The Romantic Revolution

by Tim Blanning

  Of inspiration on the humblest lay.

  But now that attention had switched to the interior world of individual artists, much sharper differentiation between them was inevitable. However good a painter might be at following the academic rules, if he did not possess the divine spark, what he put on canvas would be boring—not to say worthless. It was no accident that it was during this period that the artist as genius began to set the pace as the role model, not just for fellow artists but for all society. Of course there had been geniuses recognized in the past. Both contemporaries and posterity had venerated Dante, Michelangelo, or Shakespeare, but this was different—now there was a cult of genius.69

  One of the earliest and most influential articulations of this shift was Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition of 1759. Modern writers had a choice to make, he observed: “They may soar in the regions of liberty, or move in the soft fetters of easy imitation.” Young stressed what was to become axiomatic for all romantic creativity—originality: “Originals are the fairest Flowers: Imitations are of quicker growth, but fainter bloom.”70 He also offered a definition of genius that is hard to beat: “What, for the most part, mean we by Genius, but the Power of accomplishing great things without the means generally reputed necessary to that end? A Genius differs from a good Understanding, as a Magician from a good Architect; That raises his structure by means invisible; This by the skilful use of common tools. Hence Genius has ever been supposed to partake of something Divine.”71 Young was especially fond of contrasting “learning,” which was admirable after its own fashion, and genius: “Learning we thank, Genius we revere; That gives us pleasure; This gives us rapture; That informs, This inspires; and is itself inspired; for Genius is from Heaven, Learning from man: This sets us above the low, and illiterate; That above the learned and polite. Learning is borrowed knowledge; Genius is knowledge innate, and quite our own.”72 And of course a genius has no use for rules, which “like Crutches, are a needful Aid to the Lame, tho’ an Impediment to the Strong. A Homer casts them away.”73

  In his native England, Young’s treatise made little impact at first, but it was quickly taken up in Germany, where it appeared in two different translations within two years of publication.74 No one responded with greater—or more influential—enthusiasm than Johann Georg Hamann, the self-styled “Magus of the North.”75 Hamann had good firsthand knowledge of the English intellectual world, having lived in London during 1757–58. It was there that he experienced an intense religious conversion that inspired him to develop a highly individual worldview. The entire classical inheritance he abandoned. In Socratic Memorabilia, published in 1759, he asked what permitted Homer to be ignorant of the rules or Shakespeare to disregard them. His one-word answer was: “Genius.” Moreover, the prerequisites of genius were originality, passion, and enthusiasm: “Passion alone gives hands, feet and wings to abstractions and hypotheses; gives spirit, life and voice to images and symbols.”76

  Hamann’s “polemical pyrotechnics,” as Nicholas Boyle has dubbed them,77 were too incoherent and opaque to inspire a movement. It was through his pupil Johann Gottfried Herder and Herder’s friend Goethe, that his insights entered the mainstream. In his autobiography, Goethe recorded Hamann’s huge influence on everyone who found the prevailing Zeitgeist uncongenial and also paid tribute to his “wonderful greatness and profundity” [Großheit und Innigkeit].78 Goethe’s own epiphany occurred at Strasbourg in 1770, brought on by the overwhelming impact of its Gothic cathedral. He articulated his response in “Concerning German Architecture,” an essay dedicated to Erwin von Steinbach, the cathedral’s chief architect, and published in a collection edited by Herder in 1773. Goethe emphatically rejected any idea that beauty could be found by joining schools, adopting principles, or following rules: They were so many chains enslaving insight and energy. In the essay’s key passage, Goethe defined his alternative: “The only true art is characteristic art. If its influence arises from deep, harmonious, independent feeling, from feeling peculiar to itself, oblivious, yes, ignorant of everything foreign, then it is whole and living, whether it be born from crude savagery or cultured sentiment.”79 Untamed, spontaneous authenticity was everything: “For a genius, principles are even more harmful than examples.”80

  In developing his new aesthetic, Goethe was also strongly influenced by Rousseau. In the year following the latter’s death in 1778, he made a pilgrimage to the island of Saint Pierre on the lake of Bienne in Switzerland, where Rousseau had taken refuge after his expulsion from Geneva. There Goethe wrote his name on the wall of the room the fugitive had occupied. He also took the opportunity to visit some of the places where episodes from La Nouvelle Héloïse had been set—and was duly overcome by tearful emotion. Shortly after the posthumous publication of The Confessions in 1782, Goethe was given a copy by his mother, as part of a lavish new edition of Rousseau’s collected works, and enthused: “Even the few pages at which I have looked are like shining stars; imagine several volumes like that! What a heavenful! What a gift to mankind a noble human being is!”81 In Rousseau’s Dictionary of Music, first published in 1768, Goethe would have found the following emotional effusion under the entry “Genius”:

  Seek not, young artist, what meaning is expressed by genius. If you are inspired with it, you must feel it in yourself. Are you destitute of it, you will never be acquainted with it. The genius of a musician submits the whole universe to his art. He paints every piece by sounds; he gives a language even to silence itself; he renders ideas by sentiments; sentiments by accents; and the passions which he expresses are drawn from the bottom of the heart. Voluptuousness, by his assistance, receives fresh charms; the grief to which he gives utterance, excites cries; he continually is burning, and he never consumes.82

  Indeed, Rousseau’s influence on German intellectuals was immense, far greater than on their equivalents in France, where it was only after 1789 that he achieved recognition for his political works. Johann Heinrich Campe had “My Saint!” inscribed on a bust of Rousseau; Herder’s fiancée, Caroline Flachsland, learned French expressly to read the works of “a saint and a prophet”; Herder invoked, “Come Rousseau, and be my guide!”; Friedrich Maximilian Klinger believed that Rousseau had brought “a new revelation” to the world; and so on and so forth. No less a figure than Kant wrote that it was Rousseau who had put him right again [hat mich wieder zurecht gemacht].83

  THE ELEVATION OF THE ARTIST AND THE SACRALIZATION OF ART

  This elevation of genius, which became a permanent feature of the modern cultural landscape, had important consequences for the status of the creative artist. By 1800 “genius” had ceased to be one characteristic among many that an individual might possess and had progressed to encompass the whole person: Avoir du génie means just to possess exceptional talent; être un génie is to be superhuman.84 His—and the gender-specific possessive pronoun can be used here without apology—emergence was greatly assisted by the secularization of European society and the simultaneous sacralization of its culture. If the eighteenth century was “the age of faith” as well as “the age of reason,” it also witnessed a downgrading of organized religion and its priests. For a growing number of educated Europeans, both traditional doctrines and traditional institutions were no longer sufficient. They looked to art in all its various forms to fill the transcendental gap that was opening up.

  It was, however, a special kind of art: art that was serious, profound (at least in intention), and above all self-contained. It was around this time that “art” acquired its modern meaning. For Dr. Johnson, “art” still chiefly meant skill, as in “the art of boiling sugar,” and even in his subordinate definition of “a science, as the liberal arts,” the main emphasis was on “the power of doing something not taught by nature and instinct; as, to walk is natural, to dance is an art.”85 A generation later, art had advanced to become the supreme form of human activity. It could no longer be subordinate to some external patron such as a prince or a church or designed
simply to entertain. So the exponents of a sacralized art rejected not just the triumphalism of Versailles and the ecclesiastical art of the baroque, but also the hedonism of the rococo. Particularly influential was Winckelmann, who in effect created an aesthetic religion by marrying the language of Pietist introspection to sensualist paganism. Winckelmann’s account of the Apollo Belvedere is more than an appreciation of a statue, it is a religious exercise, because for him the statue does not represent God, it is a God.86 Yet for all his emotionalism, Winckelmann was operating very much within a neoclassical framework; indeed, his celebrated call for “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” represents the best summary of its program. It was only when the last external restraints were cast aside that the creative artist could break out of the mimetic cocoon and achieve full independence as a high priest of an aesthetic religion.

  For this new kind of purpose, a new kind of space was needed. Sacralized art could no longer be satisfied with sharing churches or palaces with prelates or princes but demanded its own temples. An early example was the opera house on Unter den Linden in Berlin, commissioned by Frederick II of Prussia as soon as he came to the throne in 1740. Taking the form of an autonomous classical temple, it was the first freestanding opera house in Europe.87 The inscription above the portico proclaimed, “Fridericus Rex Apollini et Musis”—“Dedicated by King Frederick to Apollo and the Muses.” It was no coincidence that Frederick reviled Christianity as a tissue of pernicious fictions and turned instead to the arts to satisfy his need for transcendental experience: “Since my childhood I have loved the arts, literature and the sciences, and if I can contribute to their propagation, I dedicate myself with all the zeal at my disposal, because there can be no true happiness in this world without them.”88 His aestheticism was shared by another great German role model, Goethe, who wrote after visiting the art gallery of the elector of Saxony at Dresden: “This sanctuary … imparted a unique feeling of solemnity which much resembled the sensation with which one enters a church, as the adornments of so many temples, the objects of so much adoration, seemed to be displayed here only for art’s sacred ends.”89

  Now installed in their own buildings—the first freestanding museum in Europe was the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, constructed between 1769 and 1779 to contain the collections and library of Landgrave Frederick II—paintings could be worshipped in their own right. More or less simultaneously, music found its own autonomous space in the public concerts that mushroomed during the second half of the eighteenth century. As they moved from tavern to dedicated concert hall, they required a more reverential attitude from the audience. This was well put by Fanny Burney’s heroine Evelina in the novel of that name published in 1778:

  About eight o’clock we went to the Pantheon. I was extremely struck with the beauty of the building, which greatly surpassed whatever I could have expected or imagined. Yet, it has more the appearance of a chapel, than of a place of diversion; and, though I was quite charmed with the magnificence of the room, I felt that I could not be as gay and thoughtless there as at Ranelagh [a pleasure garden], for there is something in it which rather inspires awe and solemnity, than mirth and pleasure.90

  This image of the concert hall as church and the concert as divine service became a recurring feature of romanticism. In “The remarkable musical life of the composer Joseph Berglinger,” published as part of the enormously influential Heartfelt Effusions of an Art-Loving Monk of 1796, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck recorded: “When Joseph went to an important concert, he avoided looking at the glamorous audience and sat by himself in a corner, listening with devotion as if he were in a church—silent and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him.”91

  The secularization of society, intensified by the French Revolution, urbanization, and industrialization, encouraged the sacralization of art in all its forms. In 1832 the French periodical L’Artiste asserted: “In our nineteenth century, a century that no longer believes anything, music has become a kind of religion, a last belief to which society is clinging with all its might, exhausted as it is by dogmas and words.”92 Although an exaggeration, even if applied only to Paris, it was not an aberration. Of the many supporting observations from contemporaries, the following by Hermione Quinet about the period before 1848 is representative: “I often forget that the Conservatoire is not a church, that the hundred musicians in the Société des Concerts live scattered throughout the twenty arrondissements of Paris and not in a seminary, that they are not a college of priests gathered before us to perform a holy service each Sunday.”93

  Especially revealing were the events following Beethoven’s death on March 26, 1827. The funeral oration, written by the leading poet of the day, Franz Grillparzer, and delivered at the gates of the Währing cemetery in Vienna by the leading classical actor of the day, Heinrich Anschütz, did not mention the Christian God once. The deity to whom Grillparzer—and Beethoven—paid homage was Art: “The thorns of life had wounded him deeply, and as the castaway clings to the shore, so did he seek refuge in thine arms, O thou glorious sister and peer of the Good and the True, thou balm of wounded hearts, heaven-born Art!”94 Beethoven’s role as secular redeemer was well put in a poem dedicated to his memory by Schubert’s friend Gabriel Seidl: “He teaches us new jubilation, new laments, new prayer and new jests.” Anticipating Richard Wagner’s celebrated injunction to emotionalize the intellect, Seidl added: “He feels through his mind; he thinks through his heart.”95

  In the popular imagination, Beethoven was the romantic hero par excellence: the lonely, tortured, afflicted, uncompromising, utterly original genius, a man who “treated God as an equal,” as his friend Bettina von Arnim recorded.96 In his autobiography, Richard Wagner recorded that when he was fourteen he had been bowled over when first hearing a Beethoven symphony (the Seventh) at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, with “the added impact of Beethoven’s physiognomy, as shown by lithographs of the time, as well as the knowledge of his deafness and his solitary and withdrawn life. There soon arose in me an image of the highest supernal originality, beyond comparison with anything.”97 Franz Liszt claimed that for all musicians “Beethoven’s work is like the pillar of cloud and fire which guided the Israelites through the desert—a pillar of cloud to guide us by day, a pillar of fire to guide us by night ‘so that we may progress both day and night.’ ”98

  Liszt provided material evidence of his enthusiasm when he intervened to save the faltering project to erect a statue of Beethoven at his birthplace, Bonn, in 1845. Although the organization was chaotic, to put it very mildly, the event supplied the best possible evidence of Beethoven’s posthumous standing. Tens of thousands of enthusiasts poured into the small Rhenish city for the celebrations, including Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Spohr, Charles Hallé, Jenny Lind, and an army of journalists and critics. That this was much more than a musical event was dramatized by the appearance of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the king and queen of Prussia, not to mention the launching of a steamboat named Ludwig van Beethoven on the opening day. In his speech at the ceremonial banquet, Liszt described the journeys made to Bonn from all over Europe by the participants as constituting one great pilgrimage.99

  Apart from his supreme skills as a pianist, Liszt was also a prolific writer, contributing frequently to the musical periodicals on a wide range of topics. In a remarkable series of articles titled “On the Situation of Artists and Their Social Condition,” published in installments in the Gazette musicale de Paris in 1835, he delivered a passionate critique of modern civilization. Its degeneration, he argued, was due to the separation of religion, politics, art, and the natural sciences into separate activities. Only when they could be reunited under the aegis of the arts, especially music, could man’s alienation be resolved. It was high time that creative artists realized that they had a “great religious and social MISSION” (sic).100 To the poet Ludwig Eckardt, he wrote: “Art is for us none other than the mystic ladder from earth to Heaven—from the finite to the Inf
inite—from mankind to God: an everlasting inspiration and impulse towards redemption through love!”101

  As art was sacralized and placed on a pedestal, so were its creators elevated to become high priests of this aesthetic religion. As early as 1802, Joseph Haydn had referred to himself as “a not wholly unworthy priest of this sacred art.”102 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the use of quasi-religious language to describe the musician’s calling was common, as for example when an English periodical referred to Mendelssohn and Spohr as “high priests of art who wield the sceptre by right of intellectual power” or when Prince Schwarzenberg, one of the greatest aristocrats of the Habsburg Empire, praised Liszt as “a true prince of music, a genuine grand seigneur … a priest of art.”103 This kind of tribute was not confined to musicians, although they were especially venerated. In 1842 Elizabeth Barrett Browning was moved by Benjamin Haydon’s portrait Wordsworth on Helvellyn to write:

  The poet as priest: Benjamin Haydon, Wordsworth on Helvellyn (1842)

  National Portrait Gallery, London (Bridgeman Art Library)

  Wordsworth upon Helvellyn! Let the cloud

  Ebb audibly along the mountain-wind,

  Then break against the rock, and show behind

  The lowland valleys floating up to crowd

  The sense with beauty. He, with forehead bowed

  And humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined

  Before the sovran thought of his own mind;

  And very meek with inspirations proud,

  Takes here his rightful place as poet-priest

  By the high-altar, singing prayer and prayer

  To the higher Heavens.104

  THE PHILISTINE PUBLIC

  The priests of art themselves welcomed their elevation, of course, not least because it offered an escape from a dilemma created by the rapid expansion of the public sphere. It was in the course of the eighteenth century that the interrelated expansions of population, the economy, towns, and literacy combined to create a new source of patronage. Increasingly, especially in the great metropolises such as London and Paris, writers, artists, and musicians were able to dispense with royal, aristocratic, or ecclesiastical patronage. The ability of Alexander Pope to live solely from the sale of his publications—“indebted to no prince or peer alive,” as he put it105—was very exceptional in the first quarter of the century but would have been less so by the last. Mozart did well as a freelance musician in Vienna after 1781, at least until the Turkish war of 1788 and the illness of his wife caused temporary difficulties.106