by Tim Blanning
There has also been a corresponding reaction to the culture of reason at a more intellectual level in the shape of strands known collectively as “postmodernism.” Thankfully, there is no space to investigate this richly various—and contradictory—phenomenon. It must suffice to assert that all postmodernists have in common a rejection of grand narrative, teleology, and rationalism. They squarely belong with the culture of feeling, in a line that stretches back to fin de siècle and romanticism (and indeed to the baroque). But, as before, this is not just another spin of the cycle’s wheel, but a dialectical progression. Where it will take us next is anyone’s guess. That the central axiom of romanticism—“absolute inwardness”—will have a role to play is certain. The romantic revolution is not over yet.
Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in His Studio (1811)
With the outside world blocked out and his studio reduced to the bare essentials, Friedrich looks inside himself for inspiration.
Staedtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim (AKG)
Philipp Otto Runge, Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1805)
Here Runge gives visual expression to Schelling’s dictum that “Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature.”
Kunsthalle, Hamburg (AKG)
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781)
For the romantics, the nighttime was the right time for the subconscious to reveal itself in dreams. Fuseli believed that “dreams are one of the most unexplored regions of art.”
Detroit Institute of Arts (AKG)
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, A Medieval Town on a River (1815)
This depiction of the union of king, church, and people presents allegorically the victorious Frederick William III of Prussia returning from the Napoleonic Wars. National Gallery, Berlin (AKG)
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Triosson, Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of the Fallen French Heroes (1801)
The poems attributed to the mythic Caledonian bard “Ossian” were modern forgeries, but that did not prevent him becoming a cult for romantics across Europe. Musée National du Château de Malmaison, Rueil (AKG)
Caspar David Friedrich, Tombs of Ancient Heroes (1812)
In his characteristically subtle and allusive manner, Friedrich predicts the doom of the Napoleonic empire. Kunsthalle, Hamburg (AKG)
J. M. W. Turner, The Great Falls of the Reichenbach (1804) The romantics agreed with Byron that Switzerland was “the most Romantic region in the world.” Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford (Bridgeman Art Library)
Eugène Delacroix, Scenes from the Massacres of Chios (1824)
Images such as this of Turkish atrocities inspired Europe-wide support for the Greeks in their struggle for independence. Louvre, Paris (AKG)
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Second of May 1808 (1814)
On the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Spanish insurgents attack Mamluk soldiers of the French army of occupation …
Prado, Madrid (AKG)
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Third of May 1808 (1814) … and on the following day they face the firing squad. Prado, Madrid (AKG)
Joseph-Denis Odevaere, Lord Byron on His Death-bed (c. 1826)
The poet as martyred freedom fighter, hailed by Goethe as “the greatest genius of the century.” Groeninge Museum, Bruges (AKG)
Francesco Hayez, The Refugees of Parga (1831)
Betrayed by the British, the Greeks of Parga leave for exile rather than submit to Muslim rule, but their example inspired Italian patriots such as Hayez to resist their own oppressors. Pinacoteca Civica T. Martinengo, Brescia (AKG)
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Joachim Whaley, “The German Lands Before 1815,” in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), German History Since 1800 (London, 1997), p. 15.
2. “Des tendances de l’art musical à l’époque actuelle, et de l’avenir,” Revue et gazette musicale de Paris VI, 17, April 28, 1839, p. 129.
3. Quoted in David Blayney Brown, Romanticism (London, 2001), p. 63.
4. Reprinted in his collected Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948), pp. 228–53.
5. Ibid., p. 252.
6. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford, 1981), p. 1.
7. Michel Florisoone, “Romantisme et néo-classicisme,” Histoire de l’Art, vol. III, ed. Jean Babelon (Paris, 1965), p. 867; Kenneth Clark, The Romantic Rebellion: Romantic Versus Classical Art (London, 1973), p. 19; Maurice Cranston, The Romantic Movement (Oxford, 1994), p. 1; Rüdiger Safranski, Romantik: Eine deutsche Affäre (Munich, 2007), p. 11; Maurice Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (Oxford, 1961), p. 271; Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Deutsche Geistesgeschichte der Neuzeit, vol. 3: Von der Aufklärung zur Romantik (Mainz, 1978), p. 267.
8. Hans Eichner, “Romantic” and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word (Toronto, 1972), p. 501.
9. Oxford English Dictionary.
10. Its history in French dictionaries is best followed through the online resource provided by the ARTFL project of the University of Chicago at http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/node/17.
11. Eckart Klessmann, Die deutsche Romantik (Cologne, 1981), p. 10.
12. René Wellek, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History, I: The Term ‘Romantic’ and Its Derivatives,” Comparative Literature I, I, pp. 3–4.
13. John R. Davis, The Victorians and Germany (Oxford, 2007), pp. 47, 59–62.
14. Wellek, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History,” p. 8.
15. Germaine de Staël, De l’Allemagne, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968), vol. I, pp. 211–24.
16. Sigrid McLaughlin, “Russia: Romaničeskij—romantičeskij—romantizm,” in Eichner, “Romantic” and Its Cognates, p. 423.
17. Wellek, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History,” p. 10.
18. Ibid., p. 12. The quotation by Goethe is to be found in Olga Ragusa, “Italy: Romantico, romanticismo,” in Eichner, “Romantic” and Its Cognates, p. 293. For the spread of the word, see also the helpful chronology in ibid., pp. 501–12.
19. Quoted in McLaughlin, “Russia: Romaničeskij—romantičeskij—romantizm,” p. 418.
20. Klessmann, Die deutsche Romantik, p. 7.
21. David Watkin and Tilman Mellinghoff, German Architecture and the Classical Ideal 1740–1840 (London, 1987), p. 178.
22. Blayney Brown, Romanticism, p. 8.
23. Christopher Ricks (ed.), Tennyson: A Selected Edition (London, 1969), p. 348.
24. I have discussed this in The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (London, 2007), ch. 10.
25. Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800; with a Lecture on the Ideas of Natural Law and Humanity, by Ernst Troeltsch, trans. with an introduction by Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1934), p. 203.
26. Lytton Strachey, “The Rousseau Affair,” in his collected essays Books and Characters, French and English (London, 1922), p. 174.
27. P. M. S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford, 1980), pp. 263, 269.
CHAPTER ONE:
THE CRISIS OF THE AGE OF REASON
1. Lester G. Crocker (ed.), The Age of Enlightenment (London, 1969), pp. 291–92.
2. Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 528.
3. Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1754 (Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 271.
4. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London, 1994), p. 27.
5. Quoted in Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab (New York, 1963), p. xxiv.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, ed. J. M. Cohen (London, 1953), p. 327.
7. Cranston, Jean-Jacques, p. 228.
8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Ot
her Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevich (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 16, 25–26.
9. Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York, 1972), p. 181.
10. This episode, which was occasioned by the success at court of Rousseau’s opera Le Devin vu village, is recounted in T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 363–64.
11. Ronald C. Rosbottom, “The Novel and Gender Difference,” in Denis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1989), p. 481; Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754–1762 (London, 1991), p. 263.
12. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), p. 242.
13. R. A. Leigh (ed.), Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. VIII (Geneva, 1969), p. 292. There are many more such examples in this volume and the following two. For a convenient summary, see Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, pp. 242–43.
14. Ibid., p. 243.
15. Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 506.
16. Ibid., p. 17.
17. Plato, The Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 315–16.
18. Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV, ed. F. C. Green, trans. Martyn P. Pollack (London, 1961), p. 370.
19. Béatrice Didier, La musique des lumières: Diderot—L’Encyclopédie—Rousseau (Paris, 1985), p. 19.
20. David Irwin (ed.), Winckelmann: Writings on Art (London, 1972), p. 61.
21. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (London, 1966), p. 19.
22. Peter H. Feist, Thomas Häntzsche, Ulrike Krenzlin, and Gisold Lammel, Geschichte der deutschen Kunst 1760–1848 (Leipzig, 1986), p. 29.
23. Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 115.
24. K. Andrews, The Nazarenes: A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome (Oxford, 1964), p. 6.
25. Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art—Past and Present (Cambridge, 1940), p. 191.
26. Quoted in Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-enlightenment,” in Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London, 1979), p. 10; Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (ed.), Deutsche Chronik auf das Jahr 1774 (repr. ed., Heidelberg, 1975), Erste Beylage zur Deutschen Chronik, August 1774, p. 5.
27. Quoted in Hugh Honour, Romanticism (London, 1979), p. 245.
28. Herbert von Einem, Deutsche Malerei des Klassizismus und der Romantik 1760–1840 (Munich, 1978), p. 45.
29. William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting (New Haven, 1980), p. 33.
30. Quoted in ibid., p. 45.
31. See below, pp. 64–69.
32. Pevsner, Academies of Art, p. 192.
33. Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 262.
34. G. W. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975), p. 519.
35. These contrasting metaphors provide the title for one of the most important discussions of romantic aesthetics—M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford, 1971; 1st ed., 1953).
36. Quoted in Theodore Besterman, Voltaire, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1976), p. 246.
37. Cranston, Jean-Jacques, p. 248.
38. Quoted in Crocker (ed.), The Age of Enlightenment, p. 294.
39. This comment was related to me by the late Robert Wokler, but I have not been able to find a source. John Morley in his Voltaire (London, 1891), p. 120, wrote, “His style is like a translucent stream of purest mountain water, moving with swift and animated flow under flashing sunbeams,” but that is not quite the same thing.
40. Quoted in Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester, 1953), p. 88.
41. Quoted in Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-enlightenment,” in Berlin, Against the Current, p. 8.
42. Joachim Maass, Kleist: Die Geschichte seines Lebens (Bern and Munich, 1977), p. 70.
43. A. W. Schlegel, “Über Litteratur, Kunst und Geist des Zeitalters,” in Friedrich von Schlegel (ed.), Europa: Eine Zeitschrift, vol. II, 1 (1803), p. 82. These were lectures given at Berlin at the end of 1802.
44. Goethe, Faust, Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford, 1987), p. 10.
45. S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Providence, 1965), pp. 28, 234.
46. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, vol. I (Oxford, 1956), p. 210.
47. Ibid., vol. II, p. 387.
48. R. R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France (Princeton, 1939), p. 131.
49. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London, 2008), pp. xvi–xvii.
50. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. II, p. 387.
51. Quoted in H. S. Reiss (ed.), The Political Thought of the German Romantics (Oxford, 1955), p. 137.
52. Quoted in Werner Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich (London, 2000), p. 269.
53. Maurice Cranston, The Romantic Movement (Oxford, 1994), p. 53.
54. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther, trans. Bayard Quincy Morgan (London, 1957), pp. 20–22.
55. Ibid., p. 63.
56. Quoted in Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford, 1981), p. 168.
57. For a concise summary, see Robert Stern’s introduction to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of This Science, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge, 1988).
58. Timothy Mitchell, Art and Science in German Landscape Painting, 1770–1840 (Oxford, 1993), p. 77.
59. Quoted in ibid., p. 75. See also the acute analysis of Runge’s painting in Robert Rosenblum, The Romantic Child from Runge to Sendak (London, 1998), pp. 24–29.
60. Robert Rosenblum and H. W. Janson, Art of the Nineteenth Century: Painting and Sculpture (London, 1984), p. 87.
61. Cranston, The Romantic Movement, p. 38.
62. Jens Christian Jensen, Caspar David Friedrich: Leben und Werk, 10th ed. (Cologne, 1995), p. 181.
63. William Wordsworth, The Excursion, E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (eds.), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 5 (Oxford, 1949), Book I: The Wanderer, pp. 15–16, lines 219–34.
64. Ibid., p. 82.
65. Quoted in Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, p. 68.
66. Jensen, Caspar David Friedrich, p. 210.
67. His friend Georg Friedrich Kersting painted at least three pictures of him at work in his austere studio—Hannelore Gärtner, Georg Friedrich Kersting (Leipzig, 1988), illustrations 29, 31, 32.
68. Quoted in Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich, p. 101.
69. Von Einem, Deutsche Malerei, p. 13.
70. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, in a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (London, 1759), p. 26.
71. Ibid., pp. 26–27.
72. Ibid., p. 36.
73. Ibid., p. 28.
74. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 199.
75. Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London, 1993). “The Magus of the North” was one of the many ironic titles Hamann gave himself.
76. Quoted in W. D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany (Oxford, 1965), p. 59. It is regrettable that a recent anthology of Hamann’s writings, translated into English, should include only the dedications of Socratic Memorabilia—Kenneth Haynes (ed.), Hamann: Writings on Philosophy and Language (Cambridge, 2007).
77. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1: The Poetry of Desire (Oxford, 1991), p. 38.
78. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Part 3, Book 12 (Munich, 1962), pp. 64–66.
79. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst,” in Johann Gottfried Herder (ed.), Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773), ed. Edna Purdie (Oxford, 1924), p. 129.
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80. Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries (Princeton, 1960), p. 417.
81. Carl Hammer, Goethe and Rousseau: Resonances of the Mind (Lexington, 1973), pp. 36–37; Eugene L. Stelzig, The Romantic Subject in Autobiography: Rousseau and Goethe (Charlottesville and London, 2000), pp. 138–39.
82. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Complete Dictionary of Music, consisting of a copious Explanation of all Words necessary to a true Knowledge and Understanding of Music, trans. William Waring, 2nd ed. (London, 1779), p. 182.
83. All these and other tributes are to be found in Raymond Trousson, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau et son œuvre dans la presse périodique allemande de 1750 à 1800,” Dixhuitième Siècle, 1 (1969), pp. 289–90.
84. Herbert Dieckmann, “Diderot’s Conception of Genius,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, 2 (1941), p. 152.
85. John Brewer, “ ‘The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious’: Attitudes Towards Culture as a Commodity 1660–1800,” in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds.), The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London and New York, 1995), p. 350. Samuel Johnson, A dictionary of the English language: in which the words are deduced from their originals: and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers: to which are prefixed, a history of the language, and an English grammar, vol. I (London, 1755), unpaginated.
