The Romantic Revolution

by Tim Blanning

  Less radical but even more popular were the historical romances of Walter Scott, whether in the form of verse or novels. Of the twenty-three novels he wrote between 1814 and his death in 1832, only three are not set in the past. As Trollope observed, Scott succeeded in making novel writing respectable by putting history, which was serious, together with the novel, which was not.59 His ability to combine strong characters in evocative settings with gripping plots made him the most popular writer of the age, not just in Britain but across the world. His narrative poems were “phenomenal best-sellers,” and by 1818 he was making the colossal sum of £10,000 a year from his novels.60 By the time of his death, the first of the latter—Waverley—had been translated into French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, and Russian.61 In France a sixty-volume edition of his works published in the course of the 1820s sold one and a half million copies in six years.62

  Among the many literary examples of his fame, the characteristically ironic tribute paid by Stendhal in The Charterhouse of Parma stands out: To reestablish his credentials when in exile, the fugitive Fabrizio del Dongo was required to choose a monarchist as a confessor; avoid anyone with a mind of his own; avoid cafés; never read a newspaper; pay court to an attractive noblewoman (to prove that he was not a misanthropic conspirator); and express contempt for all books written after 1720 (with the exception of the novels of Sir Walter Scott).63 As this implies, Scott was no threat to the established order. A conservative Unionist, he used his stories to promote the reconciliation of Scots and English, Protestants and Catholics, creating in the process “a synthetic Scot with a Lowland head but in Highland dress.”64 For that reason most of his novels were set in relatively recent times, with the Jacobite insurgencies to the fore. As Peter Fritzsche has observed: “The great achievement of Walter Scott was not simply to have produced the effects of historicity in his fictions, but to have drawn attention to the ‘just passed’ quality of a still half-remembered age.”65

  This use of history was obviously not the invention of the romantics. All these characteristics could be found, for example, in the masque Alfred first performed in 1740, with a libretto by James Thomson and David Mallet and music by Thomas Arne, the major difference being that it was English rather than Scottish history that was being celebrated.66 Nor was the preceding period bereft of “straight” history. The allegedly unhistorical nature of the Enlightenment is hard to sustain in the light of masterpieces such as Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Hume’s History of England.67 In his own lifetime Hume won fame and fortune much more from his history than from his philosophy and claimed: “I believe this is the historical age and this is the historical nation.”68 Of Gibbon, Sir John Plumb wrote: “After Gibbon history was fully fledged.”69

  On the other hand, the romantics, and especially the Germans among them, did approach history in a significantly different way. Gibbon may well have interpreted history “in purely human terms” (Plumb), but his perspective was that of the enlightened, skeptical, urbane scholar, deploying his superlative literary skills to deride the intolerance and superstition of Christianity and to point the way to a more rational order, as in: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.”70 Not without reason, the romantics believed that the Enlightenment approached history from the outside, imposing on the past contemporary standards and a contemporary agenda. For their part, they took their cue from the observations about “characteristic art” by Goethe quoted above.71 General ideas such as those advanced by Gibbon they dismissed as grand-sounding labels for subjective prejudices. To view a phenomenon from the outside was to invite certain misunderstanding: It had to be illuminated from the inside on its own terms. “From the inside out” was the only way. Hence Leopold von Ranke’s celebrated dictum that “every age enjoys a direct relationship to God.” No better summary of this essentially romantic position has been produced than Hugh Trevor-Roper’s, in the course of an assault on scientific history:

  We exist in and for our own time: why should we judge our predecessors as if they were less self-sufficient: as if they existed for us and should be judged by us? Every age has its own social context, its own intellectual climate, and takes it for granted, as we take ours. Because it was taken for granted, it is not explicitly expressed in the documents of the time: it has to be deduced and reconstructed. It also deserves respect.… To discern the intellectual climate of the past is one of the most difficult tasks of the historian, but it is also one of the most necessary. To neglect it—to use terms like “rational,” “superstitious,” “progressive,” “reactionary,” as if only that was rational which obeyed our rules of reason, only that progressive which pointed to us—is worse than wrong: it is vulgar.72

  The belief that the Enlightenment was hostile to history properly understood could only be intensified by the French Revolution. At first, its aggressive rejection of the past and passionate embrace of universalism, exemplified by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, fired the enthusiasm of intellectuals right across Europe. Not for the last time, Wordsworth found the most memorable form of words:

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times,

  In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

  Of custom, law, and statute, took at once

  The attraction of a country in romance!

  When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,

  When most intent on making of herself

  A prime Enchantress—to assist the work

  Which then was going forward in her name!73

  But Wordsworth was writing in 1804, by which time events in France had turned his youthful enthusiasm into equally radical rejection. Regicide, civil war, the Terror, de-Christianization, war, imperialist conquest, and the looting of Europe combined to turn the liberating enchantress into a destructive demon. The view expressed by the Revolution’s chief ideologue, Sieyès, that “the alleged truths of history have no more validity than the alleged truths of religion,”74 had lost its appeal. It was Edmund Burke’s alternative—“people will not look forward to posterity who never look back to their ancestors”75—that had gained in popularity. As Lord Acton observed in his seminal article “German Schools of History” in the very first issue of the English Historical Review in 1886, at the heart of the Revolution had been “condemnation of history,” and “the romantic reaction which began with the invasion of 1794 was the revolt of outraged history.”76 It was also Acton’s view that the historicism of romanticism had “doubled the horizon of Europe” by enlarging its perspective to embrace “the whole inheritance of man.”77 The elevated status now accorded to history was well summed up by Thomas Carlyle in his essay of 1830, “On History”: “History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man’s spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called Thought.”78

  As the revolutionaries of 1789 had set off boldly and confidently to establish a new order based on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, they threw away the old regime’s rule book: “Let us not be discouraged because we find nothing in history that can be adapted to our present situation,” proclaimed Sieyès in What Is the Third Estate?79 For the romantics, who always preferred organisms to artifacts, it was only the past that could provide a guide to present and future. The notion that there was some sort of natural law, eternally and universally valid, was a chimera. Law was not precept but tradition, the organically evolving expression of a community’s identity. In Friedrich Schlegel’s pithy formulation: “The world is not system but history.”80 This historical concept of law was then given magisterial and highly influential expression in Friedrich Carl von Savigny’s pamphlet On
the Calling of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence [Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft], published in 1814, in which he argued that law, like all other manifestations of the human spirit, including religion and language, was the fruit of historical development.81

  MEDIEVALISM

  This historicism expressed itself in a reevaluation of past epochs. The Enlightenment had venerated the classical world just because it was there that the natural laws of aesthetics had been discovered and practiced. Many of the romantics admired the Greeks, too, but less for their “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” (Winckelmann) than for their celebration of the wild Dionysian realm and, as we shall see later, the importance they attached to myth. The romantics’ attachment to particularism, organic growth, and history ensured that they would also find value in other epochs, notably the Middle Ages so derided by the neoclassicists of the Enlightenment. As Kenneth Clark put it: “To the eighteenth century the middle age was a foggy sea with but one landmark—the Norman Conquest—round which the Gothic cathedrals drifted like rudderless ships.”82 Winckelmann found that the mere sight of the great Gothic spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna was like “a great needle sticking into his eye.”83 Yet, as we have seen, the equally obtrusive spire at Strasbourg gave Goethe just the reverse experience, as it did to the many German romantics for whom the cathedral became an irredentist symbol.84 Subsequently, enthusiasm for Gothic art and architecture became one of the chief distinguishing marks of the romantics. All those characteristics derided by the classicists—irregularity, ornamentation, gloom, clericalism, transcendentalism—were now paraded as inspiring assets. Especially eloquent was François-René de Chateaubriand, who found his way back to the Catholic Church after his experience of the French Revolution. In The Spirit of Christianity, or the Beauties of the Christian Religion, written in exile in London in the 1790s and first published in 1802, he wrote: “One cannot enter a Gothic cathedral without feeling a kind of shiver of awe and a vague sentiment of the Divinity.” He went on to explain the appeal of the Gothic by reference to its relationship to history and nature:

  The forests of the Gauls have passed in their turn into the temples of our ancestors, and the woods of our oaks have thus maintained their sacred origin. These vaults carved in foliage, these buttresses supporting the walls and terminating abruptly like broken tree trunks, the coolness of the vaults, the shadows of the sanctuary, the dark aisles, the secret passages, the low doorways: everything in the Gothic church retraces the labyrinths of the forest and excites feelings of religious horror, the mysteries and the Divinity.85

  The book proved to be highly influential. As David Cairns has written: “It set a current of sympathy flowing between the author and a whole generation of young French men and women, kindling their imagination over a wide range of feelings and ideas.… More than any other work, it was the primer of early French romanticism.”86

  From being a term of abuse, as in “O more than Gothic ignorance!” (the epithet applied to the boorish Squire Western by his sophisticated sister in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones of 1749), “Gothic” became a badge of pride, as in the title of Horace Walpole’s novel—The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story of 1764. The latter was one of the first signs that the cultural tide was on the turn. Inspired by a nightmare (a very romantic origin in itself), it included such extravagances as a portrait that stepped down out of its frame, a statue that bled, a sword so massive that it needed fifty men to wield it, giant severed body parts, a sundry cast of magicians, goblins, friars, and other agents of the supernatural, and so on. Both the original dream and the writing of the novel took place in the ideal environment, for in the course of the previous fifteen years or so, Walpole had turned his house at Strawberry Hill near Twickenham into a Gothic extravaganza. Dismissed by one architectural historian as “a witty sham, an immense curiosity cabinet of architectural fragments heaped up into a building,”87 Strawberry Hill nevertheless initiated a trend that was to last for a century and more.88

  In his study The Gothic Revival, first published in 1928, Kenneth Clark maintained that it was “an English movement, perhaps the one purely English movement in the plastic arts.”89 There is only one reference to Goethe in the book, in a footnote to a passage in which he writes about Gilbert Scott’s study of the German Gothic in the 1840s and comments: “Germany was not yet awake to the Gothic Revival.”90 This majestic ignorance can perhaps be attributed to the ignorance of youth (he had just completed his studies at the University of Oxford). In reality, the Germans were in the van and, moreover, went far beyond the castellated walls and pointed arches that decorated the English Gothic villas and sham castles. Twenty years before Scott began his researches, Hegel was giving lectures at the University of Berlin on, among many other things, “what is called Gothic or German architecture,” in the course of which he gave credit to Goethe for having rescued it from the reputation for crudity and barbarism.91 He also succinctly summed up its appeal to the romantics: “While the buildings of classical architecture in the main lie on the ground horizontally, the opposite romantic character of Christian churches consist in their growing out of the ground and rising to the sky.”92

  The last part of that observation could well serve as an epigraph for A Medieval City on a River, painted by Hegel’s near contemporary and fellow Berliner Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1815. The cathedral rises naturally, as if growing out of the oak forest that surrounds it. To emphasize its organic character, its second spire is still under construction, like all romantic art a work in the process of becoming, not a completed artifact. In the foreground a prince rides home from the wars to his castle, situated symbolically immediately opposite the cathedral, as his loyal subjects rush to greet him. As the storm clouds disperse above an idealized medieval city, a rainbow forms to herald better times to come.93 As the date of its creation reveals, this was an allegory on the return of King Frederick William III from the Napoleonic Wars and the liberation from French domination he had helped to achieve.

  The image of an unfinished cathedral had a special resonance for Germans, for the greatest of all their medieval buildings, Cologne Cathedral, was just that. Not least because of its gigantic size, work had faltered in the mid–fourteenth century and had come to a complete stop by the middle of the sixteenth, with just the choir (itself big enough to be a cathedral), side aisles, and two stories of the south tower completed. The survival of a medieval crane on the latter was a visual reproach to succeeding generations. Yet it was just this disjunction between medieval aspiration and modern achievement that made such a powerful impression on the romantics. One of the earliest and most eloquent to respond was the naturalist Georg Forster, who among many other things had accompanied Captain Cook on his second expedition to the South Pacific. A freethinker of Protestant origins, he was seeking an aesthetic rather than a religious experience when he entered Cologne Cathedral: “Whenever I am in Cologne I always visit this wonderful temple, in order to experience the shivering excitement of the sublime.”94 The clusters of slender columns in the choir appeared to him “like the trees of a primeval forest” and the vaults “like crowns of branches.” Anticipating Hegel by a generation (he was writing in 1790), he commented that in Greek architecture was to be found the essence of all that was human and the here and now; the pillars of Cologne soaring through the Gothic gloom were manifestations of another world, “fairy palaces” bearing witness to the creative power of mankind.95

  Forster concluded by expressing his profound regret that such a magnificent building should have been left unfinished. He died in Paris four years later, bitterly disappointed with the French Revolution he had supported so enthusiastically at long range. So he did not live to see a campaign for the completion of Cologne Cathedral become the great cause commune of the German romantics. To the fore was another disillusioned “German Jacobin,” Joseph Görres, who had turned from radical politics to Catholicism and nationalism. He made the first public app
eal in his periodical Rheinischer Merkur in November 1814, or in other words during the triumphalist period of self-congratulation following the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig the previous year, which led to the liberation of Germany from French rule.96 Not one of the innumerable projects for victory monuments should be realized, he argued, until the standing reproach that was the uncompleted cathedral had been corrected. He received powerful support from the leading lights of German romanticism, notably Friedrich Schlegel (who had written his own paean of praise to the cathedral in his treatise Principles of Gothic Architecture in 1805)97 and the brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée, who had done so much to further the cause of medieval painting.98 Despite his well-known dislike for what he thought were the excesses of the romantics, even Goethe was induced to put his shoulder to the wheel.

  Eventually it moved, not least because the Boisserée brothers had converted the crown prince of Prussia to their cause.99 Alas, he did not succeed to the throne until 1840, but then he set about making amends. In a grand ceremony on September 4, 1842, King Frederick William IV dedicated the cornerstone of the resumed construction. He also took the opportunity to make one of the public speeches he was so good at, hailing the project as a symbol of German power and unity. “The spirit which builds these portals is the same which broke our fetters twenty-nine years ago, which brought to an end the humiliation of the Fatherland and the alien occupation of this province. It is the spirit of German unity and strength.… I pray to God that the Cathedral of Cologne may soar over this city, may soar over Germany, over ages rich in peace until the end of time.”100 Even with the help of the state, another thirty-eight years were to pass before the completed cathedral could be dedicated in 1880 by Frederick William’s brother, the new German emperor William I.