The Romantic Revolution

by Tim Blanning

  Cologne Cathedral as it was when construction resumed in 1842 and how it was to look when completed.

  LANDSCAPE AND MYTH

  By the time the cornerstone of the cathedral was laid in 1842, the river above which it towers had itself become the object of a cult. For the Enlightenment, the Rhine was the “Pfaffengasse,” or “Clerics’ Alley,” the notoriously backward region dominated by the prelatical princes of Cologne, Trier, Mainz, Worms, and Speyer. Visitors to Cologne derided the superstitious locals, especially their fabulous collection of relics, which included the remains of the three Magi, of a thousand martyrs slaughtered during the reign of Emperor Maximianus, and, even more improbably, of eleven thousand virgins who came from Britain to convert the locals, only to be martyred by the Huns in AD 383.101 The skeptical rake William Beckford wrote in 1783 that the pious burghers of Cologne “care not a hair of an ass’ ear whether their houses be gloomy, and ill contrived; their pavement overgrown with weeds, and their shops with filthiness; provided the carcases of Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar [the three Magi] might be preserved with proper decorum.”102 But once Beckford started traveling up the Rhine, his contempt turned into admiration: “Let those who delight in picturesque country, repair to the borders of the Rhine, and follow the road which we took from Bonn to Coblentz. In some places it is suspended, like a cornice, above the waters, in others, it winds behind lofty steeps and broken acclivities, shaded by woods, and cloathed with an endless variety of plants and flowers.”103 Beckford has been claimed as “the first Rhine romantic,” for it was from that point that the river became a favorite destination for British tourists.104

  And they wrote about it, enthusiastically. Of such accounts, two stand out for being among the biggest bestsellers of the period. The first was Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poem that brought him fame and fortune overnight. As he put it in a letter to his friend Tom Moore in March 1812, he “awoke one morning and found himself famous.” Moore’s own version was: “His fame had not to wait for any of the ordinary gradations, but seemed to spring up, like the palace of a fairy tale, in a night.”105 Byron traveled up the Rhine in the spring of 1816 and was bowled over by “the perfection of mixed beauty” he found there. The stretch from Bonn to Mainz he found “beautiful—& much surpassing my expectation … nothing can exceed the prospects at every point.”106 In the third canto of Childe Harold, published later that year, he gave these impressions poetic form:

  … true Wisdom’s world will be

  Within its own creation, or in thine,

  Maternal Nature! for who teems like thee,

  Thus on the banks of thy majestic Rhine?

  There Harold gazes on a work divine,

  A blending of all beauties; streams and dells,

  Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, cornfield, mountain, vine,

  And chiefless castles breathing stern farewells

  From gray but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells.107

  In 1818 a very different kind of bestseller propagated the same message. This was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the passage on the Rhine being based on a journey she had made with Percy Shelley four years earlier. Although the Shelleys had had to put up with the company of some “disgusting Germans,” who “swaggered, and talked, and, what was hideous to English eyes, kissed one another,” she extolled what she saw as “the loveliest paradise on earth.”108 In her novel, the same sorts of words were put into the mouths of Victor Frankenstein and his Swiss companion, Henry Clerval, who exclaimed that the beauties of the Rhine exceeded even those of his native country—“He felt as if he had been transported to Fairy-land, and enjoyed a happiness seldom tasted by man.”109

  As enthusiasm for things German began to gain momentum during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, so did the rush of British tourists anxious to experience “the most romantic spot on earth.”110 Ironically, the desire to experience untamed nature and ruined castles was satisfied by such instruments of modernity as the railways and steamships, which made the journey increasingly quick, comfortable, and cheap. Soon the Rhine was being used as a metaphor for the special qualities of German culture, as in Edward Bulwer Lytton’s novel The Pilgrims of the Rhine, for example, in which one of the characters observes as the boat travels upriver from Cologne: “As the Rhine flows, so flows the national genius, by mountain and valley—the wildest solitude—the sudden spires of ancient cities—the mouldered castle—the stately monastery—the humble cot. Grandeur and homeliness, history and superstition, truth and fable, succeeding one another so as to blend into a whole.”111

  French attitudes toward the Rhine were more ambivalent, not least because the whole of the left bank had been part of France from the conquests of 1794 to the collapse of the Napoleonic empire twenty years later. Handing back so much of the Rhineland at the final peace settlement in 1815 stuck in the craw of many French patriots. However, although they came to it rather late, the French romantics eventually succumbed to the Rhine’s attractions. In 1842 no less a figure than Victor Hugo published a travelogue devoted solely to the region: “Above all rivers, I love the Rhine … this proud and noble river, impetuous without fury, wild, but majestic … a noble river, at once feudal, republican, and imperial.”112 In a passage that was purple even by Hugo standards, he went on: “The Rhine combines every quality a river can exhibit. The rapidity of the Rhone, the breadth of the Loire, the rocks of the Meuse, the sinuosity of the Seine, the translucency of the Somme, the historical reminiscences of the Tiber, the regal dignity of the Danube, the mysterious influence of the Nile, the golden sands of the glittering streams of the New World, the phantoms and legends of some Asiatic stream.”113

  The Rhine was only one of many locations to excite the enthusiasm of the romantics. Competing for preeminence as the quintessentially romantic landscape was the river’s source—the Alps. Viewed in the past as an inconvenient obstacle to travelers, to be traversed as quickly as possible, in the late eighteenth century it was just their rugged inaccessibility that began to give them such appeal. To the fore, as usual, was Rousseau, who increasingly shunned cities for the countryside, the wilder the better: “It is already clear what I mean by fine country. Never does a plain, however beautiful it may be, seem so in my eyes. I need torrents, rocks, firs, dark woods, mountains, steep roads to climb or descend, abysses beside me to make me afraid. I had these pleasures and I relished them to the full, as I came near to Chambéry.”114 What he liked best about the high Alps was that they presented nature in a form least polluted by man. It was there that the hero of his epistolary novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, Saint-Preux, had his mystical experience and wrote to his doomed lover, Julie: “It seems that in being lifted above human society, one leaves below all base and terrestrial sentiments, and that as [a man] approaches the ethereal regions, his soul acquires something of their eternal purity.”115

  As the biggest bestseller of the eighteenth century,116 La Nouvelle Héloïse did more to publicize the appeal of the Alps than any other publication. It also encouraged Alpine tourism. In the course of the eighteenth century, the pace of international travel increased rapidly. If still frequent, wars were more localized and less destructive. If still defective, roads were better. If still risky, travel was no longer so perilous. So the “Grand Tour” came to be regarded as an essential part of a gentleman’s education. The first English traveler to leave an account of a journey to the continent that was a tour rather than a pilgrimage was Sir Thomas Hoby, who visited Italy in 1549.117 But it was in the eighteenth century that the trickle of English visitors became a flood and then a torrent. In 1768 Baretti estimated that during the previous seventeen years, some ten thousand English people had traveled to Italy.118 By 1770 one anonymous observer could write, “Where one Englishman travelled in the reign of the first two Georges, ten now go on a Grand Tour,” while Edward Gibbon estimated fifteen years later that there were forty thousand English traveling on the continent (although this must have been a guess and was al
most certainly an overestimate).119

  Most of them went to Italy via the Alps. “Foreigners arrive in droves,” wrote the Swiss artist Caspar Wolf in 1779 in the preface to his collection of engravings titled Detailed Description of the Remarkable Views of Switzerland.120 It was intended to show those who could not travel there in person what they were missing. It was a service also performed by many of the travelers themselves, including such distinguished painters as John Robert Cozens and Francis Towne, who in the same year—1781—painted Alpine scenery.121 It was the sight of Cozens’s watercolors that inspired Turner to travel to the Alps in 1802 when the Peace of Amiens opened up the continent again, albeit briefly, to English travelers. As he told the painter Joseph Farrington, whom he met in the Louvre on his way home, he had found the Alps “very romantic.”122

  The Alps were everything the romantics liked—irregular, particular, sublime, organic, terrifying, spiritual. The Swiss natural scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, only the third person to reach the summit of Mont Blanc, in 1786, wrote of his experiences in the high mountains: “The soul ascends, the vision of the spirit tends to expand, and in the midst of this majestic silence one seems to hear the voice of nature and to become certain of its most secret operations.”123 It was an emotion repeated by the English romantic poets who found Switzerland “the most Romantic region in the world,” as Byron put it. Together with his new friend Shelley, whom he had just met at Sécheron near Geneva in 1816, he went on a boating trip equipped not with a guidebook but with a copy of La Nouvelle Héloïse.124

  Coleridge exclaimed when seeing the Alps at Chamonix: “Who would be, who could be an atheist in this valley of wonders?” Shelley could, but even he was overwhelmed by the same sights: “I never imagined what mountains were before … the immensity of these aerial summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a sentiment of ecstatic wonder not unallied to madness.” The poetic result was “Mont Blanc,” his ode to a mountain he had climbed in the company of none other than Saussure:

  Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee

  I seem as in a trance sublime and strange

  To muse on my own separate fantasy.

  In the preface to Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817), he wrote: “The poem was composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and, as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untameable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang.”125

  At about the same time some romantics were going south to the Alps, others were going north to the Scottish Highlands, also in pursuit of wild, rugged, untamed landscape. It was not until the definitive pacification in the wake of the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745 that the region became safe enough to be visited without a military escort. In the 1760s its appeal was greatly enhanced by the sensational success of three volumes of “prose translations” of verse purporting to have been composed in the third century AD by “Ossian,” the son of Fingal, the great Caledonian hero whose band of warriors had defeated an invading army. They were published by a schoolteacher, James Macpherson, whose modest role in the enterprise was affirmed in the title of the first volume: Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language. The preface gave an unequivocal assurance that “the public may depend on the following fragments as genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry.” Although the exact date could not be established, “tradition, in the country where they were written, refers them to an éra of the most remote antiquity; and this tradition is supported by the spirit and strain of the poems themselves.” The verses, it was claimed, had been handed down from one generation of bards to another.126 The first “fragment” begins:

  Vinvela: My love is the son of the hill. He pursues the flying deer. His gray dogs are panting around him; his bow string sounds in the wind. Whether by the fount of the rock, or by the stream of the mountain thou liest; when the rushes are nodding with the wind, and the mist is flying over thee, let me approach my love unperceived, and see him from the rock. Lovely I saw thee first by the aged oak of Branno, although thou wert returning tall from the chace; the fairest amongst thy friends.127

  Although one modern scholar has dismissed Ossian’s work as “totally unreadable … of inexpressible tedium; its characters as bloodless as the ghosts who provide its supernatural machinery,”128 many contemporaries hailed him as a Scottish Homer. Moreover, it was not only in Scotland itself that he received an ecstatic reception. An early boost was supplied by no less a writer than Goethe in The Sufferings of Young Werther. At what proves to be their very last meeting, Werther reads to Lotte some of Ossian’s songs in his own translation, at her request. They have an electrifying effect: “A flood of tears, which burst from Lotte’s eyes and gave her oppressed heart relief, checked Werther’s reading. He threw down the papers, seized her hand, and wept the bitterest tears. Lotte rested her head on the other hand and hid her eyes with her handkerchief. Both were in a fearful agitation.”129 When he resumed reading, it was not long before she completely lost control: “Her senses grew confused, she pressed his hands, pressed them against her breast, bent down with a sorrowful movement to him, and their glowing cheeks touched. The world was lost to them.” Not for long, alas, and Lotte was soon hurrying from the room, telling Werther she could not see him again. He shot himself the next day.

  By the end of the century, Ossian’s poems had been translated into Italian, French, German, Polish, Russian, Danish, Spanish, Dutch, Czech, and Hungarian, or in other words into more languages than any other work written in the English language in the eighteenth century except Robinson Crusoe.130 As Matthew Arnold later wrote, it poured “like a flood of lava through Europe.”131 In 1770 Herder wrote to a friend: “Should I ever reach the coasts of Britain, I shall only hurry through, see some theatre and Garrick, and say hello to Hume, and then it will be up to Wales and Scotland, and on to the Western Isles, on one of which sits Macpherson, Ossian’s youngest son.”132 Yet from the very start, loud and influential voices had been raised casting doubt on the authenticity of the poems. The derision heaped on them by Dr. Johnson might be dismissed as yet another example of his notorious dislike for all things Scottish. Possibly also tainted was the vigorous criticism voiced by Irish scholars enraged that their own heroes had been reassigned to Scotland. It was a different matter when David Hume disowned his earlier endorsement and told his fellow Scot James Boswell that the poems were all fakes, adding that he would not believe that Fingal was an ancient poem “though fifty barearsed Highlanders” should swear to it.133

  Indeed it was not an ancient poem. Macpherson had not “collected” Fingal or Temora (the other epic poem in the collection) but had written them himself or—more likely—had translated them from Gaelic poems written by his cousin Lachlan Macpherson, the laird of Strathmashie, with the assistance of Ewart Macpherson.134 This question continues to exercise literary scholars135 but need not delay us here. What was significant about the Ossian phenomenon was the widespread and enduring response it evoked right across Europe, although it might be added that this alone suggests that the poems attributed to him had both more literary merit and more historical substance than skeptics such as Hugh Trevor-Roper are prepared to concede. At least three major paintings testify to their evocative power: Gérard’s Ossian Evoking Phantoms to the Sound of His Harp (1801), Girodet’s Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of the Fallen French Heroes (1802), and Ingres’s The Dream of Ossian (1813). All three were commissioned by Napoleon, who took Ossian’s poems on both his first overseas expedition (to Egypt) and his last (to St. Helena).136 Napoleon was also a great admirer of Jean-François Le Sueur’s opera Ossian, or The Bards, first performed shortly after the new emperor’s coronation in 1804. Its colossal success—it was given seventy performances during the next decade—confirmed Le Sueur’s position as th
e leading composer of the Napoleonic regime.137

  The poems had been available in French translation since 1777,138 which greatly helped Ossian’s fame to spread across the continent. The need to discover, revive, or, if necessary, invent ancient folk epics proved to be ubiquitous. The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, an epic poem written in Old East Slavic, discovered in 1791 in a monastery, and published in 1800, gave Russian nationalists the cultural pedigree they felt they needed. Dating from the 1180s, it recounts a campaign led by Prince Igor of Novgorod against Turkic nomads. Despite doubts raised periodically, it is almost certainly authentic.139 It was given a warm reception by contemporaries, as was Kirsha Danilov’s Ancient Russian Verse published four years later.140

  Just as influential but much less trustworthy were the various discoveries announced a little later in the Bohemian Lands of the Habsburg Empire, where cultural competition between Germans and Czechs intensified rapidly during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. When Count František Kolovrat, the governor of Bohemia, founded the National Museum in 1818, his manifesto, written in German, referred to the new institution as a “Patriotic Museum” [vaterländisches Museum], but when Josef Jungmann translated this into Czech, it became the “National Czech Museum” [Národní české museum].141 In the previous year, the folklorist Václav Hanka announced that he had discovered an ancient Slavonic manuscript in a vault under the church at Dvůr Králové. Although it was lying under a sheaf of arrows that had been there since the days of the great Hussite warrior Jan Źiźka, it was thought to be much older.142 A fragment of a much larger work, the poems it contained told the Czechs what they knew already but never tired of hearing again and again: that they had a very ancient culture and that their past had been distinguished by feats of heroic resistance to German-speaking intruders. In a poem called simply “Patriotism,” for example, the great warriors Zaboj (Destroyer) and Slavoj (Glorious) unite to defeat the wicked German oppressor Ludiek, whom Zaboj kills in single combat.143