberating zone free from such particularity. It is a translation zone, while remaining potentially a ground for national identity. Writers such as Stathis Gourgouris or Michael Herzfeld have described in detail the logic of external and internal representation

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of Greece.1 On the one hand there is the wish to display aYliation with a (classical) past in terms that are thought in line with a Western Enlightenment-based understanding of the nation—which comes with an understanding of the European tradition that makes classical Greece its origin, but that also makes the translatability away from Greece its asset, as much as a necesssity, while still relishing the fact that some of its staying-power can be seen residing in modern Greece’s material presence. On the other hand, there is resistance to such a model, in the shape of insistence on Greece’s non-Western, diVerent, exceptional status. There is, in other words, a multiplicity of tensions, in which Greece is a placeholder, standing in for its past or someone else’s present, and not quite ‘itself ’. What is more, this is not only a tension between the ‘outsider’s’ perspective on Greece as opposed to an insider’s view: it is a tension, and an availability of positions, that is brought into play both on the Greek and the non-Greek side. Herzfeld has focused on how this dynamic tension is not part of Wxed, stable categories, and on its context-dependency instead, in stacked frames of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’: the local community as opposed to another community or the larger national unit, Greece as opposed to the West, and so on. Gourgouris has pointed out that this tension is a Wrm part of the Enlightenment project in the Wrst place, whose discourse of sovereignty keeps lapsing into dreams of perfect heteronomy, and patterns of self-colonization. This basic Enlightenment predicament of squaring the universal with the particular had special purchase in the Greek process of national fantasy, where both claims were equally strongly, and paradoxically, insisted upon. In this light especially, the representation of Greece in terms of a deWning nature and landscape is, I have suggested, one of the areas where those claims, and the expectation of transference between them, meet. One of the main factors in appreciating the diYcult relationship between European Hellenism and Greece’s place in it and with it, is that being modern and creating or intimating modernity are not the same thing. From the German point of view, for example, being modern meant an awareness of the 1 Gourgouris, Dream Nation; Herzfeld, Ours Once More; Cultural Intimacy; Anthropology Through the Looking Glass.

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past, which involved an awareness of what was lost or changed; a loss of immediacy, visible only in retrospect, that was especially legible in regard to material nature and its representation. Seeing, quite literally, contemporary Greece as oscillating between a valued past and a deWcient modernity, gave the Greek land a functional position from which it was not really meant to change, and from which it was diYcult to change. To deWne Greece by the qualities of its place and material nature became the carrot in front of representing modernity: both outside Greece, and in the new state itself, whose writers faced an aesthetics of distance that was supposed to be squared with an insistence on being on home ground. Greek place, in the framework of European Hellenism, works best when seen on the ground, but still from a distance, as it were: just as the travellers’ and artists’ Claude glass worked through indirect vision, but depended on standing on site. Translating such distance onto the Greek writers’ position, the passages in their works that pay particular attention to landscape and spatial environment are motivated by a context either of paralysis before fatal exit (Solomos’s free besieged) or of Xight (Soutsos’s restless wayfarers). Appearing as a territorial nation state at a time that privileges nature as a necessary, if ambivalent, motor in the understanding of modernity, Greece soon became deWned, and in turn deWned itself, by its ‘placeness’; this imposes a rigid frame that claims the stabilizing, determining force of that nature, but renders representation highly unstable at the same time. Why is it important to describe this paradox? One reason is that a result of the systemic diYculty of representing Greek landscape and nature may have been the desire, within and outside literature, to Wx that image of Greek nature and its position as much as possible. This can be seen in the insistence, again both outside and inside Greece, on the timeless continuity of certain natural elements (colours, light, sea, climate, and so on), as much as in the focus on the institution of archaeology as a locus of national pride and a means to establish (material) continuity, as the nineteenth century wore on, and a process that is still continuing. Another reason is that the perception of Greece in terms of its signiWcant environment has fostered a false sense of security that nature is a self-explanatory category in the ‘ideal’ versus ‘real’ blame game of writings about Hellenism, one of whose problems may be

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the reassuring transcendence that has been inscribed into Greek nation and nature alike. Modern Greece is not just (falsely imagined as) a weightless simulacrum of antiquity, a colonized ideal disturbed by the physical presence of the modern Greek, as Calotychos suggests; it ‘matters’, in that its materiality anchors it within the structure of Hellenism, making it functional within an aesthetic pattern in which the physical presence of Greek landscape enables that ‘autoscopic project of identity that tends to read a diVerent yet recognizable Other for a deWnition of the Same’.2 Calotychos argues that ‘[t]his project expressly excludes and denies the modern Greek any identity. For it is the modern Greek, that ‘‘dirty descendant’’, who disturbs this colonization of space for those who read or appropriate Greek landscape as a symbolic capital and who then elevate it through the lens of diachrony onto a temporal plane and back to an ideal UrText.’3 I suggest that it is exactly the aspect of descent, of a material presence, that is tangible and visible, but ‘dirty’, that is, tainted or lesser than its original, the messiness of Greek place, rather than its ‘ab-sense’, that puts modern Greece into the diYcult structural position it holds. The materiality of the Greek ground proved to be a veritable, and sometimes also a literal, stumbling-block in the new Greek nation state. The German archaeologist Ludwig Ross, overseer of Greek antiquities in the Peloponnese, described the arrival from Germany of King Otho’s bride Amalia as the new, young queen of Greece, in 1834: With the advent of Western civilization and its true beneWts in Greece also came its obligatory inanities. The Athenian authorities, whether it had occurred to themselves or whether it had been suggested to them, had decided to present the young queen upon arrival with a speech and the symbol of the city in the form of a living bird of Minerva, legs and wings bound with white and blue silk ribbons. No sooner had the queen set foot on Greek soil than she almost fell over the great number of olive branches strewn in her way, only then to have to attend to that poor little screech owl that by then was practically frightened to death.4 2 Calotychos, Modern Greece, 32. 3 Ibid. 32. 4 ‘[M]it der westlichen Civilisation, mit den wirklichen Segnungen derselben waren auch die obligaten dummen Einfa¨lle u¨ber Griechenland gekommen. Die Beho¨rden von

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Are we, like Amalia, ‘grounded’ with talk of place and space when it comes to studying Greece? Must we, talking about Greek writing, keep talking about nation and nature and place? Leontis, in her Topographies of Hellenism, has argued for adopting the position of a theoro¯s, a spectator and literally a participant observer, in order to investigate the relationship between knowledge and place (as a power relationship) by way of a critical ‘topology’.5 By looking at the period from the late eighteenth century to the Wrst decade of the Greek state, I argue that ‘theory’ is exactly at the core of Hellenism: the act of observation gives Greece its particular meaning and it does so through attention to space. The attention to form as describing the inner workings and dynamic attached to the authority of nature, an interest in the logic of topos rather than a topology, may lift a theory of Hellenism, as articulated within and outside Greece, beyond the ‘natural’, that is, self-evident, attention to space and may help create a vocabulary that eventually critiques space as an exclusive theoretical focus. Laying bare the assumptions of European (and undoubtedly Eurocentric) Romantic Hellenism, we might want to question its traces in current critical thinking that gives pride of place to a spatial model, even if it focuses on its constructed and at times constructive character. Place, and the act of ascribing meaning to place, while it is interrogated in a critical mode of topology, may not necessarily be the only approach, even if or because ‘placing’ has been such a powerful and appealing pursuit, especially in regard to the nation state. Of course, we cannot not talk about space, but we should acknowledge that one of the legacies of Romanticism for modern criticism is the way of seeing nature and place as a staple, and as a ‘natural’ component of viewing others and other cultures; in other words: of cultural comparison.

Athen, sei es, dass sie selbst diesen geistreichen Gedanken gehabt hatten oder dass er ihnen eingeXo¨sst worden war, hatten beschlossen, der jungen Ko¨nigin als Wahrzeichen der Stadt einen lebendigen Vogel Minervens, mit weissblauen seidenen Ba¨ndern an den Fa¨ngen und Flu¨geln gefesselt, zur Begru¨ssung unter einer geeigneten Anrede zu u¨berreichen. Kaum hatte die Ko¨nigin den Fuss am Lande, wobei sie fast u¨ber die reichlich gestreuten Oelzweige gestolpert wa¨re, so musste sie sich mit dem armen halb zu Tode gea¨ngstigten Kaüzchen bescha¨ftigen.’ Ross, Erinnerungen, 104 f. 5 Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, 14.

246

Epilogue

For the writers of the new Greek state, the role of nature was a recognizable medium of communication. Whether it was a proWtable one is a diVerent question altogether. If the task and the potential of ‘theory’ is to assume a higher view, at least for a time, it should also allow for putting place as a critical concept in its own place, contextualizing its critical potential, and enriching the analysis of placings and imaginations of place or territory by throwing light on its boundaries and the modes of translation between places. Now that the question of modes of comparison is once more at the centre of cultural and literary studies, maybe we should be willing and curious enough to move away from place as a self-evident and deWning category of studying modern Greece, and to look more towards the interaction of place and topos with other discourses. In this way we may avoid a little more the fate of that German queen, stumbling over the symbolic branches strewn on Greek ground, clinging on to a distressed owl unable to take Xight.

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Index Ali Pasha 200 America, United States of 98, 107, 151, 175 Arcadia 125 Athens 76, 82, 85, 136, 137, 142–4, 151, 177–80 ‘Athenian School’ 145–8, 152, 193, 206, 212 n.44 Amalia, queen of Greece 244 Aristotle 48, 173 n.65 Arnim, A. 113 Athos, Mt. 79, 181–5 Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung 100 Austria 233 Barthe´lemy, Abbe´ 58–9, 72 Barthes, R. 236 Bartholdy 55–7, 125 Bavaria 98, 108, 139, 119 n.72, 142 Beaton, R. 185, 216 Berlin 13, 137 Bhabha, H. 75, 127 Biedermeier 94 Bildung 12, 13, 27–9, 55, 58, 62, 74, 100, 110, 112, 135 Bildungsroman 73 Black, M. 104 Boeckh, A. 118 Boie, H.C. 60, 69 n.62, 72, 112 Brandis, C.A. 173, 188 Brentano, C. 37–8, 113 Bucharest 150 Buffon, G.L.L. 47–8 Bu¨rger, G.A. 164–5, 213 Butler, E. i

‘tyranny of Greece over Germany’ 1–2, 19, 46 Byron 2, 40, 117, 118, 148, 152, 154, 184–5, 186, 188, 196, 197 Calotychos, V. 11, 190, 203, 209 n.35, 244 Capodistrias, see Kapodistrias Cephalonia 66–7 Chandler, R. 49, 60 n.41, 61, 67, 72, 82, 87 Chios 67 n.57, 196, 198 Choiseul-Gouffier 49, 59–61, 63, 69, 72, 79, 82 Classicism 11–12, 198 Classic(ism) vs Romantic(ism) 94, 146–7, 156, 158, 193–5, 206 Claude glass 44, 243 climate 46, 47–9, 53, 59, 173, 243 comets 93, 141, 149, Constantine, D. 90 Constantinople 146, 150, 167, 177, 181 Corfu, see Kerkyra Cotta, J.H. 108 Coutelle, L. 213 n.47, 215 n.51, 223 Dessau 119, 120 Dimaras, K.T. 149, 190, 203 Diotima 73, 81–5, 87, 90, 95 Dubos, J.-P. 47 eco-criticism 9 Elytis, O. 193, 195, 202

272

Index

Epirus 122, 128, 198, 200 Ermis o Logios 29 n.21, 118 n.69, 119 ethno-symbolism 8–9 Eynard, J. 126–7 Fabian, J. 41 Fauriel, C. 114–5, 117, 129, 133, 163, 164 n.55, 168 n.62, 169 n.63 French Revolution 95, 98, 103, 104, 159, 231 n.76 folk song 18, 65–6, 109–14, 130–1, 145, 162–3, 172 Greek folk song 109–10, 114–15, 128–9, 133, 153, 166–7, 186, 237–8 Foscolo, U. 175, 178, 193–5, 197 n.17, 200 n.21 Gentz, F. 120 Goethe, J.W. 2, 16, 41–2, 50 n.15, 104, 117, 164 n.56, 175, 213, 215, 238 Sorrows of Young Werther 13, 178 Go¨ttingen 108, 112 Gourgouris, S. 16, 156 n.34, 239 n.89, 241–2 Grand Tour 44, 51, 78, 79, 180 Greek Romanticism 17, 146–7, 151, 188 Greek War of Independence 15, 18, 67, 94–5, 97, 105, 116, 119, 122, 139, 146, 154, 162, 178, 183, 192, 195, 197 Guys, P.A. 53–4, 57, 61, 67 Halem, von G.A. 69 n.62, 112 Blu¨then aus Tru¨mmern 60–8 Haxthausen, von W. 108, 114 Hegel, G.W.F. 212 n.44, 214, 215, 237

Heine, H. 117, 131 n.107 Heinse, W. 69–71, 85 Helicon, Mt. 77 Heliodorus 155 Heptanesian Islands, see Ionian Islands Herder, J.G. 28–30, 48–9, 50 n.15, 66 n.52, 68, 81, 112, 114, 157 Herzfeld, M. 4, 241–2 Hesperia 72, 107 Heyne, C.G. 50 Ho¨lderlin, F. 1, 5, 19, 71–2, 93, 95, 231, 237 n.85, 238, 241 Hyperion 46, 63, 73–92, 149 ‘The Archipelago’ 83, 90, 231 n.76 letter to Bo¨hlendorff 75 n.79, 76 letter to Neuffer 73–4 Homer 23, 31, 50, 131 n.108, 194–5, 198, 199, 235, 241 Homer’s burial place 67, 79–80 Hugo, V. 157 n.36 Humboldt, W. 13, 65 n.50, 93 Hydra 134–6, 198 idealism 9, 10, 19 German 13–4, 207, 211, 214, 215, 235, 237, 238 idyll 193, 196, 217 Iken, C. 105–8, 126, 135–6 imagination 54, 57–8, 60–1, 66, 72, 90, 94, 169, 180, 185, 190, 205, 220 Ionian Islands 66, 191–2, 207 ‘Ionian School’ 148 Ios 67, 79 Iser, W. 35, 58 islands 52, 68, 82–3, 195 archipelago 52, 63–4, 67–8, 70, 82 as place of freedom 67–8, 136, 198, 201

Index Italy 14, 63, 69, 96, 97, 119, 142, 178, 191–2, 193, 194, 207, 210, 213, 214, 233, 236 Jusdanis, G. 17 Kalaurea, see Poros Kalckreuth, von F. 119 Kalvos, A. 116 n.58, 148 n.15, 207, 222, 231 n.75 Odes 192–206 Kant, I. 33–6, 48, 74, 159 n.41, 213–5, 232 Kapodistrias, I. 108, 119 n.72 katharevousa 147, 148 n.15, 162 n.48 Kerkyra 200, 208, 209, 212 Kerner, J. 130 Kind, T. 135 klefts 65, 128, 138 n.121, 152, 154, 166, 168 kleftika 128, 134, 171 Korais, A. 105, 108, 115, 118 n.69, 135, 136, 155 Koromilas, A. 185 Krug, W.T. 100, 108, 126 landscape 30–2, 44, 70–1, 72, 79, 87–92, 133, 139, 175, 176, 180, 192–3, 229, 237, 239, 241–3 theoretical approaches 4, 6–9, 22–4, 74 Romantic landscape 32–43, 94, 153, 219–21 Leipzig 97, 100, 101, 108, 119 n.72, 120 Leontis, A. 10, 16, 22 n., 239 n.89, 245 Lessing, G.E. 213 n.46, 214, 224 n.68 Lisbon earthquake 103, 106 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt 129–30, 133 n., 137, n.117

273

Lobsien, E. 74 Logue, C. 241 Lountzis, E. 212 Lountzis, N. 212, 213, 220 Ludwig I, king of Bavaria 142 Man, de P. 77 n., 88 n.97, 89–90 Mani, see also Sparta 62 n.44, 123–6 Maniots 62–3, 65, 120, 123–8, 132–3 Macpherson, J., see also Ossian 113 Marathon 122, 198 Marchand, S. 12 Mavromichalis P. 123 n.85, 126 metaphor 9, 56, 64, 65, 67, 74–5, 83, 86, 89, 103–5, 113, 202 Metternich 120 Missolonghi 98, 121, 143, 208, 217, 219, 221, 222–6, 229, 230, 233, 234, 237 Mistras 87 Moldavia 98, 106, 146 n.11 Montesquieu 47, 53 n.25, 157 Morea, see Peloponnese Morlachs 65 mountains 66, 82, 86, 109, 121, 153, 167, 176 as place of freedom 84, 95, 127–8, 131, 134, 180 Mu¨ller, W. 96, 99, 111, 113, 115 Griechenlieder 116–37, 164 n.57 and publisher Brockhaus 105, 114 n.49, 118–19, 120–1, 129 Munich 137, 150, 151 Naples 106–7, 115 Nagel, F.G. 101, 125 Nafplio 142, 143, 144, 150, 162, 177 n.76, 181, 188 Napoleon Buonaparte 66–7, 94, 98, 120, 123, 126, 178, 191, 194

274

Index

nation 15, 47, 95, 102–3, 115, 138, 141, 145, 149, 155, 172, 176, 188, 203, 207, 215, 238–40 nationalism 102 nature and freedom 20, 24–5, 33–6, 40, 48, 52–4, 56–7, 67, 84, 124, 140–1, 172, 184, 217 politicized 95–6, 101–2, 104 Navarino 139 Naxos 69 Nemoianu, V. 14, 94, 189 Neroulos, J.R. 146, n.11 Nerval, G. de 188 Niebuhr, B. 95 Nio, see Ios Novalis 14, 20, 21, 25, 37, 93, 104, 214, 219, 222, 227 n., 230 ocean, see sea Odessa 119, 150 Olympia 79 Olympus, Mt. 84, 110 Orthodox Church 45, 97, 106 Ossian 113, 115 n.56, 194 Otho, see Otto Otto, king of Greece 142, 177, 186, 244 Ottomans 20, 45, 61, 69–70, 77, 97, 101, 105, 107, 123, 128, 135, 136, 138, 146, 167, 183, 191–2, 198 Palamas, K. 147 n.14, 148 n.15, 192, 197, 212 n.44 Parga 198, 200 Parnassus, Mt. 77 Paros 69 Patmos 62–3, 67, 201 Paulin, R. 96, 117 Peckham, R.S. 17, 139, 167

Peloponnese 45, 85, 86, 98, 106–7, 123–4, 128, 138, 143 Percy, B. 112–3 Perrault, C. 21 Pfau, T. 121–2 Phanariots 134, 146, 150 n.23, 163 n.53, 190 Philhellenism 6, 11–13, 15, 18, 97–101, 114, 116, 125, 132, 137, 152, 162, 189, 197, 198, 200, 206, 225, 234 Piedmont 107 Pinkard, T. 13 Plato 68, 69, 81, 82 Poland 96 politikos stichos 129 Polylas, I. 209–11, 218, 226, 239 Poros 81–2 Pouqueville, F. 125, 134, 136 Psara 198, 233 n. Querelle, see Perrault Rangavis, A.R. 5, 18, 141–2, 144, 149–73, 180, 182, 186–9, 204 Dimos and Eleni 147, 151, 154–6, 167–71, 185 ‘The Kleft’ 153–4 Phrosyne 151, 173 ‘The Singer’ 166 ‘Thoughts in Desolation’ 141, 154, 171–2 ‘The Travelling Girl’ 162–5, 169 Reichard, H.A.O. 49, 60, 87 Restauration 94, 105, 118, 122 Ross, L. 244 Roumeli 77, 128 Rousseau, J.-J. 63, 66, 78, 89 n.101, 175, 200 n.22 ruins 64, 85, 132–3, 178–9 Russia 45, 62, 87, 98, 191

Index Sack, von baron 118, 134 Salamis 82, 84, 135, 232 Samos 198, 201 Schiller, F. 30–1, 33, 36, 75, 87, 91, 154, 159–61, 190, 207, 210–11, 211, 212 n.44, 213–14, 216–19, 223, 224, 227 n., 238 Schelling, J.W.F. 207, 214, 215, 220–1, 230 Schlegel, F. 36, 37, 42, 65 n.50, 104, 124 n.91, 157 n.36, 183, 191, 213 n.46, 229 Schlo¨zer, A.L. 55 Scott, W. 175 sea 66, 83, 107, 109, 121, 176, 201–2, 228–9, 243 as place of freedom 67, 134–6 Shelley, P.B. 11, 234 n.79 Simmel, G. 32 Sismondi, J.C.L. 114 Smyrna 79–80, 110 Solomos, D. 18, 116 n.58, 148 n.15, 192, 193, 207–40, 243 Dialogue 208 ‘The Cretan’ 208, 215, 227 ‘The Free Besieged’ 208, 211, 215, 216, 217, 222–32 ‘Hymn to Freedom’ 208, 211, 213 n.46, 215, 232–5, 240 ‘Ode on the Death of Lord Byron’ 208, 211 ‘The Shark’ 208, 215 ‘The Woman of Zakynthos’ 208, 223, 237 Souli 110, 198, 202 Soutsos, A. 142, 174, 176 n.70, 177 Soutsos, P. 18, 142, 143, 144, 147, 173–86, 243 Leandros 175–80 The Wayfarer 147, 180–5, 199 Spain 96, 107

275

Sparta 62 n.44, 122–7, 133, 184 de Stae¨l, Mme. 14 Stafford, B. 23 Stein G. 203 Steward, S 109–11 Stieglitz, H. 133 Stolberg, F. 60, 68–9, 112 Switzerland 69, 72, 125, 194, 197 symbol 8–9, 102, 104, 206, 219 in Romanticism 4, 6, 18, 32, 35–40, 68, 94, 203, 207, 215, 222, 236 Taheiti 68–9 Thermopylae 122–3 Thiersch, F.W. 100, 108, 119 n.72, 120, 150 Tieck, L. 214 Todorov, T. 236 travel writing 43–58, 72, 125 Trikoupis, S. 208, 211, 234 n.80 Uhland, L. 114 n.49, 117 n.65, 131, 214 Ukert, F.A. 108, 125, 134, 135, 136 n. Varnhagen von Ense, K.A. 96 Venice 67 n.56, 69, 191 Vico, G. 115 Vienna 94, 97, 108, 118–19, 120 Voltaire 63, 146 n.11 Voss, W. 60, 72, 112 Voutier, colonel 133 Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis, see Barthe´lemy Waddington, G. 136 Waiblinger, W. 124 n.89

276 Wallace, J. 11 Wieland, C.M. 64–5 Winckelmann, J.J. 1, 25–9, 40, 47, 52–4, 224 n.68 Wolf, F.A. 51, 118, 131 n.108 Wood, R. 50, 57, 58, 80

Index Ypsilantis, A. 98, 123 Young, E. 194 Zakynthos 106–7, 192, 193, 195, 196, 207 Zante, see Zakynthos

Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770-1840 (Classical Presences)

Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770-1840 (Classical Presences)

Classics and Comics (Classical Presences)

Classical Dynamics

Isaeus (The Oratory of Classical Greece)

The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece

Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (Classical Presences)

The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece

Laughing with Medusa. Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (Classical Presences)

Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (Classical Presences)

Hellenism

The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Classical Presences)

Folk Poetry of Modern Greece

Folk Poetry of Modern Greece

Historical Dictionary of Modern Greece

Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English (Classical Presences)

Modern Greece (Brief Histories)

Information Gathering in Classical Greece

Classical Greece. 500–323 BC

Modern Greece (Brief Histories)

Greece (Modern World Nations)

Pandora: Women in Classical Greece

Classical Mechanics: Dynamics

Antiphon and Andocides (Oratory of Classical Greece)

The Classical Archaeology of Greece: Experiences of the Discipline

Classical Archaeology of Ancient Greece and Rome

The Dynamics of the Modern Brewing Industry

Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900

Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality (Romanticism in Perspective)

The Romantic Poets (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

The Economic Dynamics Of Modern Biotechnology

Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770-1840 (Classical Presences)