Romanticism

 

The Literature of Romanticism

began in the late eighteenth century as a broad movement of protest against the aristocratic culture of the ancien régime and the neo-classical aesthetic upon which that culture was based.

This account of Romanticism is divided into the following sections:

1. Radical Energy: The Context of European Romanticism.
2. The Way Within: Romanticism: Goals and Programme.
3. Self and World: The Literature of Romantic Individualism.
4. Revolt and Declaration: Romantic Drama.
5. ‘All things are sentient’: Romantic Nature Poetry.
6. ‘What exile from himself can flee?’ Romantic Travel Writing and the Theme of the Journey in Romantic Literature.
7. The Darker Self: Romantic Gothic.
8. ‘Hymns to the Night’: The Longing for Transcendence.
9. Romanticism: An Annotated Bibliography.

 

1. Radical Energy: The Context of European Romanticism

‘Nothing was dreamt of it but the regeneration of the human race’, exclaimed the English poet and critic Robert Southey in 1824.  He was describing the French Revolution, but his words might equally apply to the literary movement of which he himself was a central part: Romanticism.  From Byron’s act of self-sacrifice in the cause of the liberation of Greece, to Shelley’s Promethean myth and the radical stage of Victor Hugo, Romanticism enjoyed a close, almost symbiotic relationship with the political changes of the age.  The French Revolution, with its explosive mixture of revolutionary optimism and totalitarian cynicism, was certainly the most dramatic of these changes; but much else happened in the period between 1770 and 1830 to bring European society to a final break with its feudal past: the industrial revolution began to transform Europe, initially technologically but then socially; nationalism and ethno-centricity emerged as political forces; and science established its potency through, for example, the discoveries of electricity and electro-magnetism.  These changes and others, such as voyages of discovery to the New World, the spread of religious evangelicalism and the rediscovery of rural life and peasant culture, produced a climate of ‘reformation and change’, which seemed to many, such as, the English radical, William Godwin, to be the augur of a new period in human history.[1]

But it was the French Revolution that dominated the imagination of the age.  During five momentous years, between 1789 and 1794, it dismantled the ramshackle (but no less oppressive) political apparatus of the ancien régime, abolished feudal rights and guild restrictions, rationalised fiscal and taxation systems, redrafted the relationship between Church and state, and, above all, enfranchised groups long deprived of political representation.  The enthusiastic and oft quoted lines by the major English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ but to be young was very Heaven’, were echoed by an entire generation of youthful writers, who saw in the French Revolution a vindication of morality over-ossified convention, justice over tyranny, nature over artifice.  The initial reception was particularly positive in Germany. The leading member of the Jena school of German Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel, viewed the Revolution as ‘the greatest and most singular phenomenon in the history of states’, a realisation of ‘God’s Empire on earth’; whilst his compatriot, Christoph Martin Wieland, welcomed it as the culmination of that ‘beautiful, noble and happy state of being with which nature has endowed mankind’.  None could escape its influence.  As Heinrich Heine wrote, even ‘the most isolated author, living in a distant corner of Germany, took part in the movement; sympathetically, even without fully understanding its political import’.[2]

The French Revolution was the first major political event of the modern period.  Not only did it give birth to a notion of governmentality that merged, in striking anticipation of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, statist manipulation with populist notions of democracy and the needs of ‘the people’; it also attempted to mobilise the electorate in the direction of the revolution through propaganda and civic symbolism.  This included not only a rewriting of the calendar (nominally beginning French history from 1792) but in a more grandiose form the replacement of traditional religion and the rites of the Church with a new civic faith, whose spiritual locus would be not God, but a state-inspired Supreme Being.  The leaders of the French revolution also anticipated the political demagogues of the twentieth century in one further area: in the practice of politics as a mysticism of power, which manifested itself in the moralistic and self-righteous tone of successive leaders from Danton to Robespierre, who increasingly came to see themselves as chosen ones, individual expressions of that anonymous totality: the popular will.  The Romantics were fully justified in seeing their own aesthetic of self-expression and self-empowerment writ large in the grandiose style with which the Revolution was conducted.  As the English poet Thomas de Quincey shrewdly observed, ‘until the French Revolution, no nation in Christendom except England had any practical experience of popular rhetoric; any deliberative eloquence, for instance; any forensic eloquence that was made public; any democratic eloquence of the hustings; or any form whatever of public rhetoric’.  Slogans such as ‘the fatherland’, ‘citizens’, and ‘liberty’ were fashioned into an emotive discourse, and used by successive revolutionary leaders to impart legitimacy to their aspirations for power.  Robespierre, in particular, showed himself master of the rhetoric of political Romanticism.  His famous speech ‘On the Cult of the Supreme Being’ (1794), with its emotive declaration and grandiose generalisations, conjured up the ‘immortal events of our revolution’ in a language that seemed to echo the hyperbolic idiom of the Romantic voice.[3]

The leaders of the French Revolution were driven by a moral mission, whose abstract principles they essayed to put into concrete and immediate form.  In the early days of the Revolution, these principles formed a charter, ‘The Rights of Man’ (1791), which received memorable formulation in the famous tract by the English political theorist, Thomas Paine.  But Paine’s influence was short-lived; as the revolution progressed his liberal-egalitarian credo gave way to the infinitely more abstract and impenetrable notion of the ‘General Will’ (volonté générale), whose source lay in the writings of the French pre-Romantic, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and most notably in his influential political treatise, The Social Contract (1762).  The ‘General Will’ was not an empirical reality but a mystical ideal, a governing abstraction that helped legitimise acts of brutality against all who stood in the way of revolutionary change.  As the Revolution progressed, the ideals that were embodied in the Estates General of 1787 soon degenerated into collective violence, first locally, in the form of the trial and execution of Louis XVI in 1793, and then in a more general way through the Reign of Terror of the years 1793–1794, masterminded by the most ruthless of the Revolution’s leaders: Maximilien Robespierre.  Byron’s later expression of repugnance with the Revolution: ‘But France got drunk with blood to vomit crime’ (voiced in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, four volumes, 1812–1818), graphically described the widespread disaffection that began to spread through Europe.  Those who initially supported the Revolution, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, now came to reject not only it, but all forms of political change, redefining themselves in the process as intractable defenders of the ‘social order’.[4]

It is only an apparent paradox that the energies unleashed by the French Revolution should find their supreme embodiment in a personality who would be responsible for its termination: Napoleon Bonaparte.  For he was a child of the Revolution.  At the age of twenty-four, he became the youngest general in French history, his meteoric rise made possible by the egalitarian policies of a revolutionary government that encouraged both personal and professional mobility, allowing for careers, as Napoleon himself described it, ‘open to all talents, without distinctions of birth’.  ‘Mounting the throne’, the French Romantic writer, François René de Chateaubriand, noted later in his memoir, ‘he seated the common people beside him.  A proletarian monarch, he humiliated the kings and nobles in the ante-chambers; he levelled the ranks of society, not by lowering them but by raising them up’.  It was fitting that Napoleon should be created Emperor of the French ‘by grace of God’, in a ceremony that took place in Notre Dame only ten years after the ceremonies in the same cathedral in honour of the goddess Reason.  His coup d’etat of 1799 put an end to the Revolution, but brought a style to politics that was as every bit as revolutionary as anything that had preceded it.  His imperial ambitions transformed the cosmopolitan idealism of the French Revolution into a nationalist cause, and provided the springboard for a resurgence in the economic, political and, above all, military might of the French nation.  Napoleon’s achievements were many, and they went well beyond his momentous victories in Italy, Spain and Germany, which were made possible through the first example of mass mobilisation (the levée en masse) in European history.  Equally impressive were the internal administrative reforms implemented during his first period of rule between 1799 and 1804, known as The Consulate, reforms such as the professionalisation of state bureaucracy, the centralisation and rationalisation of the judiciary through the Code Napoléon, and the restructuring of the French educational system.  Such initiatives, along with the diplomatic coup of The Concordat (1801), which turned the Church in France into an institution of the state, transformed the unstable achievements of the French Revolution into a permanent form of governance.  It is not surprising that many, including the great German philosopher Hegel, saw the French Emperor as the major figure of his age.  After viewing the conquering hero ride through the streets after the Battle of Jena, Hegel had no doubt that he was viewing ‘the World Spirit on horseback’.[5]

To his supporters, Napoleon represented the necessary emergence of discipline out of the rampant and unchecked individualism unleashed by the French Revolution.  But it was the imperial (and imperious) personality that won the hearts of his contemporaries.  Bonaparte embodied many of the personal qualities that the Romantics were to idealise in their writings: charismatic leadership, disdain for traditional class distinctions and advocacy of an aristocracy of personal merit, sexual prowess and an aggressive self-confidence.  He possessed, according to the French novelist, Stendhal (who wrote not one but two studies of his hero) ‘the energy necessary to shake the enormous mass of contracted habits’ that had remained unaffected by the Revolution.  The French Romantic, Lamartine, held him for the essence of ‘gloire! honneur! liberté!’, sentiments reiterated by the Italian, Ugo Foscolo, in his ode, ‘Bonaparte, liberator’ (1797), and by the Swedish poet, Esaias Tegnér (the author of the epic Frithiof’s Saga, 1825), who celebrated the military prowess of the little Corsican in the Russian campaign in his poem, ‘Hero’ (1813).  Even after Napoleon had surrendered at Fontainebleau and had been despatched to Elba, the English critic, William Hazlitt, was still prepared to defend the former emperor in public, extolling him in his Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1830) as a universal liberator, ‘the child and champion of the French Revolution’.[6]

Napoleon met his nemesis on the fields of Waterloo.  What followed him was a period of political reaction known as the Restoration.  From 1815 onwards, the conservative, aristocratic and largely Catholic values that had dominated pre-revolutionary Europe now found themselves back in favour, enshrined in the portentous protocols of the Congress of Vienna, signed in that year by the reigning monarchs of Austria, Russia and Prussia (the so-called Holy Alliance).  Where the ideas of Rousseau had once reigned, now came those of Joseph de Maistre (Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, 1809), and Edmund Burke, whose repudiation of the French Revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) (‘a revolutionary book written against a revolution’, as the young German poet, Novalis, shrewdly observed) gained increasing currency.  Notions of liberty, equality and the rights of man were now replaced by a new focus upon order, consensus and community, the key terms of a new social and political ethos that would be combined ‘with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with civil and social manners’. Revolutionary stirrings were repressed by governments throughout Europe in a process of counter-revolution masterminded by the noted architect of repression, the Austrian Foreign Minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich.  His intervention in the affairs of Italy in 1821, and of Spain in 1823, executed through a sophisticated police and spy network, retarded the development of liberalism in those countries by decades, and gave succour to all who longed for a restoration of traditional conservative values in Europe.  As Wordsworth’s friend and colleague, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, by 1830 ‘the hand of providence ha[d] disciplined all Europe into sobriety […] by alternate blows and caresses’.[7]

But Napoleon’s legacy could not be undone: he had embodied the ideal of freedom.  He had ridden into Italy in 1796 not as a conqueror but as a liberator, bringing with him not only the techniques of modern warfare, but an ideology of national self-determination that was to prove as effective as his canons and rifles. Even in those countries that had not been occupied by Napoleon’s armies, such as Greece and Hungary, the modernising effect of his ideas was felt, and served to support, in Greece’s case, its war of liberation against the Ottoman Empire.  The Germans, however, did not find Napoleon’s intervention as inspiring.  In 1799 and 1802, he had defeated, in spectacular military victories, their two largest states, Austria and Prussia, victories that enabled Bonaparte to break up the patchwork pattern of antiquarian principalities that had been a feature of German political life since the Holy Roman Empire, and replace them in 1806 with a much more tightly knit organisation known as the Confederation of the Rhine.  Under Napoleon’s protectorate, the German states became both more secularised and more centralised; feudal entitlements were largely abolished, and educational and political institutions modernised.  Even quintessential Germans, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, were forced to admit that Napoleon was ‘one of the most productive men that ever lived’.  ‘His destiny was more brilliant’ as the great poet noted later in a spirit of unqualified admiration, ‘than any the world had seen before him, or perhaps, will ever see after him’.[8]

Napoleon’s dramatic victories over Austria and Prussia produced amongst the defeated an intense feeling of ethnic solidarity that brought all under its sway. Even the otherwise metaphysically inclined Romantics were affected by the rising tide of nationalism.  In their evocative descriptions of the German countryside, with its arcane customs and superstitions, works such as Ludwig Tieck’s Minstrel Airs from the Swabian Past (1803), Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s, The Boy’s Magic Horn (first volume, 1805), and the Grimm brothers’ Fairy Stories (1812), promoted those qualities of the German character that were most at odds with the rationalist-liberal traditions of nations such as England and, most pointedly, France.  The philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder, directed the attention of his countrymen to the existence of an indigenous literature in his two volumes of Songs of the Folk (1778-1779), evoking that uniquely German Volksgeist, which had traditionally manifested itself in folk and popular literature.  Herder was followed by a generation of younger spirits, such as the philosopher, Friedrich Schleiermacher, who castigated the French for their lack of natural piety and for treading the ‘holiest ordinances under foot’, and the playwright, Heinrich von Kleist, who transposed in his historical drama, Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (1808), the Napoleonic invasion back into the Roman colonisation of Germany, at one point in the play exhorting his audience to take all measures ‘to cleanse the fatherland from foreign tyranny’.  Johann Gottlieb Fichte was an Idealist philosopher, but he too was caught by the imperative of German nationalism, arguing in his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), delivered in Berlin during the French occupation of that city, that the Germans possessed a moral superiority over its enemies and an historical mission which would one day make it ‘the regenerator and re-creator of the world’.  In Fichte’s writings, and in those of others such as Adam Müller (The Elements of State Policy, 1809), the contours of an aggressively nationalist ideology emerged, an ethos that valorised social duty over the rights of the individual, the norms of the community over personal self-gratification, and which celebrated that higher unity of nation and state, that ‘spiritual community’, which represented for many (including the otherwise other-worldly poet, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff) the fullest realisation of ‘the mind and the soul of the people’.[9]

The Germans were not alone in inflecting their Romanticism through a rhetoric of nationalist revival.  Elsewhere in Europe, the rediscovery of national culture and custom merged with the Romantic project, to give a symbolic form to the former, and a political dynamism to the latter.  In Italy, for example, the great poet, Giacomo Leopardi, began his career with his patriotic verse ‘To Italy’ (1818).  Scandinavian writers were also awakened to the distinctive racial and cultural identities of their peoples.  Major voices here included the Norwegian, Henrik Wergeland, who wrote the ambitious philosophical-religious epic, Creation, Humanity and Messiah (1829); the Danish poet, Adam Oehlenschläger, whose poems ‘The Golden Horns’, and ‘Midsummer Night’s Play’ (both 1802) draw on Scandinavian mythology; the Swedish writer, Esaias Tegnér, author of the nationalistic Frithiof’s Saga (1825); whilst, in Finland, Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1835, expanded 1849) brought that nation into the forefront of European literature for the first time.  Not all of these were unambiguously nationalistic: Wergeland’s epic mythologising, for example, belongs to the world of the fantastic that would later be cultivated by the Danish writer, Hans Christian Andersen, in his Fairy Tales (1835).  But much of this literature is inspired by patriotic sentiment, even if such sentiment is disguised in the form of the folk-tale or historical parable.  This is the case with the The Tales of Ensign Stål (1848) by the Finnish writer, Johan Ludvig Runeberg, who offered his work to the public as a ‘patriot song’; but even Lönnrot, whose Kalevala depicts the history of its people from the creation of the world to an unspecified present, felt convinced that his task was to infuse ‘the rising generation’ with a sense of cultural community and historical mission by reconstructing the customs of its past, its folk traditions and military exploits.[10]

Contributing to this work of national revival lay a figure whose influence on European romanticism was to remain unparalleled: Walter Scott.  His enormous fictional output (which began with Waverley in 1814, and ended, more than thirty novels later, with Castle Dangerous in 1831) helped stimulate amongst his readers an insatiable enthusiasm for folk antiquity, chivalry and antiquarian habit.  Many regarded him as the Shakespeare of modern times, a writer who had brought the past back to life in the collective memory of the present.  Goethe viewed Scott’s historical fiction with awe and admiration, seeing in it an entirely original literary genre, ‘a wholly new art, with laws of its own’.  Although the great Scottish novelist treated the folk-lore and customs of the past, and particularly the past of his own country, with sympathy and historical insight, allowing the values and psychology of his characters to emerge on their own terms, Scott’s appropriation of the past was not, however, as simple as it seemed to his many admirers.  For, as Scott made clear in his first and greatest novel, Waverley (within the context of a detailed portrayal of the failed Scottish insurrection of 1745) the ‘solitary and melancholy grandeur’ of the past is worth retaining, but not at the expense of the present or the future.  This is the wholly non-romantic moral that Waverley, the young English protagonist of that novel, must learn to draw.  In spite of his emotional commitment to the raw vitality of the Highland clan custom (and to the wild charm of his Scottish sweetheart), Scott’s hero is brought to a crucial recognition: that ‘real history’ possesses a forward momentum which transcends individual volition, and which compels even the most idealistically inclined to expediency and compromise.  In Waverley, we near the end of Romanticism and the beginning of a new culture of moral restraint and Realpolitik that would eventually be called Realism.[11]

 

2. The Way Within:

Romanticism: Goals and Programme

Well before the French Revolution had made its final break with the ancien régime, the aristocratic culture of eighteenth-century Europe, and the neo-classical aesthetic upon which it was based, had come under increasing attack.  The forms of this criticism were varied, but all had their source in the rise of a new self-confident middle class that wished to see its growing power and status reflected in the concerns of contemporary literature.  On the eve of the industrial revolution, these needs were met by an expanding and increasingly mercantile publishing industry, and by novelists such as Samuel Richardson (Pamela, 1740, and Clarissa, 1748) and dramatists such George Lillo (The London Merchant, 1731), Denis Diderot (Father of the Family, 1758) and Gotthold Lessing (Miss Sara Sampson, 1755), authors of so-called ‘bourgeois tragedy’, who elevated the precocious moral world of the merchant classes to the status of serious drama. These novels and plays of the pre-Romantic writers invested their characters with a larmoyante sense of self, a capacity for feeling (‘sensibility’ was the word in England; Empfindsamkeit in Germany), and a ‘habit of virtue’ (as Diderot termed it) that stood in sharp contrast to the self-seeking, vain and rapacious mentality of the aristocratic characters who appeared in such literature.  The Romantics were deeply influenced by such authors, as they were by the other great critic of the ancien régime: the French philosopher and social theorist, Jean Jacques Rousseau.  His political writings, The Discourse on Inequality (1755) and The Social Contract (1762), had helped prepare the way for the revolution of 1789; but the impact of his other work, The New Héloïse (a epistolary novel on love and the sacrifice of love to duty, 1761) and Émile (a discursive novel extolling the value of natural education, 1762), was, if anything, even more dramatic  For here, Rousseau deepened the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility into a philosophy of personal interiority, a complex ethos which included a spiritualised view of nature, a rejection of social convention and a valorisation of pure expressivity, values which were to become key terms in the aesthetic of Romanticism.[12]

 

The cult of feeling elaborated by the pre-Romantics was deepened through a series of cultural discourses that included a new preoccupation with the irrational and with death (exhibited, for example, in Edward Young’s The Complaint: or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, published serially between 1742 and 1745), a renewed interest in racial traditions, and a rediscovery of the art and ideas of medieval Europe (approached under the rubric of ‘The Gothic’). These discourses provided the framework in which a younger generation of writers came to define themselves as ‘Romantic’.  The term had long been used by the exponents of neo-classicism but in a largely derogatory sense, as coterminous with the ‘absurdities or incredible fictions’ that they saw cultivated in certain Romance literatures (hence the derivation of the term), or simply as a synonym for ‘picturesque’ in landscape painting.  William Blake in England, and Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis in Germany were happy to embrace the alternative and oppositional values that these categories implied, deepening in their work the otherness associated with the ‘Romantic’ into a systematic aesthetic far removed from the trivialising descriptions of the neo-classicists.  The terms of that aesthetic emerged in a number of major theoretical essays and manifestoes.  These included, in Germany, Novalis’ Pollen (1799), Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘Dialogue on Poetry’ (1800) and his many ‘Fragments’, published between 1789 and 1800 in the journal Athenäum, and August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1809–1811); in England, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s preface to the second edition of The Lyrical Ballads (1798), and Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ (1821); in Italy, Giovanni Berchet’s The semi-serious Letter (1816), Pietro Borsieri’s, ‘Literary Adventures of a Day’ (1816), and Alessandro Manzoni’s Letter on Romanticism (1823) self-consciously came out in defence of the new movement; in France, Madame de Staël’s On Literature (1799) and On Germany (1810), Stendhal’s Racine and Shakespeare (1823), and Victor Hugo’s preface to Cromwell (1827) provided the key texts; whilst Mariano José de Larra’s essay ‘Literatura’ (1836) belatedly brought Spain into the debate.  Collectively these writings helped to produce a new cultural paradigm, which pitted spontaneity against deliberation, imagination against reason, the native against the foreign, inwardness against formalism, authenticity against convention and energy against stasis.  By 1823, these terms had formed themselves into a recognisable aesthetic, which could clearly be associated with a rising generation of writers whose work, as Stendhal noted, sought to explore ‘the genre of fantasy and the mysteries of the soul’.[13]

 

There were, certainly, differences of emphasis and strategy here, dividing, for example, the more theoretically sophisticated but largely apolitical Germans (in their pre-nationalist mode) from the empirically inclined English Romantics, and the highly politicised Shelley and Hugo; and, as their publication dates suggest, the chronology of their emergence was both broad and non-synchronous, with England and Germany providing the inspiration behind the development of Romanticism in Italy, Spain and finally (and in spite of its pre-Romantic initiatives) France.  The European Romantics, nevertheless, had much in common: they all emphasized the liberating potency of feeling and pure inwardness; they held to a radically new sense of the poetic mission, endowing the artist with an almost mystical status, believing that personal vision alone could guarantee artistic integrity; and all converged on a rejection of the ‘rules’ of decorum and formal conservatism of the neo-classicists.  The Romantics aspired to a type of writing that was (and the paradox was central to the Romantic imagination) both more popular and more mystical.  These goals became evident as early as 1798 in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads.  The two poets had set out to choose, as they noted in their famous preface, ‘incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout […] in a selection of language really used by men’.  Such poems as ‘Michael’, ‘The Brothers’ and ‘The Idiot Boy’, indeed, conspicuously break with previous picturesque treatments of rural themes by focussing upon rural poverty and deprivation and by radically departing from the poetic diction in which such themes had traditionally been depicted.  But as Wordsworth also noted in his preface, ‘ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect’, transformed by the poetic imagination, and made to reveal the ineffable mystery which resides in the most common-place.  These were sentiments that Coleridge, in particular, took to heart, giving expression in ‘poems of fancy’, such as ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’, to a unique and often disturbing poetry of visionary intensity.[14]

 

It was precisely this creative merging of the natural with the supernatural that constituted for Madame de Staël the strength and originality of Romantic writing.  In her On Literature, the French critic drew a famous distinction between ‘the literature of the South’, with its innate propensity towards formal perfection, high-minded nobility and the decorum of unmixed genres; and ‘the literature of the North’, which had traditionally combined the epic, the lyrical, the comic and the tragic, seeking to give voice to eternal concerns: the ‘transience of life, veneration for the dead [and the] glorification of their memory’.  Romantic literature was, in short, metaphysical, and moved in those realms of experience that lie above and below the surface of civilisation.  For Madame de Staël and for other Romantic theorists, two authors embodied this literature of metaphysical depth: Shakespeare and Ossian.  Friedrich Schlegel called Shakespeare the ‘actual centre, the core of the Romantic imagination’ who, in combining ‘narrative, song and other forms’ in his plays, had heroically broken with the neo-classical tyranny of genre; whilst his brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel made Shakespeare a household name in Germany through his translations with Tieck of the latter’s work into German (published between 1797 and 1810).  In France, Stendhal traced his adherence to the Romantic cause back to his discovery of the Bard, whilst Madame de Staël was able to justify the Romantics’ neglect of the rules by pointing to the ‘varied inventions of [this] man of genius’.  Wherever the Romantic spirit found theatrical expression, from Schiller to Hugo, it was the figure of Shakespeare, now cast in medieval guise, now in the radical garb of modernity, who provided the inspiration.[15]

 

For many Romantics, the great English playwright was but an emanation of a spirit that was even more fundamental to the Romantic imagination: the legendary Gaelic bard, Ossian.  His verse, distilled from fragments of Celtic folklore and brought back to life by the young scholar, James Macpherson, came to dominate the imagination of a generation sentimentally inclined to ethnic authenticity.  It mattered little to this readership (pleasing ‘persons of exquisite feelings of heart’) that Ossian’s verse, published as Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760) (and from 1765 simply as The Works of Ossian), was largely the product of an enterprising minor poet, Macpherson, seeking to exploit the emotive power of Gothic melodrama and the mystique of the Ancient epics.  In a collective act of self-deception, an entire generation read the Fragments, eagerly intent on finding a Northern equivalent to Homer, and a pedigree for its obsession with the heroic, the simple, the arcane and the tribal.  Such readers were (as Macpherson knew) emotionally committed to the mysteries and customs of their ancestors, as they had existed in their pure form before refinements of society had produced a civilisation ‘devoid of human imagination and passion’.  The poems of Ossian were enthusiastically received throughout Europe.  They were translated into German in 1762, where they influenced Herder (Selection from a Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of ancient Peoples, 1773) and Goethe (they play a pivotal role in his The Sorrows of Young Werther of 1774), and into French in 1777, where they came to form the basis of Mme de Staël’s distinction between the culture of the South, deemed to be formal and superficial, and the rugged, mysterious and autochthonic art of the Gothic North.[16]

 

Shakespeare and Ossian were not simply consummate artists; they were also ‘geniuses’, intuitively at one with the deeper spiritual needs of their people.  The notion of the Romantic artist as genius was central to the self-image of this generation.  Edward Young did not invent the word, but his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), with its celebration of ‘the native growth of mind’ and its consistent denigration of ‘the soft fetters of easy imitation’, helped to give a powerful stimulus to the idea.  In the hands of subsequent Romantics, the notion of the artistic genius came to acquire an almost vatic resonance.  Shelley, for example, in his ‘Defence of Poetry’, argued that the poet was a prophet, being ‘the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory’.  Even when artists were unconscious of their high office, they remained, nevertheless, capable of expressing in their work the most positive energies of their age.  As Shelley noted in the concluding, triumphalist lines of his essay: ‘they are the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.  Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.[17]

 

Most Romantics viewed the external world simply as the starting point for a revolutionary process of creative transformation through the mind.  The name that gained common currency for this transforming faculty was ‘Imagination’, a mental facility which occupied for many a conceptual space somewhere between the aesthetic and the mystical.  For Wordsworth, it was (as he noted in The Prelude, 1850) ‘another name for absolute power/ And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, /And Reason in her most exalted mood’.  As he later confessed in a letter written at the height of his religious convictions, ‘even in poetry it is the imaginative only, viz., that which is conversant [with] or turns upon infinity, that powerfully affects me’; adding ‘all great poets are in this view powerful Religionists’.  The most sophisticated formulation of the concept was provided by Wordsworth’s friend and colleague, Coleridge, who made in his Biographia Literaria (1817) a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ imagination: ‘The primary imagination’, Coleridge explained, ‘I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the infinite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.  The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation.  It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealise and to unify.  It is essentially vital, even as objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead’.[18]

 

As Coleridge’s words indicate, what the Romantics were trying to achieve was no less than an epistemological revolution, a radical renewal of the categories, both cognitive and perceptual, that had governed Western thinking for at least for two hundred years, since Descartes and the Rationalists.  The terms in which that revolution were to be carried out were manifold.  Friedrich Schlegel spoke of Romantic writing, which he termed ‘Transcendental Poetry’, as a synthesising imperative that would restore the cognitive totality that had been lost through the corrosive intellectualising of Enlightenment philosophy.  Novalis was more specific about the faculty that would allow this merging of the objective and subjective spheres, calling it ‘Magic Idealism’, a perspective capable of construing the universe as a system of analogies and interrelationships in which the human, the natural and the spiritual would coexist in a symbolic relationship.  As the poet explained in a fragment from the year 1798: ‘Romanticising is no more than a qualitative empowerment […] By giving a higher meaning to the quotidian, a mysterious aspect to the ordinary, to the familiar the dignity of the unfamiliar, to the finite the appearance of infinity, then I am romanticising it’.  This is also how Blake conceived of the imagination: as a mystical power capable of transforming the phenomenal world, as an intellectual energy whose potency the poet crystallised in his famous maxim from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790): ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite’.[19]

 

In the place of the versification favoured by the neo-classicists, the Romantics invoked a poetic process that was both irrational and, ultimately, inexplicable, being the pure product of unmediated expressivity.  Wordsworth, in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, provided the most famous formulation of this process, when he described the poetic statement as a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.  Self-consciousness was seen as a hindrance to poetic creation: the successful poet, according to Keats, needed to possess a ‘negative capability’, a mental set that would allow him to remain in ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’.  The poet, in short, had to surrender the self to the object world so that the latter might be understood from within.  Shelley held a similar view, believing writing to be an activity of the unconscious mind, and, therefore, beyond rational control.  As he noted in his ‘Defence of Poetry’, ‘the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic of its approach or its departure’.[20]

 

But achieving such a state of unreflective consciousness would not be unproblematical, as Friedrich Schiller knew.  In his On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795), he argued that modern writers fell into two types: those who embodied a non-self-reflective, almost innocent type of intellectual disposition, and those who adopted a more reflective, analytical attitude towards the self and world.  Schiller called the former type ‘naive’, adding ‘we love in them the tacitly creative life, the serene spontaneity of their activity, existence in accordance with their own laws, the inner necessity, the eternal unity with themselves’.  The latter type he called ‘sentimental’.  These writers (and he included himself amongst their numbers) have lost that secure self-confidence in their mission, and often feel compelled to provide a theoretical justification for their activities; for them the mind ‘is in motion, it is in tension, it wavers between conflicting feelings’, it is forced to bear witness to a ‘unity that has been disrupted by abstraction’.  Schiller saw these configurations as antinomies, irreconcilable poles around which the modern mind was doomed, indefinitely, to circle.  The German dramatist, Heinrich von Kleist, however, saw them as parallel paths to the same destination.  As he argued in his parable ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ (1810), what is decisive is not self-consciousness or its absence, but the intensity with which each state is felt by the individual thinker; for ‘grace [the perfect union of mind and body] appears purest in that human form which has either no consciousness or an infinite one, that is, as in a puppet or in a god’. This would remain the ultimate goal of the Romantic dream: to give tangible form to the plenitude of consciousness, to find a literature that would give shape to the paradox of a nature made more natural through increased intellectual depth.  This would be a literature which, once written, would constitute (in Kleist’s uncompromising words) ‘the last chapter in the history of the world’.[21]

 

3. Self and World:

The Literature of Romantic Individualism.

 

At the very start of Romantic literature is the great ‘I am’, that expression of personal identity that asserts the uniqueness of the individual self and the irreducibility of personality to moral or social convention. It is the most characteristic voice of the Romantic mind.  Rousseau gave it seminal expression in his epic of self-revelation, The Confessions (completed in 1765; published 1782), and in later works, such as The Reveries of a Solitary Walker (written in 1778; published in 1782).  Both works are characterised by a form of secularised mysticism, whose channels are intense introspection and meditation, and whose product is a spiritual self-sufficiency that brackets out the external world so that the hyper-sensitive Rousseau can exist fully in and for himself.  The result is someone who finds himself, ‘tranquil at the bottom of the gulf, a poor unfortunate mortal, but as undisturbed as God himself’.  The tone of Rousseau’s writing, an emotive combination of strident self-assertion and deeply felt alienation, influenced an entire generation; but Romantic individualism expressed itself in many other ways, in, for example, the rebellious assertiveness of Byron and Hugo, in the mystical intoxication of Blake and Novalis, and in the pantheistic identification with nature felt by Wordsworth, Lamartine and Eichendorff.  These forms of subjectivity found personification in the many types of hero and heroine who appear in Romantic writing: in Wordsworth’s child of nature (see, for example, the ‘Lucy’ poems, but also the autobiographical The Prelude); in the rebel-martyr figure of Shelley’s Prometheus; in noble outlaws, such as Karl Moor in Schiller’s The Robbers (1782); in Byron’s multiple amoral outsider personae, such as Childe Harold and Don Juan; and, finally, in the heroines of George Sand’s fiction, those brave spirits, whose will to self-assertion eventually goes under, broken (as Sand herself noted in the preface to her novel, Indiana, 1832) in a ‘ruthless combat with the reality of life’.[22]

 

Two types of hero came to particular prominence in Romantic literature: the introvert, whose accentuated sensibility and finely tuned self-consciousness made him or her a victim of an uncaring and unselfcritical society (as in Goethe’s Werther, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe and Ugo Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis); and the hero of pure extroversion, self-confident and dismissive of society’s values, but also world-weary and sceptical (Byron’s Don Juan, and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin were paradigmatic of this latter type).  Of them all, it was Werther, the focus of Goethe’s famous novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, who made the greatest impact upon literary Europe.  The obsessive nature of his amorous fixation, the rhetorically persuasive nature of his Weltschmerz, and his freely and rationally chosen suicide affected a readership throughout Europe predisposed to the extremes of sentiment.  Goethe’s novel was the work of an original mind, but it also brought to fruition developments within the literature and thinking of pre-Romanticism.  It drew upon the lachrymose emotionalism that had been a part of the representation of female subjectivity since Richardson’s Pamela and Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson, but which, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, began to be usurped by male characters, such as the hero of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771); it gave further substance to the romanticisation of death evident in Young’s Night Thoughts, which was translated into German in 1754; and it gave a highly personal inflection to the ‘natural’ morality’ and ‘back to nature’ philosophy of Rousseau.  These ideas and others were given memorable shape in Goethe’s novel, making its hero a representative of his generation.  As Thomas Carlyle (the foremost English commentator on German literature in the nineteenth century) noted in his essay on Goethe, Werther’s outpourings, emotionally sincere if intellectually naive, could be read as ‘the cry of that dim, rooted pain, under which all thoughtful men’ in the age of Romanticism were suffering.[23]

 

The Sorrows of Young Werther attracted a cult following throughout Europe (in France alone, it was translated sixteen times between 1776 and 1799); its influence on the broad course of European Romanticism was immense.  Its brooding melancholia permeates Chateaubriand’s René (1802), whose youthful hero seems not only to endure but positively to cultivate ‘the emptiness of a lonely heart’, giving himself over without resistance to a Weltschmerz that has only its partial cause in his incestuous relationship with his sister; the Italian, Ugo Foscolo used the same motif of the love-torn hero in his Last letters of Jacopo Ortis (1802), but made his travails coterminous with those of an Italy deprived of national heritage by Napoleon’s conquests; whilst Benjamin Constant added a twist to the theme in his psychological novel, Adolphe (1816).  Its hero possesses the facility, which was later to be known as the dédoublement constantien (the Constantian split-personality), both to suffer the anguish of emotional dislocation whilst, at the same time, seemingly enjoying such pain as he subjects it to detailed analysis, succumbing to the perversion of ‘a vanity which is only concerned with itself when recounting the evil it has done’.[24]

 

In the hero of Constant’s Adolphe, Romantic sentiment is no longer naive, but forms the medium for a style of personal fashioning, which seeks to distance the self from the offending emotions that it is experiencing.  The writer who explored, and, indeed, most embodied this complex psychological disposition was George Gordon, Lord Byron.  From his early verse, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Cantos I and II, 1812), The Corsair, Lara (both 1814) and Manfred (1817), through to his later masterpiece, Don Juan (1819–1824), the poet systematically built up a composite picture of the Byronic hero, a multiple persona which drew upon images of the aristocrat, the dandy, the womaniser, the social and political outcast, and the rebel.  That feeling of estrangement, which verges upon self-pity, experienced by Werther and his like has little place in Byron’s poetry.  Here, suffering is transposed from alienation into a sense of aristocratic superiority, which sees itself justified in creating its own set of values, albeit often confounding in the process (as Lara does, in the poem of the same name) ‘good and ill/ And half [mistaking] for fate the acts of will’.  Byron’s life was characterised by a restlessness that finds expression in his semi-autobiographical heroes, characters such as the bandit in The Corsair or the religious rebel in Cain (1821), who embody (as the poet himself did) moral transgression and a concern for personal integrity and the individual’s right to self-determination.  Both elements are combined in Byron’s most famous hero, Don Juan.  Here, in a picaresque epic (left unfinished at his death in 1824), Byron wrote a social and moral allegory, constructing a narrative which takes his hero from the exotic climes of Spain and Turkey to the familiar ones of roué London.  In the process, Don Juan and his narrator give voice to what was popularly understood as the uniquely Byronic worldview, that set of values which combined carefree adventurism with a hard-headed pragmatism.  In spite of its obvious bravura, however, Byron’s Don Juan embodies a trenchant element of political satire, whose target is a Restoration Europe that has given itself over to military aggression and pompous religiosity, in a period described by Byron as a ‘patent age of new inventions/ For killing bodies, and for saving souls’.  In the final analysis, to set against the widespread political and sexual hypocrisy that he saw around him, Byron offered to the public the achievement of a life lived from the source of self, and based upon a personal philosophy, which, in spite of the poet’s sometimes histrionic projection of self, was concerned to give full voice to ‘the hope, the fear, the jealous care/ The exalted portion of the pain/ And power of love’.[25]

 

The élan of Byron’s verse, and the charisma of the author, impressed an entire generation of writers.  In Spain, the major poet of this generation, José de Espronceda, dealt with themes of transgression and rebellion in his two epic poems, The Student of Salamanca (1840), and the more metaphysically ambitious, although incomplete, The Devil World (1841).  Equally influenced by Byron was the major Czech Romantic, Karel Hynek Mácha, whose most famous poem, the epic May (1836), treats of incest and patricide, but also of the Byronic transcendence of crime through love and expiation.  Byron’s influence was particularly telling upon the two major Russian Romantics: Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov.  Pushkin’s epic poem, Eugene Onegin (1832) is one of the great works of Russian literature, depicting an individual who is isolated from society through guilt and superior intellect, and whose amoral progress through the world leaves him in characteristic Romantic fashion oscillating between the poles of ennui, solitude, amorous involvement and exile.  Pushkin subtitled his poem ‘a novel in verse’.  It was an apt description, not only because of the proportions of the poem (which consists of eight cantos, each containing some fifty fourteen-line stanzas), but also because of the focus of the work.  Pushkin’s poem details not only Onegin’s personal development, but also the backwardness and sham cosmopolitanism of his contemporary Russia, with its polite society that feeds solely upon the ‘reproduction of the vagaries of others, [and] fashionable words’.[26]

 

At one point in Eugene Onegin, the narrator makes the following generalisation: ‘he who has lived and pondered cannot in his heart but despise people; he who has experienced emotions is disturbed by the phantom of irrevocable days, no longer feels fascination, is gnawed at by the serpent of memories and by repentance’.  These were characteristic sentiments of late Romanticism, that twilight moment in the movement, which witnessed the claims of subjectivity and individualistic voluntarism give way to a quasi-Realist pessimism and cynicism regarding personal ideals.  It was, once again, a Russian, Mikhail Lermontov, who provided the most memorable statement of this attitude.  In his novel, A Hero of our Time (1840), Lermontov sets up the central tenets of Romantic individualism: idealism, the refusal to compromise personal integrity and the loss of the self in nature, only to deflate them through the cold, analytical gaze of the ‘hero’ of the novel, Pechorin.  The latter works not with, but on and through Romantic individualism.  He sees the latter as a mere pose, something that is adopted by lesser mortals (such as the cadet, Grushnitsky), who wish to make ‘a solemn display of uncommon emotions, exalted passions and exceptional sufferings.  Their greatest pleasure in life is to create an effect, and romantic provincial ladies find them madly attractive’.  Such characters, Pechorin notes, don the personae of Werther or Byron at will, toying with the affections of the loved one and fully realising that they are involved in nothing more than an elaborate game.  Pechorin, for his part, has passed through such games, arriving at a personal philosophy that has exchanged ideals for a cynicism towards others and an honesty towards himself. As he concludes towards the end of the story: ‘One just goes on living, out of curiosity, waiting for something new.  It’s absurd and annoying’.[27]

 

Sixty years on from Werther, Lermontov took the moral relativism and solipsism that resided at the heart of Romantic individualism to its logical conclusion.  ‘I’ve an insatiable craving inside me’, notes the blasé Pechorin, at one point in the novel, ‘that consumes everything and makes me regard the sufferings and joys of others only in their relationship to me, as food to sustain my spiritual powers’; ‘I’m incapable of friendship’.  Byron’s heroes would not have put it quite so brutally, but subsequent figures in the pantheon of post-Romantic writing would.  These included aristocratic exponents of amoral self-assertiveness, such as Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866); the decadent poets (poètes maudits) of mid-nineteenth century France, notably Baudelaire and Rimbaud; the aesthetes of England, such as Oscar Wilde; and the iconoclastic German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.  All despised the claims of conventional morality and the bourgeois terrain from which it emerged, and all argued for the right to live, as Nietzsche put it, ‘beyond good and evil’, seeking in the intensity of their artistic visions that ‘secret citadel’ where the superior consciousness ‘is set free from the crowd’. Lermontov had anticipated them all, and the movement to which they belonged: Romantic Decadence.[28]

 

4. Revolt and Declaration:

Romantic Drama.

 

‘Rouze up, O Young men of the New Age!’, Blake had exhorted in the preface to his epic poem, Milton (1810), and he had been followed by a generation that infused into Romanticism the energies and missionary zeal of a religious revival.  The young Goethe and Schiller were amongst its ranks, as were the French Romantics, Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas.  And Shelley.  They all embodied that heightened sense of subjectivity first celebrated by Rousseau (and given memorable shape through Goethe’s hero, Werther, and Chateaubriand’s René); but they balanced the introversion endemic to that mindset with a competing set of more extrovert dispositions and with a greater awareness of the public ambit of their work, often radicalising the momentum of Romantic individualism into a conscious oppositional ethos.  This is particularly true of Shelley, who connected Romantic subjectivity and political radicalism both in his theoretical writing (most notably in his The Defence of Poetry, 1821), and in verse works such as Prometheus Unbound (1820), a political allegory in which constrained humanity is pitted against arbitrary despotism, and whose eponymous hero, half saint, half political rebel, accepts his martyrdom in order to defy ‘the deepest power of hell’.[29]

 

The political intent of Romantic individualism first emerged in the German Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang) movement, whose poetry and plays provided a vehicle for a widespread feeling of middle-class antagonism to the social order of aristocratic Europe.  The major works of the movement included Goethe’s Götz from Berlichingen, (1773), Jacob Lenz’ The Tutor (1774) and The Soldiers (1776), Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s Storm and Stress (1777) and Heinrich Wagner’s The Child Murderess (1776).  According to Lenz, who provided the most extensive statement of its aesthetic in his Remarks concerning the Stage (1774), the Storm and Stress dramatists wished to produce a theatre that was both democratic and challenging, open to the raw energies of ‘chaos’, for there alone could ‘freedom’ be expected to flourish.  In pursuit of their goals, they achieved two things: an innovatory dramaturgy, and a highly suggestive drama of political statement.  On the stage, they broke with the major conventions of neo-classical drama: they ignored the traditional unities of time, place and action; they dealt with the concerns of the middle classes rather than the aristocracy; they tended towards melodrama rather than tragedy; and they drew characters who were psychologically complex and morally ambiguous, hoping to shock their audiences out of their political complacency and slavish adherence to the status quo.  Lenz’ plays are replete with covert politics, The Soldiers demonstrating the double standards and sexual rapacity of an aristocratic class that continues to insist on its honour, even as it has become ‘hardened to every kind of debauchery and infidelity’.  Like Beaumarchais in France, writing at the same time (The Marriage of Figaro, 1778), Lenz too sought to make his political point in a satirical-ethical way, disclosing in his plays the vices and the abuses ‘which disguise themselves in a thousand ways beneath the mask of our dominant customs’.[30]

 

The restless dynamism of the Storm and Stress movement provided inspiration for many of the major German playwrights of this period, such as Friedrich Schiller (The Robbers, 1782, Wallenstein, 1800, and Maria Stuart, 1800), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Egmont, 1789, and Faust I and II, 1808 and 1832), and Heinrich von Kleist (Penthesilea, 1808, and Prince Friedrich of Homburg, 1821).  Their work reflects the dramatic vitality and ethical self-consciousness of the Storm and Stress school, but integrates those energies into a formally more coherent and intellectually more complex type of literature, which reveal a greater understanding of the impingement of ethical and religious values upon life.  Schiller’s The Robbers is a case in point.  Many of his contemporaries viewed the reversal of natural filial ties depicted in the play, and its radical questioning of political authority, as ‘a terrifying spectacle of the most deplorable human misery, of the deepest confusions, of the most terrible vice’.  Certainly, the hero’s assertion, ‘I could blow the trumpet of rebellion throughout the realm of nature’ touched an important nerve in pre-revolutionary Europe.  And yet The Robbers is far from unambiguously libertarian; the motifs of familial deceit and deception, of honour and chivalry, around which the play revolves, ultimately anchor it in a pre-political terrain, and its denouement (which sees the robbers’ leader, Karl, surrendering to the law, resigned to his execution) clearly leaves the established order intact, indeed, inviolable.  The same could be said of Schiller’s later play, Maria Stuart, which focuses upon conflicts between duty and conscience, and between individual integrity and the greater needs of the state, which it dramatises in terms of the personal contest between Elizabeth and Mary for the crown of England.  Mary loses both her claim to the throne and her life, but in doing so confirms her moral superiority over Elizabeth.  The triumphant Queen must continue to live in the shadow of her more idealistic sister, her name ‘abhorred for all eternity’.[31]

 

Schiller’s concern to read political struggle in terms of moral conflict is evident in all his historical dramas, including Don Carlos (1787), and his final play, William Tell (1804).  Writing the latter, Schiller had the example of Goethe’s Egmont before him, which likewise focuses upon the efforts of a small nation (in this case Holland) to free itself from foreign tyranny.  Schiller chose a popular hero, Tell, as the catalyst for his Swiss rebellion; Goethe chose an aristocrat, whose political motives have their origins in a personal philosophy of self-affirmation, which coincides, at this historical juncture, with the needs of his countrymen.  Egmont freely commits himself to the cause, knowing it will lead to death.  But for the world-historical individual, there is no choice.  As he explains in a famous series of metaphors: ‘Our destiny is like the sun; invisible spirits whip up time’s swift horses, away with its light chariot they run, and all we can do is take courage, hold the reins in a firm grip, and keep the wheels clear of the rocks on the one hand, the precipice on the other’.[32]

 

Egmont is a charismatic figure who seeks to direct fate through force of personality; instinct takes precedence over judgement, emotion over reason, and ideals over the needs of Realpolitik.  He prefers to risk destruction and self-destruction rather than inhibit his natural commitment to the moment.  As such, he is a typical product of the Romantic imagination, which celebrated autotelic energy and élan over the Enlightenment values of moderation and self-restraint.  Goethe gave fuller expression to this type of personality in his verse drama, Faust. Appearing as a fragment in 1790 (subsequently known as the Urfaust), Goethe’s work gives mythic form to the spirit of revolt that inspired much Romantic thinking.  Faust is the quintessential product of the Germanic Sturm und Drang mentality, an archetypal rebel, an over-reacher, prepared to sell his soul to the Devil in return for knowledge unbounded.  He is a restless figure bent on escaping from ‘the damnable, bricked-in, cabined hole’ of conventional wisdom, tradition and shallow rationality, determined to embrace new experience irrespective of the consequences for body and soul.  In the second part of Faust, Goethe, now in his post-Romantic phase, sought to redeem the amoral vitalism of his hero by having Faust embrace Christian salvation.  But in Faust I, Goethe’s hero is allowed to embark on a spiritual journey unchecked by moral scruple or religious censure: no door is closed, no path obstructed: ‘the fruits of pain or pleasure’, ‘sweet triumph’s lure, or disappointment’s wrath’ are all accepted in the cause of the boundless expansion of self-knowledge and self-realisation.[33]

 

The potency of the irrational also fascinated the German playwright and short-story writer, Heinrich von Kleist.  In 1801, at the age of twenty-four, he had come to the sudden realisation (subsequently known as his ‘Kant crisis’) that reason plays no part in human affairs, but is simply a veneer beneath which lie the real forces that drive the world: subconscious fears, phobias, fantasies and uncontrollable sexual urges.  The ‘terror’ that Kleist experienced on that occasion left a dark trace throughout his work: the short stories ‘Michael Kohlhaas’, ‘The Marquise of O…’, and ‘The Earthquake in Chile’ (published, together with others, as Collected Stories in 1810–1811), and plays such as The Family Schroffenstein (1803), Penthesilea (1808) and Prince Friedrich of Homburg (written in 1809).  All give a picture of a world that is propelled by currents of senseless violence and demonic energy, and which is held together (if at all) purely by superannuated codes of ethics and dynastic honour.  In Penthesilea, however, there is nothing to check the profound and destructive forces that Kleist regarded as endemic to human nature.  The play deals with the clash between Achilles and his Greek warriors and the Amazons during the Trojan war.  Kleist expands the element of martial contestation found in earlier treatments of this classical subject into a highly charged depiction of physical rapacity and sexual struggle between Achilles and Penthesilea.  Through twenty-four dramatic scenes, the emotions of the two protagonists, lust, the desire to master the other and the desire to self-surrender, go through a number of changing permutations, finally reaching a violent climax where distinctions between Eros and Thanatos, love and death, dramatically merge.  As Penthesilea graphically asserts over the body of the vanquished beloved foe: ‘A kiss, a bite – how cheek by jowl/ they are, and when you love straight from the heart/ the greedy mouth so easily mistakes/ one for the other’.[34]

 

The dark obsessions of German Romantic drama (and the Shakespearean model in which most of it originated) attracted playwrights throughout Europe.  In France, Benjamin Constant expressed his admiration for Schiller in his Reflections on the Tragedy of Wallenstein (1809), praising the re-found Shakespearian vitality that he saw embodied in the latter’s work.  Constant’s feelings were shared by other French dramatists such as Victor Hugo (Hernani, 1830 and Ruy Blas, 1838), Alfred de Musset (Lorenzaccio, 1834), Alfred de Vigny (Chatterton, 1835), and Alexander Dumas (Henry III, 1829, and Antony, 1831).  All hoped to re-create French drama on the basis of a more vital theatrical tradition.  As Hugo argued in his famous preface to Cromwell, if French theatre was to be revitalised, playwrights must abandon the Classical unities of time, place and manner, which had dominated the stage since Racine, and embrace a dramaturgy that would blend ‘in a single breath the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the farcical, tragedy and comedy’, modes that he saw as fulfilling the aesthetic needs of the ‘modern period’.  Hugo’s next play, Hernani (which became a succès de scandale on its first performance), provided the most noted example of this new form of drama.  Set in the sixteenth-century court of the Spanish king, Don Carlos, Hernani is an historical costume drama characterised by intrigue, amorous involvement and power politics, in which spectacle and scenic pageantry are exploited to the full.   Its eponymous hero, true to Romantic theory, is both a revolutionary and an outlaw, ‘a bandit whom the gallows will claim’.  And yet, it is Hernani alone who provides a source of moral credibility in the play, holding to a notion of honour and personal valour for which he is prepared to die rather than compromise.  His death and the death of his beloved, who agree to a pact of suicide, is depicted as confirmation of the Rousseauistic axiom that true morality can only be found beyond rather within the social realm.[35]

 

This focus upon the complications of desire, the tensions between duty and natural morality, and the call of the self to dissolution in death was also taken up by the Spanish dramatists of this period, playwrights such as Mariano José de Larra (Macías, 1834), Angel de Saavedra (Don Alvaro and the Force of Destiny, 1835), García Gutiérrez (The Troubadour, 1836), Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch (The Lovers of Teruel, 1837), and José Zorilla (Don Juan Tenorio, 1844). These plays reflected the French flair for the exotic and the outré, for elaborate stage settings and historicising contexts, but infused into their stories of amorous intrigue and outraged honour a sense of Byronic transgression often absent in the work of their French counterparts.  Elsewhere in Europe, in countries distant from mainstream Romanticism, writers were able to draw upon an alternative idiom, one that had its origins in folk and mythic tradition.  This was the case in Poland, where Adam Mickiewicz combined patriotism and historical mythologising in his plays and epic verse.  Mickiewicz was the leading voice amongst the Polish Romantics, although others, such as Juliusz Slowacki (Kordian, 1834, and Mazepa, 1840, both epic historical dramas), and Zygmunt Krasiński (The Undivine Comedy, 1833, and Psalms of the Future, 1845, enlarged 1848), also produced writing that was characteristic of the uniquely visionary quality of Polish Romanticism.  Mickiewicz’ major works were verse dramas, Konrad Wallenrod (1828), and the great epic written from exile in Paris that helped give shape to the spirit of revolt growing in his country against Russian domination: Master Thaddeus (1834).  In Hungary, Sándor Petöfi was perhaps the most original spirit, with his Poems (1844), the folk-song epic, János, the Hero (1845) and the patriotic ‘National Song’ (1848), although Petöfi had also learnt much from Mihály Vörösmarty, whose epics, The Flight of Zalan (1825) and Csongor and Tünde (1830), also sought to unite patriotism with Romanticism. These writers demonstrated that the claims of Romantic individualism, its rebelliousness and assertive defence of natural morality, when transferred to the national realm, could take the sufferings and afflictions of a people as its subject matter as well as those of the alienated poet or romantic outsider.  It was, perhaps, fitting that it should be the Greek poet and dramatist, Dionysios Solomos, the leading member of the Romantic movement in that country, who should find the most immediate use for the Romantic rhetoric of revolt and declaration.  His native land had long been the object of veneration for Western poets, its traditions and customs apostrophised and re-interpreted for centuries to suit the mythopoetical needs of mainstream European culture.  Now, at the moment of its greatest need, in the midst of its war of liberation against Turkey, Greece found a writer capable of mobilising both indigenous tradition and the fashionable ideas of Romantic Europe for the use of its people.  In poems such as ‘The Hymn to Liberty’ (1823), ‘The Cretan’ (1833), and, above all, in The Free Besieged, written in three drafts between 1830 and 1845), Solomos demonstrated that persecution and oppression were not simply metaphors for sensibilities no longer at home in the modern world, but were concrete realities, under which a nation was labouring, seeking to defend itself against extinction.  The inward struggles depicted by a generation of Romantic dramatists are here turned outward into armed struggle and self-sacrifice.  It is this ethos of national militancy that Solomos celebrates in The Free Besieged, a poem written in praise of those who give their lives in a spirit of self-sacrifice, defending their homes and cities, but even in death emerging from their martyrdom ‘unvanquished’.[36]

 

5. ‘All things are sentient’:

Romantic Nature Poetry

 

The Romantics rejected the heritage of the Enlightenment, believing that the philosophy of materialism and the principle of scientific rationality favoured by the thinkers of that movement necessarily led to a mechanistic and reductionist model of human nature, which had no place for the spiritual or the transcendent.  Instead, Romantic writers looked to nature, contact with which, they believed, would restore to the individual a sense of the interdependence of living things and a feeling for the organic evolution of life.  Certainly, this focus was neither new nor original.  Pre-Romantic writers such as James Thomson (The Seasons, 1730), Thomas Gray (‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’, 1751), and Oliver Goldsmith (The Deserted Village, 1770), had also written important poems invoking nature to different purposes.  Goldsmith, for example, used natural custom in his poem as a model of the historical harmony that had been destroyed by industrialisation, whilst Gray focused upon the plight of human nature locked into the rites de passage of birth and death.  But it was not until the Romantics proper that nature came to acquire a certain privileged ontology: it alone could put man and woman in contact with authentic experience.  As Gérard de Nerval, the French translator of Goethe’s Faust and author of The Chimeras (1854), asked: ‘how have I been able to live so long outside Nature without identifying myself with it? Everything lives, everything moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others cross the infinite chain of created things unimpeded; it is a transparent network which covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars.  Captive now upon earth, I commune with choirs of stars who share in my joys and sorrows’.[37]

 

In Romantic literature, nature possesses a complex symbolic ambience, which ranges from the atmospheric verse (Stimmungskunst) of the German poet, Eichendorff, through to the pantheistic sentiments of Wordsworth and the ecstatic poetry of Novalis and Blake, who saw in nature ‘Imagination itself’.  Certainly, poets such as Byron and de Vigny held to a cosmopolitan irony that did not lend itself to rural mysticisms of any sort.  Alfred de Vigny (an early forerunner of the ‘poètes maudits’) likewise looked, as Baudelaire would later do, to the unique excesses of the city for his stimulation.  But they were exceptions: the great majority of Romantic writers would have agreed with Jacques-Henri Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, whose popular idyll, Paul and Virginia (1788), showed how contact with nature both simplified social relations and ennobled personal morality, allowing all who find themselves in this state of natural grace to enjoy ‘the pleasures of love and the blessings of equality’.  Even Leopardi, who saw dark and mysterious forces working in the world, posited nature, in his famous poem ‘The Infinite’ (1819), as a medium through which the sentient self could make contact with ‘Eternity, / The ages that are dead, and the living present’.  A similar transfiguration of nature takes place in the work of Alfred de Musset (see, for example, ‘The Night’ cycle, 1835–1836), and Alphonse de Lamartine, whose Meditations (1820) (a volume that marked the beginning of Romantic poetry in France) infuses into nature emotions of loss, transience and mutability.[38]

 

A similar pathos pervades much of the nature poetry of the German Romantic, Joseph von Eichendorff, but is without the erotic complicity that links the poetic self and nature in Lamartine (and which emerges most clearly in ‘The Valley’: ‘but it is nature herself who invites you there and whom you love’). In poems such as ‘Departure’ (1810), ‘Twilight’ (1815), ‘Longing’ (1834) and ‘Forest Loneliness’ (1834) (and, indeed, in his novella From the Life of a N’er-do-well, 1826), Eichendorff endows nature with qualities that are both more spiritual and more ethereal.  In these works, the author celebrates the literal presence of the natural world as a God-given part of creation, whose purpose may be obscure, but is divinable nevertheless through intuition and self-surrender, although only to those prepared for loneliness and isolation.  In this respect, Eichendorff came close to that type of faith represented by the German Romantic theologian, Schleiermacher, who asseverated that religious understanding of the world lay neither in thoughts and actions, but in perception and feeling, in that constant openness to the movement of the ‘World-Spirit’ in nature and in man.[39]

 

In England, poets responded to nature in different ways. In Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819), ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘To Autumn’ (both 1820) nature appears now as a symbol of a higher realm, now as a cornucopia of fecundity; Shelley wrote nature into his own version of Neo-Platonism in poems such as ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ (both 1817), where he speaks of a communion between that ‘unseen power’ of nature and the ‘human mind’, which (as in the latter poem) holds now with delight now with trepidation ‘an unremitting interchange/ With the clear universe of things around’; whilst Coleridge celebrated ‘animated nature’ in his verse, likening in one famous simile the sensibility of the poet to an ‘Eolian harp’ (in the poem of the same, published in 1796) which, although passive in itself, is nevertheless attuned to the ‘intellectual breeze’ that radiates from Nature, bringing God and the Spirit into the hearts of men.[40]

 

As we know from his poem ‘Dejection’ (1802), Coleridge, the intellectual (Schiller would have typified him as a ‘sentimental’ poet), was unable to sustain the naive empathy necessary for a successful symbiosis between animated mind and inanimate nature, and looked to his friend and collaborator on The Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth, to complete a task that they had jointly conceived.  Both had been in the vanguard of a poetic revolution that had sought to reinvigorate poetry by infusing it with the diction and speech patterns of ordinary language.  Certainly, they had not been alone in this project.  The greatest Scottish poet of the Romantic period, Robbie Burns, had also striven to find a voice for the people in his Poems Chiefly Written in the Scottish Dialect (1786).  Burns developed in this volume a unique style capable of locating philosophic import in apparent banality, of seeing, for example, in the straightened circumstances of a mouse an existential predicament that brings reader, poet, and animal alike into ‘Nature’s social union’.[41]

 

Wordsworth and Burns had much in common: both described the pressures and exigencies of rural life, and both returned to an indigenous ballad form of folk literature, in order to free their subject matter from the easy pastoralism of the Neo-classical tradition, which amongst others John Ruskin repudiated – Ruskin, particularly, through his notion of the ‘pathetic fallacy’.  And yet there were important differences between these two great poets of common life, which lay largely in that sense for the spiritual immanence of nature that pervades almost all of Wordsworth’s verse.  It is evident in poems such as ‘The idiot Boy’ and ‘We are seven’ (both (1798), and the five Lucy poems (composed between 1798 and 1801), where quotidian realism is transfigured by a natural piety residing in characters and poet alike; and more substantially in poems such as ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ (both 1798), where a more reflective quality of the poet’s religious humanism becomes evident.  Wordsworth had remained largely untouched by the German tradition of Naturphilosopie that had so affected Coleridge, but had come to his own personal version of pantheism early in his life, when he had learned to view nature both as a source of spiritual delight and as a medium through which the self might be made whole again through contact with a higher realm.  ‘Tintern Abbey’ (an extended conversation poem in blank-verse) is his most important nature poem.  Here he fuses the ‘sense sublime’ of the visionary poet, capable of speculating on memory, identity and the formation of self, with a more down-to-earth temperament, which never loses sight of the concrete world, but remains committed to those ‘little, nameless, unremembered, acts/ Of kindness and of love’ that serve as the ultimate reference points of the poet’s vision.  Set against the mythopoetising of Novalis, or the narcissism of a poet such as Lamartine, where observation of nature is often the pretext for the articulation of failed desire, what poems such as ‘Tintern Abbey’ lead the reader to is the unquestionable presence of the spiritual in the real, and the permanent and constantly renewable option of grace.[42]

 

For Wordsworth, the inner self as revealed through contact with nature possessed both a visionary potency and an organic form, capable of developing through time.  This is how it manifests itself in The Prelude (begun in 1798, but only published posthumously in 1850).  The poem charts Wordsworth’s evolution as a poet and as a man, showing how the later achievements of his artistic self grew out of a character that existed as a raw potential in youth and boyhood.  In The Prelude, nature provides not only the content of Wordsworth’s vision of self but also its form, for character here is not something static or determined by external circumstance: it is a growing reality, a process whose end product is a fully formed totality, ‘the discipline/ And consummation of a Poet’s mind’.  In The Prelude, self and world enjoy a symbiotic relationship made possible through an openness to experience and to the spiritual component of the world, to that higher reality that the sensitive soul can reach through dream and imagination, that ‘plastic power’ which lies within.  Once that pact has been made, the union of consciousness and external reality (that synthesis longed for by the Romantic mind) comes close to realisation; the poet no longer appropriates but becomes part of nature, flowing with a ‘stream’ whose course, beset by obstacles and impediments, will nevertheless ultimately reach its final goal: ‘faith in life endless, the sustaining thought/ Of human Being, Eternity, and God’.[43]

 

 

6. ‘What exile from himself can flee?’

Romantic travel writing and the theme of the journey

in Romantic literature

 

Nature provided the Romantic mind with an ontology of authenticity: it allowed the deepest feelings to be felt, the closest bonds with the world to be forged, and the greatest and most lasting moments of beauty to be experienced. But nature also possessed a time and place: it was ultimately both topographical and tempographical. Nature was not always here; it was often somewhere else, and making contact with it brought into existence one of the tropes that defined the Romantic mind: the journey. In 1790, William Wordsworth visited the Swiss Alps, an experience that he later recounted in Book Vl of The Prelude. The Alps were a Romantic icon (as a boy Wordsworth might well have read William Coxe’s Travels in Switzerland, 1789), a terrain that combined lofty isolation with beauty and danger. Wordsworth travelled there seeking heightened contact with those ‘mighty forms’ of nature that he had first encountered in his days of ‘youthful fancy’, which had both uplifted his soul and shown it its place in the greater scheme of things. Once he has arrived at his destination, however, Wordsworth finds the reality of Mont Blanc entirely different and, far from confirming his expectations it undermines them. Seen in the raw, the mountain lacks majesty; it is a ‘soulless image’, ‘soulless’ because the mental picture of the object nurtured by the hypertrophic Romantic imagination exceeds (must exceed) the physical actuality of the object itself. It is only when there are no preconceptions that nature can emerge on its own terms, and when Wordsworth encounters it in this guise, amongst the crags and ghostly shapes of the Alps by night, it affects him not as a wholesome elevation but as something alien and confronting, a mysterious presence that speaks in an ‘unintelligible voice’.[44]  The comfort of the picturesque has given way to the terror of the sublime.

 

Book VI of Wordsworth’s The Prelude represents a short study within a genre that occupied an essential place within Romantic literature: travel writing. Travel literature was an antidote to the rarefied vision of nature as unio mystica, as voiced by poets such as Novalis and Leopardi, who saw in nature a medium for the dissolution of the self into a higher reality. Travelling forced the Romantic mind to confront real people, real places and the material diversity of nature: Constantinople was not Rome; the virgin forests of North America were not the deserts of Africa; trees were not sand. The Romantics were fervent travellers. The English preferred Europe, as did the Germans, Goethe as in his Italian Journey (1816-1817), and his compatriot, Karl Philipp Moritz, Journeys of a German in England in 1782 (1782). Wordsworth walked the Alps, the Shelleys lived in Italy, Byron spent his final days in Greece. The French went further afield. Whilst Stendhal (Rome, Naples and Florence, 1817), Victor Hugo (The Rhine, 1842) and Madame de Staël (Corinne; or, Italy, 1807) followed the modest geographical ambit of the English, Chateaubriand (Voyage to America, 1826), Lamartine (Voyage to the Orient, 1835) and Gérard de Nerval (Journey to the Orient, 1851), explored the New World and the exotic Middle East, opening up what was then called The Levant, countries such as Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, to the devouring gaze of the European traveller. And finally, as if in a deliberately non-exotic gesture, the Italian poet, Foscolo, made the journey backwards, choosing to flee Italy for exile in London in 1816, where he died eleven years later.

 

Their reasons for travelling were diverse. They included the desire to explore new lands (and possibly to source the experiences gained there as material for fictional writing: Chateaubriand wrote three novels out of his voyages to America), the completion of a cultural education (as with Goethe in Italy), the hope of finding amorous liaisons in new environments (Madame de Stael, likewise in Italy), a picaresque adventurism (as with the young Byron in the Levant), the quest for the exotic, for the otherness of the non-European (Nerval in North Africa) and flight into exile (Foscolo in England). Travelling permitted the expansion, in fact, the transformation of personality through the grasping of mystery and the unknown. It allowed thoughtful minds to meditate upon the relationship between the real and the ideal, to explore the consequences of the surrender of the self to the indefinite and anomic. Such themes called forth a distinctive style of writing: the autobiographical record or memoir: ‘I was there’ (Chateaubriand, for example), the choice anecdote and tableau vivant, bringing the lived experience to colourful life (Nerval), the organisation of such experiences through narrative (Lamartine), and finally the retrospective assessment of the journey: ‘what did it benefit me’ (Goethe).

 

The Romantics were not the first to be drawn to distant climes. A generation earlier, writers such as Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe,1719), Henry Fielding (Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 1755), Tobias Smollett (Travels through France and Italy, 1766) and Laurence Sterne (A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, 1768) had turned the autobiographical accounts of their journeys into popular works of fiction. Equally influential were the non-fictional publications of explorers and navigators, such as The Journals of James Cook (published in three volumes in 1773), and Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s Voyage around the World (1771), which revealed an exotic new world of climate, vegetation and peoples. The boundaries between fact and fiction were fluid in these texts. The French Romantic, François-René de Chateaubriand, combined (and creatively confused) the two modes in his Voyage to America, which was ostensibly an account of a trip that he had made in 1791, but the material it provided was also reworked in his novels Atala (1801) and René (1802), two seminal texts of French Romanticism. In his geographical, botanical and zoological observations, Chateaubriand drew heavily on William Bartram’s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1791) and Jonathan Carver’s Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768 (1778). But what Chateaubriand produces in Voyage to America is an entirely original narrative that combines scientific observation, Romantic fabulation and social philosophy. Chateaubriand admires the flora and fauna of the new world but what particularly attracts him are its native Indians. Far from the artificial values of the civilised world, they live in a state of nature and ‘have neither caprice nor ill humour’ and ‘do not quarrel, do not fight’. It is a version of paradise regained. ‘Primitive liberty’, Chateaubriand enthuses, ‘I find you at last!’.[45]

 

What the (largely male) traveller had read in the work of other explorers, what he had expected to see, what he saw or did not see but nonetheless will claim to have seen, what the author calculated that his audience and publisher would expect to find in the final work and what would then be elaborated through techniques fictional and non-fictional, often without a registering of boundaries between the two modes, all helped produce the genre of Romantic travel writing. In spite of its commitment to personal authenticity, much travel literature exploited, as in Chateaubriand’s Voyage to America, already published work of explorers and naturalists. It also drew upon current conventions that framed the experience of travel, and which provided, as in the case of the ‘Grand Tour’, both an itinerary for travellers from aristocratic society (although as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth the social basis broadened) and advice on how the traveller should draw the most cultural capital from his journey. Italy was the preferred destination for the Grand Tourists, its wealth of antiquities providing the opportunity to come into first-hand contact (through sight but also through appropriation – this was often a collector’s journey) with the classical heritage of Western culture, completing thus the humanist education of an English gentleman.

 

But not only English gentlemen. In September 1786, the twenty-seven-year-old Goethe, author of the seminal work of German and European Romanticism, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), travelled to Italy, visiting Verona, Venice, Rome, Naples and Sicily. Goethe made extensive notes in his diary and these were eventually published as The Italian Journey in 1816 and 1817. The diaries are characterised by spontaneous observations, in which Goethe describes the inns that he stayed at, the food he ate, and even the conditions of the roads that he journeyed on, and convey an immediate impression of what the traveller would have encountered in Italy at that time. The final work, however, written more than twenty years later in Goethe’s ‘mature’ style, reveals the heavy hand of retrospection. In visiting Italy, Goethe was seeking a transformative experience: ‘if I cannot come back reborn’, he tells us in a diary entry of 22 March 1787, ‘it would be much better not to come back at all’. But as becomes apparent in The Italian Journey, Goethe’s ultimate goal was not experience but education, and one particular type of education (for which there is no word in English): Bildung, the formation of the self through cultural knowledge. Goethe attempts throughout his narrative to sustain the allure of novelty (he enters society, makes new friends and he is almost at one point arrested by the police), but all of these experiences are safely absorbed by the magisterial mind, and deprived of anything that might stabilise his temperament or worldview. As he observes at one point, ‘my chief problem is Roman society, which would like to draw me out of my solitary shell and interfere with my work habits, but I protect myself as well as I can’. The fruits of Goethe’s sojourn in Italy lie in the acquisition of eternal verities relating to human nature, the world and man’s place in the cosmos. At the end of his journey, the sage Goethe is very much as he was at the beginning: a balanced, informed, cultivated, rational individual, and on the point of completing what would be his most famous novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796), which was followed by Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (1821, second edition 1829) which was appropriately subtitled The Renunciants. Both novels trace the formation of an individual from an apprentice in life to its master, to an individual accepting of the status quo, fully integrated into the customs and values of society. They are a leavetaking from Romanticism, and an entry into a Neo-Classicism that would secure his Olympian status in German literature. [46]

 

In Italy, Goethe studiously avoided the temptations to dissolution that this unfamiliar and more permissive environment was offering. But there were other Romantic writers who actively sought out such temptations. While Chateaubriand and Goethe, in their diverse ways, absorb and integrate the objects of their gaze into the classifying consciousness of the conservative European mind, Gerard de Nerval in his Voyage to the Orient (a journey to the Middle East, translated into English as The Women of Cairo) immersed himself with abandon in the local life of the countries he visited. Nerval was not the first French Romantic writer to have visited this region. A decade earlier, Alphonse de Lamartine, author of the quintessential text of French Romanticism, the Poetic Meditations (1820), had travelled to the Levant to observe and note down the ‘religion, history, manners, traditions, and the various phrases of human nature’ of the area, observations that he published in Voyage to the Orient (1835).[47] Lamartine’s compendious work reflects a thoughtful mind in sympathy with the values and religious customs that he encounters, but ultimately the aristocratic demeanour of the author and his categorising mentality hold the reader at a distance from the daily lives of the people and their customs.

 

Gerard de Nerval, by contrast, set out to ‘respond to the vague impressions of a world which is a perfect antithesis to our own’. Like the eater of hashish (a substance to whom Nerval was no stranger) in the section devoted to the story of Caliph Hakem, ‘happy and free, he wanders through space and light, chatting familiarly with the genii he meets, and they delight him with sudden and exquisite revelations’. Nerval attends Muslim weddings, meets domestic slaves and visits a harem, the Pyramids and the palace of the Pasha. Even in a Cairo barber’s shop he finds wonder in the exotic. ‘How shall I describe the impression they cause upon every dreamer?’ Nerval asks himself and the reader. But Nerval does describe all he sees, comprehensively and empathetically, in a narrative that views all with an optic that is both clinical and enamoured of the novelty of the experience.[48]

 

For many travellers from the north of Europe, it was not Italy that was their ultimate destination but Greece, a country still under the yoke of Ottoman rule, which was now rediscovered as the cradle of Western civilisation. The ground had been well prepared by the preceding generation of travellers, most notably by art critics such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a pioneering Hellenist whose Reflections on the painting and sculpture of the Greeks (1755) did much to move artistic taste away from the mannerist style of the Rocco and towards the ‘unity and perfection’ of Greek art achieved by artists who had simply ‘followed nature’. [49] The cult of all things Greek was continued by the Romantics, by the Germans, in particular. Friedrich Schiller wrote his ‘The Gods of Greece’ (1788), idealising the cultural harmony of the ancient Greeks, whilst Hölderlin looked back to the them in poems such as ‘Bread and Wine, ‘As when on a holy day …’ and ‘To the Fates’, creating a personal cosmography through which the customs, beliefs and myths of the Greeks might continue to shine. It was an act of poetic devotion that culminated in his novel Hyperion (two volumes, 1791 and 1799), in which the struggle of Greek patriots against the occupying forces of the Ottoman Empire is celebrated. Hyperion anticipated historical events that were soon to happen. In 1821, a Greek uprising was staged in the north of Greece, only to be put down by the Turks. The Greek War of Independence had begun, a war that was bitterly fought until 1832, when Greece established its freedom in the Treaty of Constantinople.

 

These events inspired a generation of writers, including Victor Hugo, whose collection of poems, The Orientals (1829), celebrated the Greeks in their war of liberation. In ‘Mazeppa’, one of the best-known poems in the volume, Hugo cites a short line by Byron; it is an act of homily to the most famous literary Hellenist of this period. Byron made his first journey to Greece in 1809, in a trip that included Portugal, Spain and Albania, and in 1812 published his account of that journey in the form of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (the work was not completed until 1818). Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is not only the most extensive lyrical text within Romantic travel writing; it is also a highly complex work that embodies the characteristics of the travel genre while at the same time problematising them, fusing in a self-conscious way fact and fiction, geography and fantasy, history and legend, the real authorial Byron and the self-stylised one. In the character of Harold, Byron captures the essence of the psychology of the Romantic traveller. Harold is ‘a modern Timon, a despiser of mankind’, driven by boredom and fatigue with life, who is compelled to seek out new experiences in distant climes because he has become a victim of the ‘satiety of past pleasures’.[50] What Harold encounters in the countries he visits is depicted through a series of sharp anecdotes and tableaux vivants. We learn of the supposedly backward nature of the Portuguese and the ‘dingy denizens’ of Lisbon; of the tragedy of a Spain that is a victim of the Napoleonic wars, yet remains true to its traditions of chivalry; of the rugged but appropriate force of law that prevails in Albania; and of Greece, ‘fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!’, once the home of civilisation now reduced to rubble under the Ottomans. Although all of these unhappy nations have been brought low through war and political tyranny, they nevertheless possess two treasures that will secure their future survival: their monuments and works of art, which speak not only of the greatness of past times but also of a future that is still to be won out of the chaos and disorder of the present, and their natural beauty, a ‘vast realm of wonder’ that is beyond the ravages of time.[51]

 

As had become clear in the first canto, Harold is a thinly disguised persona of Byron. In the final parts of the poem, that pretence of fiction is dropped, allowing a new self-conscious voice to emerge, one that queries not only its own values but even the coherence of its identity (‘what am I?’, he/it asks itself in Canto 3). Certainly, we should not assume that this is the author speaking in his own person: Byron’s fabulation of selfhood was an essential part of his writing as it was of his life. But this reflexivity allows author and reader alike to move beyond the purely mimetic quality of his narrative, a quality that adheres to the genre of travel literature, with its focus on colourful locations, exotic localities, dramatic, and even melodramatic events, on larger than life personalities, to more introspective conceptions and preconceptions about the self and world. Meditation, now challenging action, becomes the main focus. It is a crucial turn in Byron’s poem, because it allows the reader to see that Harold’s (and Byron’s) quest is not only a geographical journey; it is also a search for personal identity. As Harold has ‘thought too long and darkly’, and now reveals what he has learnt through his travelling: that his many journeys have not expanded the self or brought about a new one but, on the contrary, has led to its dissolution, its loss, because ‘I live not in myself, but I become/ Portion of that around me’, the author of ‘the bodiless thought’. These are sentiments of despair, and they point to something deeper: the wish for a final resolution to his homelessness and endless wanderings: the wish for it to be all over. In an earlier canto, Harold had declaimed, ‘peace waits us on the shores of Acheron’, words that anticipate the ultimate solution to his melancholy.[52] In January 1824, Byron travelled to Greece to participate in the Greek war of independence, but before he could join the fighting he fell ill and died on 19 April. Shortly before his death, he wrote his final poem, simply titled ‘On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year’. It is Byron’s valediction to the world and to himself: the past is gone; there is no future, and the conclusion cannot be evaded: ‘If thou regret’st thy Youth, why live? / The land of honourable Death/ Is here’.

 

 

7. The Darker Self:

Romantic Gothic

 

Wordsworth sought to make contact with a higher realm by transfiguring the natural world.  Coleridge harboured similar goals, but even in his earliest poetry, a darker, less transcendent quality is apparent in his work, whose ambit is not mystery as the spiritually ineffable but the para-normal, the macabre, the uncanny, all of which are evident in one of his most famous poems, with which the Lyrical Ballads opens: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.  It tells the story of an errant sailor who, in killing an albatross, condemns his crew to death, and himself to perpetual damnation and is compelled to wander the world, obsessively repeating with his ‘strange power of speech’ his tale to anyone who will listen.  Coleridge’s poem is an allegory that speaks not of a happy union between nature and mankind, or of personality restored to unity through contact with organic life, but of transgression, of guilt, of the eruption of the irrational into the rational, of (as Coleridge himself later observed) the pervasive dark presence of ‘supernatural agency’ in human affairs.[53]

 

It is certainly no coincidence that it should have been Coleridge, who was an acolyte of German culture, rather than Wordsworth who was drawn to the occult.  The consequences of religious transgression for our spiritual health, the moral dangers of intellectual over-reaching and the tenuous distinction between the natural and supernatural, attracted an entire generation of German Romantics from Novalis and Kleist through to Goethe, whose Faust I and II struggle both to explicate and contain experience lie beyond conventional and rational realms of knowledge.  The genre that grew out of this obsession with otherness was the Märchen (the adult fairy-story). It included Ludwig Tieck’s ‘The blond Eckbert’ (1797), Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s ‘Undine’ (1811), Adalbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl’s miraculous Story (1814), Clemens Brentano’s ‘The Story of Honest Casper and Fair Annie’ (1817), Ludwig Achim von Arnim’s ‘The Mad Invalid of Fort Ratonneau’ (1818), and a host of stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, including ‘The Sandman’ (1817), ‘Councillor Krespel’ (1818), ‘The Mines at Falun’ (1819) and the novella, The Golden Pot (1814).  Writing in 1799, Novalis called the Märchen ‘a dreamscape, an ensemble of fantastic things and events, without logical connection.  A musical fantasy, nature itself’.  Indeed, magical acts and unreal characters are found throughout the genre: the chameleon witch in Tieck’s ‘The Blond Eckbert’, the ghostly miner in Hoffmann’s ‘The Mines at Falun’, and the living shadow in Chamisso’s ‘Peter Schlemihl’ are some of the most memorable.  These characters often function as Doppelgänger, being the darker alter egos of otherwise normal people, objective correlatives of those subconscious parts of the psyche that must not be allowed to see the light of day.  These shadowy creatures move in a landscape somewhere between the recognisable terrain of everyday existence, and that other realm whose contours are formed by fear, suspicion and madness.  Their existence proves, as Clara says in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, that ‘in cheerful, careless hearts there too may […] dwell the presentiment of a dark power which strives to ruin us within our own selves’.[54]

 

The Märchen represents the dark side of the German Romantic vision.  In it, the love of nature and natural solitude that was extolled, for example, by Eichendorff, and that feeling for the wonder and mystery of the world, which is so evident in the poetry of Novalis, are deprived of their innocence, and made to reveal the irrational and demonic potential that exists at their centre, as in Tieck’s ‘The Blond Eckbert’.  The story takes the classic features of the fairy story: the benevolent witch, anthropomorphised animals and a love between a knight (Eckbert) and a peasant girl (Bertha), but develops them into a sombre tale of trust betrayed, secrets repressed, friends suspected, in a skilfully written narrative, whose increasing ambience is one of guilt and crime.  The grim disclosure that Eckbert has been guilty not only of murder but also, unwittingly, of incest leaves the hero (and, possibly, the reader) in typical Märchen fashion, ‘numbed and bewildered’, unable to distinguish between truth and fantasy.[55]

 

In giving shape to the darker side of human nature, the authors of the Märchen were able to draw upon a popular tradition of writing that had developed through the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century: the Gothic novel.  Early examples of the genre, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and M.G. Lewis’ The Monk (1796), mobilised themes and qualities of fictional fabulation that were inimical to Enlightenment thought: a belief in the supernatural, the cultivation of ambience and mood, a nostalgia for the medieval, and plots structured around enigma and mystery, in story lines that often included garish violence.  In her novel Northanger Abbey (written 1803; published 1817), Jane Austen satirised Gothic literature on account of its unhealthy focus on ‘darkness impenetrable’ and ‘horror’, finding such values contrary to the ‘laws of the land and the manners’ of an early eighteenth century England governed by good sense and decorum.  Jane Austen would not (or could not) recognise that Gothic writing clearly performed a function for its contemporary readership as a vehicle for the exploration of excess and taboo, and (indirectly, at least) as a critical commentary upon the ‘empty pomp and hidden power’ that characterised the political and sexual culture of the ancien régime.[56]

 

The Gothic also influenced the English Romantics:  Shelley drew upon its heightened rhetoric tangentially in poems such as ‘Queen Mab’ (1813), where ‘tainted sepulchres’, ‘putrefaction’s breath’, and ‘loathsomeness and ruin’ are evoked, and more directly in ‘Prometheus Unbound’ (1820), in which the Gothic penchant for physical transgression lends a visceral intensity to the sufferings of the fallen Titan, who must undergo his gruesome ordeal, passively watching ‘Heaven’s winged hound’, while ‘His beak in poison not his own, tears up / My heart’.  Byron used similar iconography, modelling many of his demonic heroes on the familiar Gothic villain, who like the Giaour (in the poem of the same name, 1813) possesses a ‘dark and unearthly’ scowl, in which ‘lurks that nameless spell/ Which speaks, itself unspeakable, / A spirit yet unquell’d and high’.  Keats drew upon Gothic imagery in his ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (both 1820), both of which exhibit a distinctive medievalism, and an attraction (as in the latter poem) for ‘death-pale’ apparitions, who surface to remind poet and hero alike of the transitoriness of love and its dangers.  Finally, Blake used the Gothic for quite different purposes in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and Jerusalem (written between 1804 and 1820).  In these poems, Blake gave voice to a pessimistic vision of a swiftly industrialising England, where factories and mills have become inhuman vehicles of subjugation and terror, bringing all who come under their dominion to a living death, forced to live under the ‘loud sounding hammer of destruction’.  In such a landscape, all are forced to surrender dignity and freedom, living in a land where ‘Los’s Furnaces howl loud, living, self moving.’[57]

 

Perhaps the most memorable, and certainly the most popular use of the Gothic tradition was made by Mary Shelley in her novel, Frankenstein (1818).  It is a remarkable text for many reasons, not least because it was written by a woman.  Prior to its publication, women had figured in Gothic fiction largely in passive terms, as the guileless victims of male rapacity.  In many respects, this view of woman mirrored in exaggerated form the predicament of femininity within the Romantic imagination itself, which tended to construe the female as the object rather than the subject of desire, the goal of Romantic obsession rather than its producer, a symbol both of earthly perfection but also of a distant corporality, whose mystique and unattainability gave rise to that characteristic Romantic emotion of immeasurable longing (known in German as Sehnsucht).  For many Romantic writers, the female formed the centre of a poetics of loss: Lamartine had his Julie Charles, Novalis his Sophie, and de Nerval his Sylvie.  Certainly, attempts were made to provide women with their own position of speech: Friedrich Schlegel made one such attempt in his fragmentary and incomplete novel, Lucinde (1799), in which he describes the ideal marriage of two free souls, Julius and Lucinde, who are united in a relationship that combines ‘spiritual desire and sensual bliss’.  Written clearly under the influence of Rousseau’s notion of natural morality, Lucinde posits its protagonists as free agents, who are able to produce a heightened communion of mind and body, returning through their physical love to that ‘golden age of innocence’ that the Romantics longed for.  But even here, at the moment of her greatest equality, the Romantic heroine remains a distant figure, a positive otherness, now angel, now earth mother, a creature who ultimately can only find her happiness in the serenity of the male.[58]

 

Mary Shelley intervened into this framework, not by writing a ‘woman’s novel’ (as Madame de Staël had done in her Corinne (1806), and as George Sand would later do in Indiana (1832) and Lélia (1833), but by taking possession of a form that had, except for Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, traditionally been written by men.  She also injected into her narrative a critique of two of the most dominant male archetypes of the Romantic imagination: Faust and Prometheus, both of which are figures who by seeking to push knowledge and power beyond their natural and moral limitations are deemed (as Shelley writes in the introduction to her novel) to ‘mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world’.  In this sense, Shelley intended her novel to be read not only as a critique of the triumphalist and arrogant nature of scientific rationalism (she targets in particular the new and disturbing energy of electricity), but also of Romanticism itself.  In celebrating genius and unbridled creativity, the latter has (Shelley implies) entirely forgotten the modest origins of art in human experience, seeking, as the unhappy Frankenstein retrospectively laments regarding himself, ‘to become greater than nature will allow’.  The monster that Shelley constructs in her novel is pure Gothic.  Assembled from the ‘degraded and wasted’ human remains culled from the local churchyard, he is from the moment of his birth regarded even by his creator with ‘horror and disgust’, a ‘demoniacal corpse’.  Left to wander the world, travelling from bucolic Switzerland to the bleak Artic, abandoned and despised, he gives himself over to a life defined by ‘carnage and misery’, revenging himself on those he believes to have betrayed him. [59]

 

But, as Shelley makes clear, the monster possesses a soul and, in the closing stages of her narrative, she adds to the ethical conservatism with which she has sustained the moral allegory of her story an important component of social reformism, projecting the monster now as much as the victim of evil as its perpetrator.  In the final scene of the novel, the monster learns to speak of his persecution and defilement, explaining that he has been ‘wrenched by misery to vice and hatred’, degraded by ‘crime […] beneath the meanest animal’ by an uncomprehending and uncaring world.  His artificial creation may have been an affront against the laws of nature and religious piety; but the greater crimes, Mary Shelley concludes (drawing upon the reformist zeal of her father William Godwin, whose novel Caleb Williams, published in 1794, came to similar conclusions) are the ones shared by all: the corruption of original innocence, lack of sympathy for one marked by difference and estrangement, and a refusal to take responsibility for crimes that are of our own making. [60]

 

8 ‘Hymns to the Night’:

The Longing for Transcendence

 

In his ‘Auguries of Innocence’ (1803), William Blake exhorted his readers ‘to see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And Heaven in a Wild Flower, /Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an Hour’.  In spite of their inherent mysticism, Blake’s lines were the product of a mind that enjoyed a natural vitality and energy and was fully committed to the tangibility of the world. In other Romantic poets, experience of nature involved a more passive facility, an opening, almost surrender of self to a higher, transcendent reality.  This comes to the fore in the religious lyrics of the great Polish Romantic, Adam Mickiewicz (such as his Lausanne Lyrics, 1840), and in those of the Dane, B.S. Ingemann, whose Morning and Evening Songs (1838) represent one of the high points of Scandinavian Romanticism.  These qualities are pre-eminently evident in the work of Ugo Foscolo (Sepulchral Verses, 1820), and in that of Giacomo Leopardi (Last Songs, 1837), the two foremost representatives of the Romantic movement in Italy.  Both were poets of the night, explorers of the depths, anxieties and mysteries that lie beyond the provenance of the daylight world.  Leopardi, in particular, in poems such as ‘The Infinite’, ‘The Evening after the Holy Day’ (both 1821), and ‘To Himself’ (1833), identified with this mentality, giving voice in his verse to a powerful sense of existential dread occasioned by the ‘unearthly silences, and endless space’ that seemed forever to surround him.  This is poetry permeated by a fear of a universe irretrievably obscure and inaccessible to moral scrutiny, of a world that offers nothing to either man or poet, both of whom, like the hopeful traveller in the poem ‘The Setting of the Moon’ (1837), must conclude their life’s journey in despair: for ‘in the night,/ Where through the dark we come/ The gods have set a sign for us, the tomb’. The Greek poet, Solomos, offered a similar homily to the poetics of the night in his remarkable poem, ‘The Whale’ (1847). Here, the merging of self into nature is not conducted through wise passivity but through a savage death (that of a young British soldier killed by a shark in the waters of the Aegean).  In spite of the grim realism of the poem’s subject, Solomos gives voice to the Romantic insistence that the experiencing self can only reach fruition through the dissolution of identity.  And as the beast of prey takes its victim, the poet offers us neither tragedy nor pity, but a glimpse into the mind forced suddenly come to terms with life and death, in one moment of pure knowledge, when ‘a light flashed like lightning and the youth knew himself’.[61]

 

One seminal text in this literature of dark transcendence was Novalis’ Hymns to the Night (written in 1789 and published in the journal Athenaeum, edited by the Schlegels, in 1800).  In his Bildungsroman (novel of self-formation and personal development) Henry from Ofterdingen (published posthumously in 1802), Novalis extolled the value of earthly achievement, depicting the quest of the young Henry for ideal love and spiritual fulfilment (in his relationship with the loved-one Mathilde, which is represented on symbolical level by an ethereal blue flower that reappears as a leit motif throughout the text).  The earlier Hymns to the Night, however, gives expression to quite a different vision of the world.  The poem tells of Novalis’ attempt to make contact with his loved one, the diseased Sophie, who has left this world for a higher realm that can only be reached by those prepared to embrace darkness and death. Hymns to the Night is a work of unrelieved interiority that, in six short paeans (formed now in prose poems, now in rhyming verse), describes the poet’s journey from light into darkness, from earth-bound existence to ethereal spirituality. Around this quest, Novalis spins a condemnation of Enlightenment thinking and scientific rationality, which have destroyed that sympathetic bond between the individual and nature that Novalis saw existing in a past golden age.  This is the central theme of the Hymns, and in the fifth in the series the poet looks back in a rare moment of mythic retrospection to the prehistory of mankind, where all lived in a ‘holy intoxication’ produced by the animistic immanence of spirit in nature.  That world is no longer but (as Novalis argues in the third Hymn) it can be recreated in our minds if we replace ‘the chains of light’, those mental habits of a calculating, quantifying rationality, with a greater feel for the ineffable in all its forms: shadows, the subterranean, dreams, in short, the night.  What is required is an intellectual leap, a break-through (Durchbruch).  Novalis leaves the ultimate destination of his journey unclear, and intentionally so: it is meant to combine the spiritual and the natural, the earthly and the heavenly, that which can be possessed and that which must remain forever an object of that dominant Romantic emotion: unfulfilled longing (Sehnsucht).[62]

 

At the heart of Novalis’ vision lies a paradox that is quite central to the Romantic imagination: for the self to reach a higher plain it must dissolve precisely those faculties that provide for its definition: rationality, self-consciousness, the ego.  In this inversion of values, death becomes life, and the undefinable workings of mood and temperament form the sole source of true knowledge.  Linking the two realms was the goal of such Romantic writers as Hoffmann, Tieck and Coleridge, whose deranged hero in ‘The Ancient Mariner’, can be read as a mediator between earth and hell.  There were other prophets of the night, such as Étienne Senancour, the author of Oberman (1804), and Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann, Nightwatches of Bonaventura (1804), both of whom interpreted the need for transcendence not as a medium of spiritual transfiguration but as a psychological problem, an obsession, that can leave the conscious self (as the hero of Senacour’s novel attests) ‘lost in the abyss’ of an ‘inquietude’ that is as pervasive as it is irredeemable. These writers were aware of the limitations of Romantic self-consciousness and, as such, anticipated two figures who would effectively bring Romantic optimism to an end: Thomas de Quincey and Gérard de Nerval.  Quincey’s most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) is an autobiographical account of his experiments with opium, and clearly draws upon Coleridge’s famous poem ‘Kubla Khan’ (written in 1797, but not published until 1816), which likewise linked poetic fantasy to the use of drugs.  Like Coleridge’s poem, De Quincey’s work is also ambiguous in its attitude to opium, oscillating between moral condemnation and a celebration of the transforming capacity of the narcotic.  His hallucinations, graphically described and framed within the urban context of metropolitan London, hover between vision and terror, as the author moves between dreams of his loved ones and nightmares that conjure up unfamiliar beasts and transform lakes into mosaics of suffering human faces.  These are experiences which liberate de Quincey from conventional notions of selfhood, but also leave him ‘agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered’, physically and mentally broken, and finally prepared to renounce the temptations of Romantic transport.[63]

 

Almost half a century separates Novalis from Gérard de Nerval.  Like Novalis, de Nerval also sought to distance himself from the stultifying tradition of Enlightenment rationalism, and came close to the Magic Idealism of his German forerunner.  His philosophy is evident in poems such as ‘Gilded Verses’ (1854), where he reminds the ‘free-thinking man’ that in ‘Each flower is a soul blossoming in nature;/ In metal there dwells a mystery of love;/ ‘Everything is sentient!’ And everything has power upon you’.  This was pure Novalis, but what came after was not.  Nerval is a late figure in French Romanticism, but an important one: his translations of Goethe and Heine were responsible for popularising the work of those authors and German Romanticism, in general, in France.  His own publications extend from the travelogue, Voyage to the Orient (1851) and the early novelistic study of the Parisian demimonde, Sylvie (1854) through to the poetry of Chimeras (1854), the latter containing the famous poem of fantasy, ‘El Desdichado’).  In all of these, the mentally unstable poet crosses genres, plays with the reader’s expectation of form and style, and conjures up a world where now fantasy, now clear realism dominate. As Nerval tells us in his letters, such works were products of a mind liberated through ‘illusion, paradox, [and] the presumption of all those things that are enemies of good sense’.[64]

 

But in his final work, Aurelia (published in Nerval’s last year, 1855), the poet intensified the Romantic optic to the point where the fusion of dream and reality is no longer a Romantic metaphor, but signals an irreversible process of mental derangement.  Aurelia has neither story nor plot, nor protagonists beyond the first-person subject of the narrative.  Time, space and sequence are likewise left unspecified, as Nerval moves around Paris, seeking to make sense of his experiences, moving from one mental hospital to another.  This is the record of a voyage into the night, whose starting point: ‘Our dreams are a second life’, is one that would have been familiar to Blake, Novalis and all who sought a higher reality in dream or the transports of religious visions.  But Aurelia speaks not of dream but of nightmare and, although the personal obsession which initiates the narrative (the death of the loved one) appears throughout Romantic literature, Nerval’s account of the psychological effects of that obsession is unique in nineteenth-century literature.  Nerval’s journey charts a ‘descent into hell’, into a world dominated by animistic fantasies, delusions of grandeur, schizophrenia and simple ‘terror’.  With Aurelia, we have reached the end of the tradition of epistemological utopianism that found its earliest and most memorable form in Novalis.  The nocturnal vision projected by the German poet had belonged to the realm of gentle sleep, had opened the riches of the unconscious, had served as a metaphor for infinity.  By the time Nerval enters a similar region, Romanticism has lost both its optimism and its naiveté; the disturbing Other that the demented narrator of de Nerval’s narrative encounters is part of his own deeper self, but hostile, and, as the century turns the corner to the modern age, a fit subject for the new scientific discourses of psychology and medical pathology.  This is where Nerval leaves us: at the end of the trajectory of Romantic idealism.  As the hero explains at one moment of rare clarity: ‘born in days of revolutions and storms, when every belief was broken […] for us it is very difficult, when we feel the need of it, to resurrect that mystic edifice already built in their ready hearts by the innocent and simple’.  Within this context, on the eve of the triumph of positivism and utilitarianism, the Romantic impulse cannot survive; fantasy has become an historical impossibility, and ‘ignorance cannot be learned’.[65]

 

Romanticism

An Annotated Bibliography

 

As a concept, ‘Romanticism’ first appeared in Germany in 1802, in France 1816, Italy 1818 and England 1823, and in other European countries after that date (see René Wellek, ‘The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History’, first published in 1949, and republished in Concepts of Criticism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963, pp. 128–198).  Its emergence within the culture of this period is charted by Lilian Furst in her short study, Romanticism (London: Methuen, 1976, pp. 6–14), as it is by the contributors to ‘Romantic’ and its Cognates: The European History of the Word, edited by Hans Eichner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), and with a greater sense for its contested meaning, indeed, for its problematic status within literary history, by Wellek in his ‘The Concept of Romanticism’. Wellek takes issue here with scholars such as A.O. Lovejoy, who in his ‘On the Discriminations of Romanticisms’ (first published in 1924, and reprinted in Robert F. Gleckner and Gerald D. Enscoe’s Romanticism: Points of View, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1962, and in a second, heavily revised edition, 1970, pp. 66–81), argued that ‘Romanticism’ reflects a ‘confusion of terms, and of ideas’, describing a movement that was without a ‘common denominator’ (Lovejoy, pp. 66 and 69). Wellek, however, counters by stressing the Romantics’ shared acceptance of certain key tropes: ‘imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style’, to which he adds that ‘concern for the reconciliation of subject and object, man and nature, consciousness and unconsciousness’, which was the greater philosophical goal of the Romantic project (Wellek, ‘The Concept of Romanticism’, pp. 161 and 218). Lilian Furst allows the Romantics to speak for themselves in her multilingual anthology, European Romanticism: Self-definition (London: Methuen; 1980), where she offers a selection of primary texts drawn from Romantic manifestoes and essays. A more extensive selection of such texts is provided by Warren Breckman in his European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), and Stephen Prickett in his comprehensive European Romanticism: A Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

 

The wider cultural history of Romanticism has been documented by Anthony Thorlby in The Romantic Movement (London: Longmans, 1966), John B. Halsted in Romanticism: Problems of Definition, Explanation and Evaluation (Boston: Heath, 1965), H.H.H. Remak in his ‘West European Romanticism: Definition and Scope’, reprinted in Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective, edited by Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1971, pp. 275–311), H.G. Schenk in his The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (London: Constable, 1966), M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), Morse Peckham, The Birth of Romanticism, 1790–1815 (Greenwood: Penkevill, 1986), by Lilian Furst in her Romanticism in Perspective: A Comparative Study of Aspects of the Romantic Movement in England, France and Germany (London: Macmillan, 1969) and The Contours of European Romanticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), and by Maurice Cranston, The Romantic Movement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994).

 

A country-by-country account of the Romantic movement is provided by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich in their edited volume, Romanticism in national Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), in A Companion to European Romanticism, edited by Michael Ferber (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) and by Paul Hamilton, The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (2016). The Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, edited by Christopher John Murray, 2 vols (New York/London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004) offers succinct entries on the culture (understood in the broadest sense of the term, to include, for example, science,) of the Romantic period. It is regrettable, however, that seminal works such as Paul van Tieghem’s Le Romantisme dans la littérature européenne (Paris: Michel, 1948, second edition 1969) and Die Europäische Romantik, edited by Ernst Behler i.a. (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1972) remain untranslated.

 

For many, poetry is regarded as the natural medium of Romantic literary expression, a via ductus linking the inner self with the world. The volume edited by Angela Esterhammer, Romantic Poetry (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002) provides a wide range of essays that both substantiate but, at times, problematise this model. The essays in Romantic Prose Fiction, edited by Gerald Gillespie i.a. (Amsterdam, /Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008), attempt to redress the balance, and discuss writing themes on travel and the exploration of nature through to children’s literature and music. The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, edited by Katie Trumpener and Richard Maxwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), has a similarly broad thematic focus, but one that is exclusively British. The Gillespie, Engel and Dieterle collection is, in fact, one volume (vol. XXIII), in an extended range of works published under the aegis of the ‘Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages’ by John Benjamins Publishing, which is seeking to provide comprehensive coverage of the European literatures of the modern period within a comparative context. Other volumes in the series pertaining to Romanticism include Romantic Drama, edited by Gerald Gillespie (1994), Romantic Irony, edited by Frederick Garber (1988), and Romantic Theoretical and Critical Writing, edited by Virgil Nemoianu (2004).

 

The complex consciousness of the Romantic text, its problematic self-stylisation, its excess of signification, has been deconstructed by Paul de Man in his influential The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).  In terms of the equally complex psychology of authorship (possibly its pathology of selfhood), this ‘other’ side of the Romantic mind has been analysed by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, but first published in Italian in 1930 with the more revealing title Flesh, Death and the Devil in Romantic Literature). Romantic subjectivity is viewed here as a form of ‘erotic sensibility’ (Praz, p. xv), which manifests itself in a penchant for excess, for the taboo, for the darker side of the sexual impulse.  Praz’ influence is evident in subsequent studies of the Romantic mind, such as David Punter’s The Romantic Unconscious: A Study in Narcissism and Patriarchy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), which seeks to establish the ‘common psycho-social root’ that links (he argues) Romanticism with other forms of narcissistic self-empowerment (Punter, p. x), and which informs, above all, Romantic Gothic. The seminal work here remains Punter’s own The Literature of Terror (London & New York: Longman, 1980), republished as A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Volume 1: The Gothic Tradition, 1996), and supplemented by the essays in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a further sub-genre indicative of the expansionist sensibility of the Romantic ethos, travel literature, see James Buzzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the ways to ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Romantic Travel Narratives, edited by Mircea Anghelescu (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004) and C.W. Thompson, French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

 

Romanticism was a philosophically sophisticated and theoretically pointed movement, whose writers were influenced by philosophers such as Kant, Schelling and Schleiermacher. The major study of this influence remains M.H. Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953), which shows how theories of artistic expressivity (the ‘lamp’ trope), came to dominate the imagination of European, but particularly, of English Romantics. As the essays included in Romanticism: Comparative Discourses, edited by Larry H Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler (Ashgate, 2006) indicate, recent work, perhaps influenced by Michel Foucault, has tended to move away from the context of recognised philosophy to more pragmatic institutional discourses, such as education or criminality, or to focus on alternative conceptual grids such as science. Works on the relationship between scientific discovery and Romanticism (largely with a British focus) include Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper Press, 2009) and Sharon Ruston, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Feminist (or at least female-focused) studies of Romanticism include Elizabeth Fay, A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) and Stephen C. Behrendt, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Romantic literature is explicated within its historical context in R.B. Mowat’s The Romantic Age: Europe in the early Nineteenth Century (London: Harrap, 1937), Howard Mumford Jones’ Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), J.L. Talmon’s Romanticism and Revolt: Europe 1815–1848 (New York: Norton, 1967), Tim Blanning’s The Romantic Revolution: A History (New York: Random House, 2012) and, through an extensive use of primary materials, John B. Halsted’s Romanticism (London: Macmillan, 1969).

 

 

[1] Southey, letter to Caroline Bowles, 13 February 1824, in The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, ed. E. Dowden (Dublin: Hodges and Figgis, 1881), p. 52; and William Godwin, Caleb Williams [1794] (London: New English Library, 1966), p. 5.

[2] Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, and newly revised by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969), p. 570; Schlegel, Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Ernst Behler (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1956), pp. 104 and 97; Wieland, ‘Unparteiische Betrachtungen über die dermalige Staatsrevolution in Frankreich’ [1790], in Werke, ed. Hans Böhm, 4 vols (Berlin: Aubau Verlag, 1969), vol. 4, p. 206; and Heine, ‘Über Ludwig Börne’ [1840], in Heine, Werke, ed. M. Greiner, 2 vols (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1962), vol. 2, p. 779.

[3] De Quincey, The Collected Writings, ed. David Masson, 13 vols (Edinburgh: Adam Charles and Black; 1890), vol. 10, p. 138; and Robespierre, in Robespierre, ed. George Rudé (New York: Prentice-Hall; 1967), p. 72;

[4]  Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, corrected by John Jump (London: Oxford UP, 1970), p. 240; and Wordsworth to William Mathews, 8 June 1792, in Letters of William Wordsworth: A New Selection, ed. by Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), p. 15.

[5] Napoleon, The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection from his written and spoken Words, trans. J. Christopher Herold (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), p. 73; Chateaubriand, Memoirs, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 329; and Hegel to Niethammer, 13 October 1806, in Briefe, ed. Joseph Hoffmeister, 4 vols (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1961), vol. 1, p. 120.

[6] Stendhal, Vie de Napoléon [1828], in Oeuvres complètes, eds. Victor Del Litto and Ernest Abravanel, 50 vols (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1970), vol. 39, pp. 75-76; Lamartine from ‘Bonaparte’ [1823], in Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Marius-Francois Guyard, (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 120; and Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1931), vol. 13, p. ix.

[7] Novalis, Werke und Briefe, ed. Alfred Kelletat (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1953), p  367; Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 91; and Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1965), p, 103.

[8] Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. John Oxenford (London: Dent: 1930), p. 246.

[9] Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers [1799], trans. John Oman (New York: Harper, 1958), p. 10; Kleist, Werke und Briefe, ed. Siegried Streller, 4 vols (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1978), vol. 2, p. 271; Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, newly ed. George Armstrong Kelly (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 215; and Eichendorff, Sämmtliche Werke. Historisch-Kritsche Ausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Kosch and August Sauer, 24 vols (Regensburg: Josef Habbel, 1908-1913), vol. 10, pp. 159-160.

[10]  Runeberg, The Tales of Ensign Stål, trans. Charles Wharton Stork (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1938), p. 19; Lönnrot, Kalevala: The Land of Heroes, trans. W.F. Kirby, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1907),  vol. 1, p.2.

[11] Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, p. 394; and Scott, Waverley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 478 and 415.

[12]  Diderot, preface to his Le père de famille, in Oeuvres choisies, ed. François Tulou, 2 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1901), vol. 2, p. 111.

[13] Samuel Johnson, preface to Father Jerome Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia [1735] (London: Elliot and Kay, 1789), p. 11; and Stendhal, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 37, p. 72.

[14] Wordsworth, Poetical Works, p. 734.

[15] Mme de Staël-Holstein, Oeuvres Complètes, 3 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1871), vol. 1, pp. 252–253; Friederich Schlegel, ‘Dialogue on Poetry’ [1800], in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania UP, 1968), p. 101; and Mme de Staël-Holstein, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 1, p. 257.

[16] Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian , 2 vols (London: Cadell, 1807), vol. 1, pp. v and 74.

[17]  Young, The Complete Works, ed. James Nichol [1854] (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), pp. 557 and 554; and Shelley, Complete Works, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), vol. 7, pp. 138 and 140.

[18]  Wordsworth, Poetical Works, p. 585; Wordsworth to Walter Savage Landor, 21 January 1824, Letters, p. 222; and Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 167.

[19] Schlegel, Schriften und Fragmente, p. 98; Novalis Werke und Briefe, p, 439; and Blake, Poetry and Prose, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch Press, 1946), p. 187.

[20] Wordsworth, Poetical Works, p. 735; Keats to George and Tom Keats, 27 December 1817, Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford; OUP, 1970), p. 43; and Shelley, Complete Works, vol. 7, p. 135.

[21]  Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, trans. Julias A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar Press, 1966), p. 85; and Kleist ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, trans. Christian-Albrecht Gollub, in The German Mind of the Nineteenth Century: A Literary and Historical Anthology, ed. Hermann Glaser (New York; Continuum, 1981), p. 90.

[22] Rousseau, The Reveries of a Solitary, trans. John Gould Fletcher (New York: Burt Franklin, 1927), p. 37; and Sand, George Sand in her own words, trans. and ed. Joseph Barry (New York: Doubleday, 1979), p. 8.

[23] Carlyle, ‘On Goethe’ [1828], in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), vol. 1, p. 217.

[24] Chateaubriand, René, trans. Walter J. Cobb (New York: Signet, 1962), p . 106; and Constant, Adolphe (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1959), p. 169.

[25]  Byron, Poetical Works, pp. 307, 651 and 112.

[26] Pushkin, Selected Verse, trans. John Fennell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 196.

[27] Pushkin, Selected Verse, pp. 145–146; and Lermontov, A Hero of our Times, trans. Paul Foote (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 93–94, and 157.

[28] Lermontov, A Hero of our Times, pp. 126–127 and 100; and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future [1886], trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p, 39.

[29] Blake, Poetry and Prose, p. 375; and Shelley, Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 196.

[30]  Lenz, Werke und Schriften, ed. Britta Titel and Hellmt Haug, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Goverts Verlag, 1966), vol. 1, p. 379; Lenz, The Soldiers, trans. William E. Yuill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 119; and Beaumarchais, La Trilogie de Figaro (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 137.

[31] Adolf Freiherr von Knigge in Schiller: Zeitgenossen aller Epoche, ed. Norbert Oellers (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Verlag, 1970), p. 57; Schiller, The Robbers, trans. F.J. Lamport (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 48; and Mary Stuart, in Five German Tragedies, trans. F. J. Lamport (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 316.

[32] Goethe, Egmont, in Five German Tragedies, p. 137.

[33] Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. Philip Wayne (Harmondsworth, Penguin: 1949), pp. 44 and 89.

[34] Kleist to Wilhelmine von Zange, 21 May 1801, in Werke und Briefe, vol. 4, p. 218; and Penthesiliea, in Heinrich von Kleist, Five Plays, trans. Martin Greenberg (New Haven: Yale U.P, 1988), p. 265.

[35]  Hugo, ‘Préface de Cromwell’, in Théatre Complet, eds. J-J Thierry and Josette Mélèze, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), vol. 1, p. 422; and Hugo, Hernani in Théatre Complet, vol. 1, p. 1288.

[36]  Solomos, Apanta, ed. Linos Polites, 2 vols (Athens: Ikaros, 1948–1960), vol. 1, p. 237.

[37] Nerval, Selected Writings, trans. Geoffrey Wagner (London: Panther Books, 1968), p. 170.

[38] Blake to Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799, in Poetry and Prose, p. 835; St. Pierre, Paul and Virginia (New York: Burt, no date), p. 26; and Leopardi, Selected Prose and Poetry, trans. Iris Origo and John Heath-Stubbs (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966), p. 213.

[39] Lamartine, Oeuvres Poétiques, p. 20; and Schleiermacher, On Religion,  p. 84.

[40] Shelley, Complete Works, vol. 1, p. 230; Coleridge, Complete Poetic Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1912), vol.1, p. 102.

[41] Burns, Poems and Songs, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford UP, 1969), p. 101.

[42] Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols (London: George Allen, 1904), vol 3, pp. 161–177; and

Wordsworth, Poetical Works, p. 164.

[43]  Wordsworth, Poetical Works, pp. 587 and 585-586.

[44] Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, and newly revised by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969), pp. 532, 533, 532, 534, 537, 537 and 537.

[45] Chateaubriand’s Travels in America, translated by Richard Switzer (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969), p. 42.

[46] J.W. Goethe, Italian Journey: 1786–1788, translated by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London: Collins, 1962), pp. 208, 373 and 137.

[47] Alphonse de Lamartine, A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (New York: Delmar, 1978), p. 3.

[48] Gerard de Nerval, The Women of Cairo: Scenes of Life in the Orient. Two volumes (London: Routledge, 1930), Volume 1, pp. 55, vol. 2, p. 65, and vol. 1, p. 275.

[49] Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, translated by Henry Fusseli (Menston: Scolar Press, 1972), pp. 19 and 14.

[50] Lord Byron, Complete Poetic Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon press, 1980), pp. 6 and 21.

[51] Byron, Complete Poetic Works, pp. 68 and 73.

[52] Lord Byron, Complete Poetic Works, pp. 6, 21, 78, 79, 118, 103, 104, 46 and 170.

[53] Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, p. 208; and Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 168.

[54] Novalis, Werke und Briefe, p. 532; and Hoffmann, Tales of Hoffmann, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 96.

[55]  Tieck, ‘Blond Eckbert’ in Four Romantic Tales from 19th Century Germany, trans. Helen Scher (New York: Ungar, 1975), p. 20.

[56] Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 175 and 202; and Bedford, Vathek in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 254-255.

[57] Shelley, Poetical Works, vol. 1, p. 67, and vol 2, p. 180; Byron, Poetical Works, p. 260; Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 335; and Blake, Poetry and Prose, p. 531.

[58]  Schlegel, Lucinde (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964), pp. 7 and 107.

[59] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 263, 313, 312, 318, 319 and 338.

[60] Shelley, Frankenstein, pp. 493 and 494.

[61]  Blake, Poetry and Prose, p. 118; Leopardi, Selected Prose and Poetry, pp. 213 and 307; and Solomos, Apanta, vol. 1, p. 255.

[62]  Novalis, Werke und Briefe, pp. 52 and 48–49.

[63]  Senancour, Oberman, 2 vols (Paris: Arthaud, 1947), vol. 1, p. 150; and De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium-Eater (London: Dent, 1960), p. 246.

[64] Nerval, Selected Writings, p. 227; Nerval, letter to Madame Alexander Dumas, 9 November 1841, in Oeuvres , eds. Albert Béguin and Jean Richer (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), p. 853.

[65] Nerval, ‘Aurelia’ in Selected Writings, pp. 119, 181, 171, and 151.