The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism [1 ed.] 9780268026165, 0268026165, 9780268158569, 2013022545

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LOU I S DU P R É

The

Quest of the

Absolute Birth and Decline of European Romanticism

The Quest of the Absolute

LO U I S D U P R É

The

Quest of the

Absolute Birth and Decline of European Romanticism

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2013 by University of Notre Dame

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dupré, Louis K., 1925 – The quest of the absolute : birth and decline of European romanticism / Louis Dupré. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-02616-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-268-02616-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-268-158569 (web pdf) 1. Romanticism. I. Title. B836.5.D87 2013 190.9'034—dc23 2013022545 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

contents

Preface

vii

ch apter 1 . What Was and What Is Romanticism?

1

part i Typology of Romantic Literature ch ap ter 2. English Romantic Poetry 23 ch ap ter 3. German Romantic Poetry 64 ch ap ter 4. French Romantic Poetry 95

part ii Systematic Discussion of Romantic Aesthetics, Psychology, and Ethics ch ap ter 5 . The Beautiful and the Sublime

117

ch ap ter 6 . The Romantic Image of the Person as Reflected in the Novel 148 ch ap ter 7. Romantic Ethics 192 ch ap ter 8. Political Theories after the French Revolution 221

vi

| Contents

part iii Syntheses of Romantic Thought ch ap ter 9 . The Romantic Idea of History 247 ch ap ter 1 0. Philosophical Foundations of Romantic Thought 274 ch ap ter 1 1 . A New Religion?

Conclusion 337

Notes 341 Index 361

309

preface

The ideas and artistic achievements of a culture reflect the mind’s light on being at a particular epoch. That light waxes and wanes. Ideas emerge, dominate public discourse for a while, and then fade away, only to be rediscovered later. They may be forgotten, but they have become an integral part of a living tradition. They are transitory and yet permanent. The intellectual revolution initiated by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo started a process that ever since has extended to more and more areas. We have learned what it means to live in a cosmos that has no mathematical center, that is virtually unlimited, and yet, even in its remote areas, is ruled by identical laws. As we no longer are at the physical center of the cosmos, we have come to realize that the mind must all the more assert its spiritual dominance and assume full responsibility for our personal destiny as well as for the world that surrounds us. Freedom has become an unconditional demand of human existence. Creative freedom has also transformed the nature of modern art and poetry. Artists should follow the creative impulse they experience in themselves. Expressiveness, not imitation of nature, has become the leading aesthetic norm. Such are some of the fundamental principles of the modern mind. In two previous studies on modern culture, one about Renaissance Humanism and the other about the Enlightenment, I have traced the earlier stages of the process of modernity. The present work investigates its next major development. The French Revolution radicalized the principles of modernity. It opened a prospect of ever more extensive programs of emancipation. The drive toward personal and social freedom was too comprehensive to be contained within the restrictions of a political program. Indeed, all finite attempts to realize the new ideal proved to be no more than way stations in the pursuit of an unconditioned Idea. The two foremost Romantic philosophers, Fichte and Schelling, openly vii

viii | Preface

professed that they aimed at an unlimited absolute. Through the entire epoch we sense a desire for the unattainable: Novalis’s and Hölderlin’s Sehnsucht, Byron’s and Shelley’s defiance, Lamartine’s sadness, and de Vigny’s Stoic resignation all reveal an aspiration to surpass the limits of human capacity. The nature of this search as expressed in poetry, art, and philosophy, but also in political theory and in new modes of religious symbolization, forms the subject of this investigation. Unquestionably, the present age enormously differs from the early nineteenth century. Yet the aspirations of the Romantic mind continue to resonate today. Even the frequent use of such terms as late Romantic or neo-Romantic points to the endurance of at least some of the Romantic ideals in our time. Our contemporaries, like the Romantics, typically resist political restrictions, social divisions, fixed moral rules, and dogmatic religion. They experience the same desire for global unity while fiercely resisting any attack on their regional autonomy. The seeds of the two powerful ideologies of the twentieth century, communist universalism and fascist nationalism, were buried deep in Romantic thought, waiting to germinate and overrun the entire twentieth century. Much in our social behavior we have inherited from the Romantic response to pressure in spontaneous outbursts of protest or exuberance, cultural rebellions, vociferous strikes, and street demonstrations. The Romantic cult of nature has survived in our present care for the earth, in our preservation of wilderness, and in our preference for all that is “natural.” A fascination with the mysterious, the esoteric, and the irrational, which is apparent in popular mysticism, in religious syncretism, and in efforts to attain instant ecstasy, testifies to a continuing spiritual unrest that can be traced back to the Romantic era. I have limited this investigation to the cultures that played a leading part in this spiritual revolution: the German, the English, and the French. Those restrictions unfortunately have forced me to exclude great poets such as Mickiewicz, superb novelists such as Manzoni, and the entire contribution of such major North American writers as Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, and Mark Twain. Some of the spiritual fathers of Romantic thought, such as Rousseau, Herder, and Jacobi, are only briefly mentioned, because I have discussed them at length in my book The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture.

Preface

| ix

Much else has been omitted that could or perhaps should have been included. I have not tried to write a history of Romantic literature, philosophy, art, or religion, but rather to sketch what I consider characteristic of Romanticism as a cultural phenomenon. Nor do my translations of various poems or my commentaries on novels have any literary pretensions; they merely serve to support and illustrate the ideas active in this process. The nature of the discussion has largely determined my choice of writers, artists, and critics. A similar consideration has directed my selection of the area in which the discussion of a particular subject dominates. In philosophy and religion, my attention has mainly, though not exclusively, gone to Germany, in poetry and aesthetics to England, and in psychological, ethical, and social theories to France. For reasons that will appear later, I have concentrated on the period between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, when Romanticism developed from a literary trend into a comprehensive cultural movement. Even those who never belonged to any formal “Romantic Movement,” such as Jane Austen in England or Joseph de Maistre in France, display some of its characteristic traits. Following the introductory chapter, the three chapters of Part I are intended as a typology of the Romantic experience as expressed by representative poets of England, Germany, and France. It may seem paradoxical to choose poetry, “the most individual expression of the most individual emotion” according to one Romantic poet, to convey a general notion of the Romantic experience. Still, I have done so with some confidence, for poets alone are able to transfer the depth and comprehensiveness of this experience. I have devoted the chapters of Part II to more systematic discussions of specifically Romantic themes, such as aesthetics, psychology, ethics, and politics. I conclude in Part III with the more comprehensive syntheses of Romantic thought in philosophy, theology, and history. This third part is theoretical, even speculative, rather than analytic. The texts that I cite in the second and third parts are selected not for their outstanding aesthetic quality, but for their appropriateness as illustrations of the theory presented in them. My intention in this final part is to bring to a close the argument on the development and significance of modern culture that I began in two of my earlier works, Passage to Modernity and The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture.

x | Preface

Although neither the main principles of modern culture nor the critique to which they have been exposed have ceased to be valid, nevertheless, some obvious fundamental changes occurred during the twentieth century. The question is: Have we broken with the principles of modernity altogether? Only the future will tell. Certainly, since Nietzsche we have begun to question the foundations of modern thought. Yet is our questioning more than a fuller awareness of what it means to be modern?1 What will the new period bring? So far, its critique of modernity has still been derived from modern sources in spite of a new prefix to the term modernity. ——— May this book be read as a memorial to the late Cyrus Hamlin, my colleague and friend, who encouraged my efforts and criticized some of the results, chapter by chapter. Without his assistance, it would not have been written. Other colleagues at Yale who directly or indirectly assisted me were Jeffrey Sammons, Geoffrey Hartman, and, indirectly, the late Henri Peyre. To all of them I remain grateful. My warmest thanks also to Roger Repohl, a generous friend and a thoughtful reader, who discussed parts of the text with me. I thank Charles Van Hof and Rebecca DeBoer at the University of Notre Dame Press for their excellent work. No one has done more to make this publication possible than my wife Edith, who edited, revised, and retyped its successive versions. To this patient and loving collaborator I dedicate the final version.

N o t e o n Te r m i n o l o g y

The term Romantic and derivatives have been capitalized when used in the sense defined in this book. Idealism (but not the adjective or noun idealist) is capitalized when referring to a particular philosophical system. The term Absolute is capitalized only when used in an explicitly religious sense.

chapter 1

What Was and What Is Romanticism?

Because of the overwhelming variety of form and content in a multiplicity of artistic, poetic, religious, and philosophical expressions, often conflicting with one another, some scholars have concluded that it is vain to search for a definition of Romanticism.1 Nevertheless, despite their irreducible differences, all Romantics shared an awareness of living at the start of a new cultural epoch.

Provisional Description

In a series of lectures posthumously published under the title The Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin called Romanticism the largest recent movement to transform the lives and thoughts of the West. Indeed, it acted as a catalyst of all earlier changes of the modern epoch. The Enlightenment has reached later generations through the critical mediation of Romanticism. The French Revolution derived most of its ideas from the Enlightenment. Yet its explosive power blew fresh air into those ideas and transmitted them to us with a new emphasis. The Enlightenment owes much of its appeal to its practical impact on the French Revolution and the post-revolutionary period. Without the Revolution, the Enlightenment’s promise of progress would have remained unfulfilled. Remarkably enough, France, which had occasioned the awakening of European Romanticism, had its “Romantic Movement” well after those 1

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of Germany and England. The rapid succession of political events in France had left no time for reflection. The Revolution intimated that history had taken a decisive turn. The high expectations built on that event, however, rapidly declined after the massacres of 1792. The hope for a social emancipation only briefly revived when Napoleon converted certain revolutionary ideals into political realities. Great Britain, France’s natural rival in the struggle for hegemony over Europe, had not shared the initial outburst of sympathy for the Revolution. Having watched events with growing concern, in 1792 she declared war on France. The English showed little taste for a similar break with tradition. They had experienced their own political emancipation in 1688. At first, only a few educated Englishmen, such as Wordsworth (who had visited France at the outbreak of the Revolution) and Coleridge, regarded the French Revolution as the dawn of a more liberal political system, and they found little sympathy among their neighbors. Thomas De Quincey, who lived in the same area as Wordsworth for a time, reports that his famous neighbor was probably the most hated inhabitant of the Lake District. In England, the political situation sheds little light on what critics later came to call English Romanticism. The Germans had originally nourished great hopes for the achievement of their own emancipatory ideals, particularly when Napoleon started exporting his political ideas across Europe. But once he occupied Prussia, they learned that little good was to be expected from an invader. A movement of national liberation, which the French Revolution had awakened and encouraged, turned into a front of opposition to the French occupier. During the occupation of Berlin, Fichte delivered his fiery Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation) (1807– 8), while Schleiermacher’s weekly sermons exhorted his congregation to seek a spiritual German identity. A factor that thereby played a major role in the movement of national liberation was the philosophy of Kant, the very thinker who had given the moral ideas of the Enlightenment their final form in his Critique of Practical Reason. There, he had described freedom as real only when it is unencumbered by external influences. This was a personal as well as a social ideal in a divided and politically impotent Germany.

What Was and What Is Romanticism?

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Some Romantics, impatient to implement the modern ideal of freedom, turned to distant places where they saw an opportunity to realize it. Greece, the country where that ideal had originated, had risen to defend it against the Turkish occupation. Byron joined the war, only to discover that modern Greece was no longer ancient Hellas. Hölderlin expressed the hopes and disappointments caused by that war in his novel Hyperion. Others turned their eyes to the one country where a revolution had succeeded, the United States. Chateaubriand’s Romantic travel reports created a mirage of America as a Promised Land, which had preserved freedom, innocence, and simplicity. Yet others, disappointed by political events in Europe, cultivated nostalgic dreams of a return to nature and the quiet, traditional life that Goethe had depicted in Hermann und Dorothea, or to a memory of the past, as Walter Scott had done in his Waverley novels. For Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin, the utopian dream included an idealized version of ancient Greece. In various ways, all early Romantic poets experienced a desire, a Sehnsucht, for an unreachable ideal. The term infinite, so often used as a predicate of the unattainable object of those aspirations, betrays both its surpassing and its indefinite nature. What justifies the inclusion of a variety of literary styles and artistic expressions as well as different philosophies and ethical, political, and religious beliefs under a common denominator? A number of answers have been given to this question, most of them insufficiently comprehensive. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre have described Romanticism as a worldview, born out of modernity yet protesting against it.2 The inclusive term worldview or world picture captures a typically modern conception of reality. It implies that the world receives its meaning entirely from the viewer: the human subject is the source as well as the limit of its reality. The term worldview itself, with its strong assertion of the primacy of the subject, was introduced in reaction to the rationalist objectivism of the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, Löwy and Sayre shrink the comprehensiveness inherent in the term worldview by narrowing it down to an alleged opposition to the modern capitalist system, understood in the Hegelian-Marxist sense. Romanticism obviously involved more than the question of the existence of a particular economic system. In the following pages, I treat

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it as an essentially positive worldview that, moving beyond the limits of a rational culture, inspired a relentless and obviously impossible drive to overcome the finitude of the human condition. Its reach for an absolute appears in poetry, in art, in politics, in philosophy, and in religion. Some scholars dismiss Romanticism altogether, as no more than a temporary deviation from the course of intellectual and practical progress taken at the beginning of the modern age. They conceive of the Enlightenment as the “true” destiny of modernity, and of Romanticism as a negligible interruption of an essentially rational development. This interruption may have been inevitable, perhaps even beneficial, but now that it has passed, they argue, we may continue what the Enlightenment had so auspiciously begun. Contrary to the view that Romanticism was a minor obstruction, however, I regard it as an important conclusion that follows from earlier premises. Romanticism incorporates what the Enlightenment had acquired while also transforming its meaning. The desire for political, social, and religious emancipation, to which it gave voice, had existed through most of the eighteenth century, but the Romantics extended it to a vision of an ideal that beckoned but remained forever beyond reach. Modern culture had begun with a linguistic-philological movement. Humanism had aimed at restoring the classical languages, primarily Latin, to their ancient purity. Under the influence of this classicism, later writers attempted to fit their unruly vernacular tongues within a tight-fitting form, patterned after an ancient grammar. This attention to language led to more profound investigations of the nature of speech and writing. A number of essays appeared on the origin of language; among the most influential were those written by Rousseau and Herder. Herder in particular, reacting against the paralyzing effect of the dominant French influence on German literature, achieved a renewal of German letters, which contributed to the rise of a nationalist movement. Herder, Hamann, and Goethe expected that a literature liberated from classicist French rules would introduce a national awareness among the politically divided Germans. Other nations were to follow. In an address to the Prussian Academy, Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), a philologist who had studied the formation of Germanic languages, showed that the language one speaks defines one’s cultural identity: “Our language is our

What Was and What Is Romanticism?

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history.” Romantic poets considered the use of the indigenous language indispensable to authentic expression. Novalis, in a fragment posthumously published as “Monolog,” wrote: “One cannot help but be astonished at the absurd, wholly erroneous assumption people make, that their talk is about things. No one knows what is most distinctive about language, namely, that it is concerned solely with itself.”3 Novalis, as well as all other major Romantic poets, understood that words constitute a universe by themselves. Poetry discloses some of this mystery without fully revealing it. Even the poet is unable fully to “explain” the text that he or she has written. The more deeply a poet descends into the mystery of language, the richer the content of his words will be. Friedrich Schlegel wrote: “A classical text must never be entirely comprehensible. But those who are cultivated and who cultivate themselves must always want to learn from it” (Fr. 169).4 The Romantic revaluation of vernacular languages led to a restoration of ancient forms of poetry, such as ballads and romances. The publication of “Leonore” by Gottfried August Bürger revived the use of the ballad in German poetry. In England, the language, a mixture of the Gallic tongue of the Norman nobility with the older Germanic speech of the Saxons and the Danes, had never been threatened or oppressed. As a result, the concern for saving the ancestral speech was less intense than the aesthetic and historical desire to explore ancient poetic traditions. Bishop Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews appeared in 1753, and Thomas Percy’s The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. During the 1740s poets had again begun to write odes, an ancient form that would become increasingly popular with the English Romantics. The development of the term Romantic is a particularly confusing story, and I do not intend to repeat it here. The adjective, derived from Romance, the Latin vulgate spoken in southern France, referred in seventeenth-century England to compositions written in that language. Later it came to be applied more generically, first to ballads and then to all fictional literature. In German and in French a roman is still a prose work of fiction. Originally, the “fictional” quality had a pejorative connotation. It meant untrue, “unnatural,” or “disorderly.” Later the term assumed a neutral meaning, as referring to a particular literary genre.

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Two studies influenced this shift: Bishop Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1759) and Thomas Warton’s On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe (1774). Much earlier, English writers had also begun to apply the adjective romantic to a scenic prospect or landscape, as a slightly more subjective equivalent of picturesque.5 Thus, in 1666 Samuel Pepys describes Windsor Castle as “the most romantique castle that is in the world.” Shaftesbury made this subjective use of the term popular, and he stretched its meaning to include any vision or creation ruled by the imagination. Via Rousseau and Diderot, this denotation also began to color the French usage of the term.6 Thus, nineteenthcentury French critics described James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) and Edward Young’s meditations on the transitoriness of human life as romantic. They also applied the term to such painters as Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, without reference to a particular period. The term continued to shift until, shortly before the turn of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schlegel and his older brother August Wilhelm linked it to a particular literary style. Even if we restrict Romanticism to the sensitivity, ideas, and attitudes typical of the Romantic Movement, it would be difficult to set a precise starting date, for all these characteristics had existed before. Rousseau, who so profoundly influenced the French Revolution and inspired all later Romantic thought, died well before any Romantic Movement existed. Diderot, the editor of the Encyclopédie, the Bible of the French Enlightenment, felt, wrote, and often acted like a Romantic. Goethe and Schiller created Romantic dramas years before the beginning of the Romantic Movement in Germany. In England, time limits are even looser: Edward Young and Thomas Gray, poets with a distinctly Romantic sensitivity, wrote in the middle of the eighteenth century. Still, the date 1789 holds a unique significance as a formal beginning. Friedrich Schlegel, who was responsible for shaping a vague term into a well-defined movement, wrote: “The French Revolution, Fichte’s Theory of Knowledge, and Goethe’s Meister [Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre] were the principal tendencies of the epoch” (Fr. 216, in Athenäum, 1798). A more pertinent question about the beginning would be: At what time did the so-called Romantic writers and artists begin to consider their epoch a distinct and relatively independent stage of modern culture?

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An early effort to distinguish the new style from the older one was Schiller’s essay Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry) (1795). The term Romantic never appears in it. Naïve poetry, for Schiller, includes most of the ancient Greek poetry, of which Homer was the prototype. It differs from modern poetry, which he calls sentimental. In his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (also published in 1795, but completed in 1793), Schiller had opposed the “natural” attitude of the ancients to the “reflective” one of the moderns. In the former, the mind remains united with nature; in the latter, it stands at a distance from nature and refers to the mind’s ideals. Schiller’s description does not further define Romantic art. Schiller’s Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung laid the groundwork for what August Wilhelm Schlegel was to describe as distinctive of Romantic aesthetics. He felt that Schiller’s use of the term sentimental largely coincides with that of Romantic, except that, for him, sentimental is not bound to any historical period, as Romantic soon came to be. In the older poet’s view, there have been sentimental poets at every period of Western literature, even among the ancients, such as Euripides and Horace, while some of Schiller’s contemporaries still wrote in a naïve style, as Goethe did in Hermann und Dorothea. Still, Schiller recognized some link between literary qualities and a particular stage of culture. Naïve poetry directly responds to the immediate impressions of nature, which Schiller regards as typical of humans still at one with nature, as he thought most were even in the classical epoch. Sentimental poetry, then, shows how things ideally ought to be. The sentimental poet is no longer exclusively absorbed by the subject of his poem, as was Homer, but rather mainly by his own feelings about it. For Friedrich Schlegel, that meant that Romantic poetry knows itself to be poetry. The naïve poet simply imitates nature, because he never moves beyond it. The sentimental poet creates an ideal world that surpasses nature. Greek poetry was plastic, that is, related to Greek sculpture and architecture. Modern poetry is primarily musical: it surpasses nature in sound. Romantic poets and artists live in a broken world, where the ideal is separated from the real. Through the creative imagination, the poet attempts to reunite them. Yet since the moral ideal is unlimited, he never fully succeeds in this goal. Sentimental art remains one of endless longing and striving. The artist never overcomes the

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discrepancy that separates him from his ideal. He is forced to raise an earthly image of a beloved woman into a spiritual ideal, far beyond the actual nature of Beatrice, Laura, or Lotte (Werther’s beloved). To the artist, the ideal seems more real, because it displays the essence of things—the way they ought to be. The notion of sentimental beauty, then, always has a utopian content: it projects what freedom aims at realizing, though will never attain.

Classical and Romantic

What was later called the Romantic Movement began in Jena around the journal Athenäum, founded in 1798 by the Schlegel brothers. A small group of like-minded intellectuals assembled with them and with August’s lively wife, Carolina. These included Friedrich Schelling, the brilliant young philosopher, and Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter Dorothea, who eventually came to live with Friedrich Schlegel. Other members of the original group were the gifted mine inspector and poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis), Ludwig Tieck, a prolific writer of novels, fairy tales, and literary criticism, and the young theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel’s housemate and a future translator of Plato. Their intention was not to start a new literary movement but to read and criticize existing literature (primarily Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller). In the beginning, it all seemed no more than a youthful reaction against the domination of French culture in German literature. Under the Napoleonic occupation, Germans expanded this literary nationalism into a political one, advocating a social and political emancipation and linking it to an ancient past.7 Eventually the discussions of the Jena group resulted in a new literary theory and increasingly moved in a philosophical direction. Even before the founding of Athenäum, Friedrich Schlegel had been publishing his thoughts in the form of “Critical Fragments” in the Lycée des Beaux Arts (1797). In France this aphoristic style had been popular since Pascal’s Pensées and the eighteenth-century moralistes La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, and Vauvenargues. The French thereby continued an ancient moral tradition that had begun with the Stoics, Epicureans, and the Neoplatonist Plutarch. Schlegel’s aphorisms, however,

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served a different purpose: he considered them the appropriate medium for conveying his theory that truth, being infinite by nature, can be communicated only in partial form. Under his impulse, several members of the Jena group anonymously published a series of fragments in Athenäum (1798). One of them defended the new literary form as follows: “A fragment, like a small work of art, must be isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog” (Fr. 206). A “fragment” is by definition broken off from a greater work. Yet without pretending to be exhaustive, it is nevertheless able to stand by itself. Its broken, incomplete character discloses the unfinished nature of thinking, as the Jena group understood it: essentially progressing toward a goal that forever remains beyond achievement. Unfinishable as the project of finding truth is, each fragment nevertheless possesses an organic completeness of its own. Even the heterogeneous character of a collection written by different authors, from different points of view, is an organic expression of an intrinsically coherent infinite truth. This Romantic striving for the unlimited has been marvelously analyzed by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in their L’absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand.8 Although they have limited their work to the literary theory of early German Romanticism, their thesis concerning the search for the absolute holds for all Romantic literature. Hitherto, the discussion in Athenäum had mainly turned around the distinction between ancient and modern literature. That changed with the final two issues (the fifth and sixth), both of which appeared in 1800. In the fifth issue, Friedrich Schlegel published more aphorisms under the title Ideen. Members of the group who earlier had published Fragmente (including Friedrich’s brother August) now objected to the loose format of aphoristic writings. In the Ideen, Friedrich, writing in his own name, attempted to overcome the formlessness of the Fragmente while still preserving the unsystematic character of his Romantic thinking. The term Ideen indicates a philosophical deepening of his thought. In the “Discourse on Poetry,” published in the fifth and sixth issues of Athenäum, Friedrich Schlegel describes a series of debates and lectures that took place at meetings of the Jena group. In a first lecture, August addressed the group, stressing the inexhaustible, indeed absolute, character of genuine poetry, which defies any effort to define it.

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Nonetheless, August still attempted to impose some order on this limitless development by showing how literary genres “naturally” emerge from a prepoetic origin. As the “Discourse” recounts, none of the auditors were satisfied with August’s answer to the question, What is poetry?—least of all “Amalia” (the group’s name for Carolina), at the time still August’s wife. How could an artificial construction ever be an appropriate response to it? According to Carolina, August always wants to separate and divide, where only the undivided power of the whole satisfies. Schelling’s lecture, as described in the “Discourse,” appears to address the very question that Carolina had raised. The real content of poetry, he argues, is mythology. The thesis made some sense to a group prepared to accept that poetry, whatever else it was, consisted in a symbolic raising of finite representations to an infinite meaning. Moreover, Schelling avoided reducing poetry to a theoretical source. Its content is indeed spiritual, he argues, but it is neither intellectual nor open to purely intellectual concepts. Poetry and religion have a common origin. To understand this origin, we must first turn to the remnants of ancient polytheistic mythology. Schelling still discerns a strong resemblance between Romantic, that is, all-embracing poetry and ancient myth in such poets as Cervantes and Shakespeare. Both display “an artfully ordered confusion, an exciting symmetry of contradictions, a wonderful constant alternative of enthusiasm and irony.” Unfortunately, he states, Christians no longer share a common mythology. Their religion has become based on historical claims rather than on mythical images. Great poets, such as Dante, succeed in creating their own mythology. Others, such as Tasso, continue to draw on classical mythology. Yet the content is becoming ever thinner. Our epoch is badly in need of a mythology. To assist us in finding one, Schelling concludes, we must explore other mythologies than the classical, the only one we know. In his response, “Lothario” (the group’s name for Novalis) made a further move. Since all arts and sciences originated in poetic language, to fully understand them we need to refer them back to their source. Schelling argued, going even further, that poetry must reabsorb the arts and sciences that originated from it. In his Philosophy of Nature he singles out physics because here the universality of all sciences appears most clearly.

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Friedrich Schlegel began his contribution to the “Discourse on Poetry” with a sharp response to Carolina (Amalia), who had objected that in August Schlegel’s theory, everything becomes poetry. Indeed, according to Schlegel, poetry consists in an overall symbolic vision of the world in which all things point at the absolute. Yet poetry is Romantic only when it presents a sentimental matter in a fantastic form.9 The term sentimental thereby refers to a subject in which feeling dominates. It distinguishes Romantic literature from classical literature but also from most modern poetry, which merely expresses affections caused by sensuous emotions. Lessing’s drama Emilia Galotti is modern, Schlegel claims, but not in the least Romantic. Great Romantic literature in the past was written only by great writers such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Ariosto, and some authors of medieval chivalry novels. Indeed, Romanticism was never wholly absent from the best post-classical writing. The stronger its presence, the less significant becomes the literary genre. Novel and drama, apparently so distinct, have often become mixed in Romantic writing: the best novels contain dramatic elements. The Jena group of friends must have left their meetings in a state of great confusion. The questions stated at the beginning—What is poetry? How does Romantic poetry differ from classical poetry?—had received no clear answer. Yet one would soon be forthcoming. In a series of public lectures delivered from 1801 through 1803 to a large audience in Berlin, August Schlegel argued that the difference between modern and classical had resulted from the changes caused by the historical event of Christianity. “Ludoviko” (Schelling), in his lecture on mythology as reported in the “Discourse on Poetry,” had implied much of this distinction when he claimed that the essential difference between ancient literature and later, Christian literature is that the former was based on mythology and the latter on historical claims. Christianity had introduced a new worldview, next to which other cultural factors became insignificant. A perspective on the infinite had appeared, which determined both form and content. The Christian poet, explicitly or implicitly, aims at a goal that lies beyond a finite world. At the same time, the Incarnation occurring in a single individual at a particular time had conveyed a new significance to the individual. Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, generally known by his pen name Jean Paul, in his Vorschule der Ästhetik (Preschool of Aesthetics) (1804), also

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draws a firm line between classical and Christian art. Ancient art was object-oriented and universal in meaning. The Greek gods, who are clearly defined and presented in serene dignity, display few individual characteristics. By contrast, in Christian art the individual dominates. At the same time, because of the presence of the idea of the infinite, the work of art appears less circumscribed by limits of space or time. The wide-open landscapes of Claude Lorrain obviously originated in a different climate than the ones portrayed in the frescoes of Pompeii. Yet Jean Paul’s aesthetics labors under the same ambiguity as that of the Schlegels. At times, he mentions Christianity as the factor that distinguishes Romantic from classical art. At other times, however, he attributes that distinction to the general difference between ancient and modern art. Christian aesthetics, however, is restricted neither to the “modern” age nor to Romantic art. Still, August Schlegel had not simply equated Romantic with Christian. Medieval Christian art is preRomantic and premodern. Moreover, not all Romantic art is Christian or even religious, as is obvious from the poems of Byron, Shelley, and Heine. What Schlegel meant was that Christianity had made Romantic thought possible: only the Romantics and certain great writers of the early modern age had become fully conscious of the significance of the Christian ethos. Victor Hugo, in the preface to his early drama Cromwell (1827), adopted August Wilhelm Schlegel’s distinction between classical and Christian poetry, which had become known in France through Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813). Yet he interpreted this distinction as if Christianity had brought “truthfulness” to art. By separating God from nature, he argued, Christianity had secularized nature as neither ideal nor imperishable. This insight, dogmatically formulated as original sin, had opened the eyes of Christian artists and poets to evil and imperfection. Their work thereby acquired an unprecedented complexity of light and darkness, of the sublime and the grotesque. The monstrous gargoyles in medieval cathedrals, the quaint figures in the stained glass windows, the devils and the damned in Last Judgment portals—all these reminded visitors of the oddness of the universe. Yet French dramas of the seventeenth century remained bound by “classical” rules and displayed less “truthfulness” than the Greek ones. Not until the appear-

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ance of Romantic drama did French theater overcome the classicist tradition and dare to display the oppositions inherent in life. Hugo added that, in order to stay closer to life, dramatic works should be written in prose rather than in verse. Whatever merits Hugo’s manifesto may possess, and they are many, its view of Romanticism is severely limited. The introduction of the grotesque and the deformed, typical of his own plays and novels, did indeed violate the rules of classicism, but was by no means an exclusive quality of Romantic art. In France the distinction between classical and Romantic always retained a polemical edge. During the Restoration, critics disaffected by poetry associated with the excesses of the French Revolution advocated a return to the “classics.” Romanticism, in their judgment, had led to disorder and was responsible for social disturbances and moral confusion, while “classicism” had established, in seventeenth-century France, a canon of good taste and safe doctrine.10 The ancient classics whom the writers of that era claimed to follow had not been Greek but Latin. France considered herself the true successor of Roman culture, the center of civilized living, which had succeeded in imposing its norms on the rest of Europe. The seventeenth-century French dispute between the ancients and the moderns, in the end, had favored the moderns. Nevertheless, the ancients continued to serve as models to imitate, as the French claimed to have done in their own classicism. Yet the terms classicism and classics, as used in France, were unfit to serve as defining characteristics of any particular period or style.11 Instead, they referred to the style and form of the great writers of the seventeenth century— Corneille, Racine, Bossuet, Molière, and La Fontaine. The cult of those “classics” had remained an essential part of general education. Through them, the schools educated the young on “how to become French.” The nineteenth-century literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was one of the first to loosen this necessary link between ancient and French classicism. For strictly literary purposes, he defined a classique as “un auteur ancien, déjà consacré dans l’admiration et qui fait autorité dans son genre.”12 By this broad definition, the works of Romantic writers also could become “classics” after having been tested by time. In Germany, Romanticism reacted against the domination of those French models. Its writers associated French “classicism” with a rigid

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formalism that had nothing in common with Greek art or literature. In contrast, German classicists of the late eighteenth century—Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller—had been inspired by Greek rather than by Roman sources. The excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as Johann Winckelmann’s writings on Greek architecture and sculpture, had aroused considerable interest in Greek art and literature. In addition, the excellent departments of “philology” at the new German universities and Protestant theological seminaries had spurred a revival of the study of ancient Greek, a language that, since the Renaissance, had lain dormant in Europe. In this rediscovery of Hellenic culture, the Romantics saw a means to define their own distinct identity. Whereas French classicism had been static, opposed to change, and hostile to Romanticism, German classicism claimed to be dynamic and in no way opposed to the new poetry. In a conversation with Eckermann shortly before his death, Goethe returned for one last time to the question of the distinction between classical and Romantic, which had stirred up so much controversy: The distinction between classical and Romantic poetry, which is now spread over the whole world and occasions so many quarrels and divisions, came originally from Schiller and me. I laid down the maxim that the literary content ought to be treated objectively and allowed no other. But Schiller, who worked in a quite subjective way, deemed his own fashion right and, to defend himself against me, wrote his treatise on Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. He proved to me that I, against my will, had been a Romantic and that my Iphigenie, through the predominance of sentiment, was by no means so classical and so much in the ancient spirit as some people supposed. The Schlegels took up this idea and carried it further, so that it has now been diffused over the whole world; and everybody talks about classicism and Romanticism—of which nobody thought fifty years ago.13

In another conversation with Eckermann a few months earlier, Goethe had conceded that classical and Romantic elements appear side by side in the Helena episode of his Faust II and that both styles were equally good.14 In his early years Goethe had gone through a “classicist”

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period. During his first Italian journey (1786– 88) he had written Iphigenie and Römische Elegien (published in 1795). Yet in contrast to British and French artists and poets traveling to Italy, Goethe mentions no ancient sites or classical events. “His elegies describe the effect of Italy on his own life, his intoxication by the happiness conveyed by the beautiful sky. He reports his pleasures, even the more vulgar ones, after the manner of Propertius.”15 For Goethe, as for Schiller, classical culture provided ideals and models for their thoroughly modern project of selfbuilding. It was not an end in itself but rather formed an integral part of a new humanism. In this modern perspective, the terms classical and Romantic lost much of their former opposition: they become universal terms, where each classical period of balance is followed by a Romantic one of rebellion.16 The present study will not pursue this generalization. For me, the term Romantic refers to a historical period, as indicated at the beginning of this chapter.

Th e R o m a n t i c I d e a

An atmosphere of existential unrest hangs over Romantic literature, which contrasts with the Enlightenment’s ideal of rational harmony. A strange, eschatological anxiety appears to keep the Romantic mind constantly on edge. Sensitive men and women, who felt that they were living at the end of an era, were weariedly waiting for the next. In The Romantic Agony (1933), Mario Praz describes melancholy as a typical Romantic mood. Yet had an undefined sadness not been a frequent theme since Tasso or even Petrarch? The real question is why and how this mood was different at the end of the eighteenth century. Praz fails to distinguish similar experiences at different times, an error against which he had cautioned in the introduction to his own study. Nor should a critic rely on what artists and poets say about their own work, since they often lack the perspective needed for a balanced assessment.17 The French poet Alfred de Musset captured the downcast Romantic mood when he wrote, “L’homme est un dieu tombé qui se souvient des cieux” (Man is a fallen god who remembers heaven). What caused it? A loss of the past? Or of the unity with nature? Or of the presence of

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God? All these causes appear in Romantic literature, and all point at the loss of an original, ideal state of being.18 Occasionally, in dreams or dreamlike states, flashes of recognition seem to restore these privileged times to the mind. Romantic poets and artists tried, through legends and fairy tales, to recapture what they lost and to return to a never actually experienced happiness. Imagination bridged the separate moments and construed them into a new virtual world. German poets and artists went the furthest in conveying a transcendent meaning to those flashes of light. Early German Romantics, such as the poets Novalis and Hölderlin, the philosopher Schelling, and the theologian Schleiermacher, interpreted them as revelations from a divine source. Most remarkably, even those French Romantics who had been prejudiced against the religious opponents of the Revolution often surrounded their radical secularization project with a religious halo. Jules Michelet, the fiercely anti-clerical historian, interpreted the Revolution as an event of more radically religious significance than traditional Christianity had ever been, namely, one that would at last implement the Christian principles of social justice so long neglected by the Catholic Church. Heinrich Heine, who had immigrated to France, wrote satirically: “The French are the chosen people of the new religion, its first gospels and dogmas have been drawn up in their language; Paris is the New Jerusalem, and the Rhine is the Jordan which divides the consecrated land of freedom from the land of the Philistines.”19 Nevertheless, whatever the differences among schools, for all Romantic writers, former images and symbols had become inadequate for expressing the anxieties and expectations of the epoch. They found new ones in such previously neglected experiences as presentiments, or emotional encounters with the unexpected, the deformed, or the excessive. The preternatural and the fantastic, common in the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Théophile Gautier and appealing to unconscious fears, exuded a poetic intensity that the “Gothic novels” of Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole had never attained. What in the eighteenth-century canon had been at the margins of the aesthetic consciousness now moved to the center, as we see in poems such as “The Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” Romantic painters, such as John Martin, Théodore Géricault, and Joseph Turner, aimed at the sublime rather than at the pleasing or the beautiful.

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In Heinrich Heine’s Die romantische Schule (1833) we hear the voice of a very critical observer of his former fellow Romantics.20 The author of this polemical writing shows great admiration for the German classics, Goethe and Schiller, some respect for those who fought the drab reality of German political life, and little more than contempt for those who had initiated the Romantic Movement, such as Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and, as the worst of the lot, the Schlegel brothers. He dismisses the turn of Clemens Brentano, Joseph Goerres, and Joseph von Eichendorff toward medieval subjects as social conservatism. Although he admired the popular ballads and folk songs collected in Brentano’s and Achim von Arnim’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, he despised what he considered to be efforts to revive the medieval piety that had inspired them. He regarded the conversions to Catholicism of a number of German Romantics as misguided attempts to reverse history. He remembers how in his youth he had loved the Romantic songs of Ludwig Uhland, which he later came to dislike. He still admired the minor poet, but this was primarily because Uhland had abandoned literature to devote himself to political action.21 British Romantics, suspicious of general categories, wrote no “manifestoes,” and for a long time they altogether avoided the use of the term Romantic to refer to a style or a literary movement. Later, it retrospectively came to denote poets who had written around the turn of the nineteenth century, and even eighteenth-century writers, such as Gray, Young, and William Collins. In the preface to the second edition of his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth describes what they had attempted to achieve in their poems. Without mentioning any movement or establishing any formal rules, he simply explains the principles that had guided them. Yet this modest preface teaches more about the nature of Romantic writing than the German or French manifestoes. As a primary characteristic of his poetry, Wordsworth mentions his habit of describing incidents and situations taken from ordinary life “in a language really used by men” yet colored by the imagination. The feeling expressed in these poems differs from that of popular poetry in that “it gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling.” Most memorably, he defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” whereby tranquillity in turn excites new emotion. Others in England cast their net wider than Wordsworth, but

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none, except occasionally Coleridge, attained greater depth or precision. Thomas De Quincey wrote his Recollections of the Lake Poets in 1848, years after he had lived in the vicinity of these two poets, yet little in his memoir contributes to a better understanding of English Romanticism. Nor is much to be learned from William Hazlitt’s essays on these poets in his The Spirit of the Age (1825). In Germany, philosophy strongly influenced Romantic poetry. Kant’s idea of freedom, further developed by Fichte and Schelling, became a seminal concept. But no philosophy played a more decisive role in early Romanticism than Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s idealist interpretation of Kant’s theory. In his view, Kant had failed to draw the necessary conclusions from his idealist intuition when he continued to accept the existence of external objects as an indispensable external cause of knowledge. For Fichte, the mind itself must find the source of knowledge entirely within itself. The young Schelling extended Fichte’s Idealism to include nature. The mind was merely the culminating point of a development that had begun on the inorganic, geological level. Most significant in that process is the aesthetic experience, in which the mind recognizes itself in the objective beauty of nature. Schelling was the Romantic philosopher par excellence, who had participated in the early discussions with Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Tieck. Through Schelling, Romanticism also affected the young Hegel (1770 – 1831), although he never actively participated in the Romantic Movement and later turned against it. His early Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit) (1807) contains a profound philosophical assessment of Romantic thought as well as a gigantic attempt to overcome its tensions and contradictions. With Schelling and Hölderlin, his roommates at the Tübinger Stift, Hegel had welcomed the French Revolution as the dawn of a long-expected political and spiritual liberation from outdated political structures and modes of thinking. Like his friends, he had been horrified by the Terreur of 1793. Napoleon had briefly revived Hegel’s faith in the ideals of the Revolution, until the emperor defeated Prussia and occupied parts of its territory. Hegel brought his overdue manuscript of the Phenomenology to the printer during the very month, October 1806, of the decisive battle in the conquest of Prussia that took place near his own city of Jena. The bulky, opaque,

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and strangely structured study was not quite ready to be printed. Even so, it was the work of a genius. Josiah Royce read it as an intellectual Bildungsroman in the tradition of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, one of the founding texts of German Romanticism. Some have recognized in it various key figures of Romantic literature, or at least critical encounters with their ideas. The Phenomenology was a Romantic voyage of homecoming, a homecoming of the mind in the Spirit.22

part i

Typology of Romantic Literature

chapter 2

English Romantic Poetry

Introduction

Romantic poetry possesses an ontological significance that is absent from Enlightenment literature. The great odes by Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, as well as Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht, some of Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques, and Hugo’s later, apocalyptic poetry, all contain insights about the mysteries of life and death that earlier generations had seldom expressed. I am not suggesting that Romantic poetry in all respects, or even most of the time, surpassed earlier poetry in quality. (Only in German poetry might this be true.) In England, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton remained the lyrical models. Yet it is typical that precisely in this respect, the Romantic poets revived their sagging reputation. Shakespeare’s daring expression of raw and strong emotions, which had diminished his popularity in the eighteenth century, regained its influence on and through the Romantics. Milton’s Paradise Lost, neglected during a less theological age, came to be recognized (especially by Shelley and Keats) as the forerunner and standard of what the Romantic poets were trying to achieve. What distinguished them from their predecessors was not always poetic perfection (although in England no one had written finer poetry than the four presented in this chapter), but rather ontological depth. They, like the German Romantics and the best of the French, directed modern thought to previously unexplored existential depths, and it is primarily in that capacity that they continue to engage our interest today.1 Romantic poets found new meaning in the emptiness left by the great “clearing up”—the 23

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Aufklärung—of traditional beliefs and errors by Enlightenment critique. What Novalis experienced at the death of his beloved, or Coleridge at the weakening of his creative powers, were more than private expressions of sadness. Wordsworth’s images of nature opened up a new vision of the soul’s infinity. For Hölderlin, the loss of traditional religion in late modern culture resulted in a negative experience of transcendence that was unknown to earlier poets. From a subject driven back upon itself, a new awareness of being emerged, which set thinking and feeling upon a different course. In a substantial philosophical study, Being and Between (1995), William Desmond has shown that neither an undifferentiated philosophical concept of Being, such as that of Parmenides, nor a nominalist one, such as science and much of modern philosophy have construed, sheds light on the mystery of Being emerging from nothingness. Between those conceptualizations lies a space that conceals a conceptually inaccessible logos.2 Romantic poets, more than any others since the “metaphysical” poets of England and Germany, explored this hidden relation between Being and nothingness, often before philosophy did so by concepts. To perceive Being as emerging from nothingness is a process that cannot be logically “comprehended.” Nor does it ever appear as an “object” on which a “subject” focuses its regard. “If Romanticism is not entirely or simply philosophical, it is not strictly comprehensive or even accessible.”3 The two authors who wrote these words use the same expression (l’entre-deux) as does William Desmond for describing the poetic irruption into sustained philosophical reflection. Poetry enters logical thought as an abrupt event, and only this irruption enables philosophy to enter upon a reflection on Being and nothingness.4

Wo r d s w o rt h

In the poetry of William Wordsworth (1770 –1850), English Romanticism reached unsurpassed greatness. Samuel Coleridge, James Russell Lowell, and Matthew Arnold all rated him second only to Shakespeare and Milton. His poetry, no less than Hölderlin’s, discloses a new, heretofore unseen vision of the person on his unique way through the world.

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Early in the long poem The Prelude, he announces: “A Traveller I am, / Whose tale is only of himself.”5 He walked all through Scotland, then France, and from France crossed the Alps into Switzerland and Italy. Being in France after the September murders of 1792, his inquisitive attitude aroused suspicion, and, afraid for his life and penniless, he had to leave the country. He concludes the tale of his youthful adventures with the words, “Since I withdrew unwillingly from France / I led an undomestic wanderer’s life” (XIV, 348 – 49). The Excursion, to which the Prelude was supposed to serve as introduction, is again conceived as a prolonged walk, in which others appear only as fellow travelers and guides on the poet’s spiritual journey. As in the case of the fictional Wilhelm Meister and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Wordsworth’s travels and casual encounters both educated his aesthetic sensitivity and deepened his existential awareness. The subjective memories of his childhood, his travels, and the return to the quiet pastoral setting of his youth are unmistakably personal. Still, the poet succeeds in conveying to these most individual impressions and feelings a universal, existential meaning. The young Wordsworth had been strongly engaged in politics, but his attitude changed after his return from France. Little or nothing remained of his early political radicalism. Again, his guide is Rousseau, this time not the political visionary of The Social Contract but the lover of nature presented in The Solitary Wanderer. Like the hermit in the Excursion, Wordsworth showed little interest in other people’s ideas. His onetime neighbor and friend Thomas De Quincey, in his Recollections of the Lake Poets, complains that the poet he so admired failed to understand how others could disagree with him on any serious matter. Unsurprisingly, Wordsworth had few friends. His natural environment was the principal source of inspiration. Still, he was not a poet of “nature.” In a typically Romantic way, the poet’s imagination transformed impressions evoked by familiar sights, remembered spots, and even sudden changes in the weather into inner visions. The originality of Wordsworth’s poetry is all the more remarkable in that he primarily read eighteenth-century poets, such as Akenside, Collins, Cowper, Gray, and Young. Yet his poetry, unlike much of theirs, never responds to the immediate perception, but rather to an inner emotion evoked by his presence in nature.

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In the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth describes the reflective quality of his poetry in a formula that, even today, has lost none of its freshness: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” The poet, strangely enough, speaks no different language than any educated person. “[He] is a man speaking to men, a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.”6 Coleridge, who, better than his friend himself, discerned the quality of Wordsworth’s poetic genius, later expressed his disagreement with a text that he had once believed to be an accurate description of their common poetic creed. Indeed, he claimed, Wordsworth’s language was not only peculiar “but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength.” 7 What was it, then, that Coleridge had admired so much in Wordsworth that he decided to live and work with him? In his Biographia Literaria Coleridge describes it with great precision: “The union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the object observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre” (Biographia, 1:59). The reference to an ideal world is especially significant, for Wordsworth’s poetry is anything but descriptive of the natural world As Coleridge remembered it, the project of the Lyrical Ballads had started as a Romantic experiment in rendering “the supernatural” believable. He would do so by describing events that conflicted with ordinary life, while attempting to evoke emotions normally aroused by such situations. Wordsworth was to do the opposite. He would take subjects from ordinary life and “give them the interest of novelty by modifying colors of the imagination” (Biographia, 2:5). Neither one of these goals

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could be attained by the use of ordinary language, contrary to what Wordsworth had claimed in the preface. The words of poetry are ordinary only insofar as they belong to a common English language. But there is nothing ordinary about their usage, order, or meaning. In analyzing a sonnet by Thomas Gray, Wordsworth asserted that only three lines differ from prose. In fact, the entire poem differs, even though each single line might also appear in prose. The difference between prose and poetry lies not in the form of a single verse but in the construction of the whole. In some verses the poet may succeed better in achieving that goal than in others, but that does not change the theory. The main quality of Wordsworth’s poetry stems from the transformational power of his imagination (Biographia, 1:202). For Coleridge, as for Kant, the imagination acts not only as a reproductive function of the mind but also as a creative one. Wordsworth himself uses the term imagination loosely; he entitled some of his poems “Poems of the Fancy” and others “Poems of the Imagination.” The imagination internalizes immediate experiences and preserves them in this interiorized form. This makes it possible for memory to replay an early experience within an entirely different mental setting. Wordsworth was keenly aware of this transformation and often alludes to it, as when he writes of “gleams of half-extinguished thought,” or mentions “recognitions often dim and faint,” in which the self recognizes its own inner state more than the object of the original experience. In the Third Book of the Prelude we read: Caverns there were within my mind, which sun Could never penetrate, yet did there not Want store of leafy arbours where the light Might enter in at will. (III, 242 – 45)

These verses echo the “large and boundless chambers of memory” in the Tenth Book of Augustine’s Confessions. For Augustine as well, memory gives access to the inner life of the soul. When Wordsworth in his poetry recalls past experiences, he is always speaking of remembrances transformed by the imagination.

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The internalized experiences appear as “spots” in which the soul recognizes glimpses of its ideal self. In Book XII appears the well-known passage: There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence depressed . . . our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired. (XII, 208 –10; 214 –15)

These spots have been lifted out of the order of succession followed by the original experiences. What the poet remembers has become detached from its context and appears independent of the causal chain of experiences. “These spots are not only in time, like islands, but also creative of time.”8 Indeed, they set up a new, inner time consciousness. Wordsworth’s poetry leaves no doubt that his recollections have been transformed into symbols of a different, spiritual reality. The strength of this inner, restructuring power appears in passages such as the following, in which he recalls the abrupt apparition of a high rock during a nightly escapade as a boy on the lake. Suddenly, . . . a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct Upreared its head. I struck and struck again. And growing still in stature, the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion, like a living thing, Strode after me. (I, 378 – 85)

In these verses, one understands what Wordsworth had meant in the “Second Preface” when claiming that his share of the poems had consisted in making the supernatural appear in the ordinary. Even in the early books of the Prelude (completed in 1799), the poet creates a mean-

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ing that surpasses a mere remembrance of the past. He has found a new wisdom in the act of retrospection.9 He attributes a different, transcendent origin to his experience: Wisdom and Spirit of the universe! Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought, That giveth to forms and images a breath And everlasting motion, not in vain By day or starlight thus from my first dawn Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me The passions that build up our human soul. (I, 401– 7)

In Book VI the link between the creative imagination and transcendent revelation becomes even more explicit. Recalling his ascent of the Simplon Pass, the poet remembers his frustration over having crossed the peak of the Alps without noticing it. This leads him to realize that the “sublime,” the glimmer of the divine, which he had expected to experience at this high point of the mountains, resides not in natural phenomena, as the cliff in Book I might have suggested, but in an enlightenment of feeling and imagination. Jubilantly, the poet exclaims at the recognition of this inner power that resides in him and at the same time surpasses him. But to my conscious soul I now can say— “I recognize thy glory:” in such strength Of usurpation, when the light of sense Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed The invisible world . . . Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there. (VI, 598 – 602; 604 – 5)

Yet not before the final three books of the Prelude, subtitled “Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored,” does Wordsworth’s imagination reach its full power. The poet has experienced changes since

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he returned from France. He has been disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution, which once had promised to be the beginning of Europe’s political emancipation. He has abandoned his dream of leading an active political life. He longs to withdraw from the world, “like a cowled monk,” and assume the role of poet-prophet to speak of “something unseen before.” Perhaps no one will listen to him any more. Yet he hopes to be comforted by the “soothing presence” of nature, as he was in his early youth. During this time of uncertainty, he experiences the spiritual insight described in the sublime “Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey” (1798). While resting near the river Wye, he suddenly becomes overwhelmed by an intense joy at feeling restored to his early intimacy with nature. He relives the happy union as he had remembered it “in lonely rooms and ’mid the din / of towns and cities.” Beyond the presence of nature, he experiences a divine immanence in her that encompasses his entire being. Yet after having rested and remembered the happy hours he spent as a child in this or similar peaceful spots, he realizes that some of the early experience is now missing. Is it the bodily joy of the time “when like a roe / I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides / Of the deep rivers and the lonely streams, / Wherever nature led” (67– 70)? If so, the poet concludes, “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no more.” Since then he has been hearing “the still sad music of humanity, / Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power / To chasten and subdue” (90– 92). Yet for that loss, he has received abundant recompense: he has learned the contributions of eye and ear—“both what they half create, / and what perceive”—and how much the person thereby forms part of nature. Then follow the sublime verses that celebrate the mystical union of the self not only with nature but with the language of his former heart, which he hears spoken by other youngsters, and with the pleasures of youth he reads in the light of other eyes. I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused,

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Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. (93 –102)

All will remain after he is gone. Nature is eternal, and all that gratifies our present lives will be enjoyed again and again by others. What does it matter if I feel “my genial spirits” decay and ultimately vanish altogether? Other young men and women will arrive and find pleasure where I now find it. Are we not part of the same nature? The experience expressed in this uniquely Romantic poem was profound, and during the following winter the poet started writing the autobiographical Prelude. Yet not until five years later did Wordsworth feel able to articulate a response to the questions he had raised in “Tintern Abbey.” There, it had appeared that nothing is ever lost, for what dies in nature will be repeated by nature. Still what happens to the individual soul as the person ages and moves further away from nature? Is it left to the sadness of decay? The spiritual union with nature, which Wordsworth had briefly experienced at the ruins of the old abbey, was not lasting. Geoffrey Hartman has decisively refuted the once common idea that Wordsworth was a poet of nature, as were some of his immediate predecessors, and has insisted that a separation from nature’s immediate presence was essential to Wordsworth’s poetic vision.10 The splendid ode “Intimations of Immortality” (written in 1803, published in 1807) describes the profound crisis caused by the poet’s awareness of this separation, as his creative powers decrease. “The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” What is lost is “the glory and the freshness of a dream.” The rainbow, the moon, the water in a starry night, they are still there, but their glory has faded “into the light of common day.”11 In fact, this painful awareness marks his entrance into a new stage of poetic life. The darkness of suffering and death makes the light of nature fade. While the child is still capable of seeing the divine splendor of nature, “we [adults] are toiling all our lives to find / In darkness lost, the darkness of

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the grave.” And yet, the memory of paradise never completely vanishes. Its glory is not lost but veiled, and there are moments when the veil is lifted. Abruptly, the poet’s mood changes. He realizes that the soul forms no part of nature and that, after it has reached spiritual adulthood, it will never again experience the immediate sense of union with nature that the child enjoys. The rupture was necessary to arrive at a spiritual consciousness. In 1805 another painful loss added to Wordsworth’s suffering, when his brother John drowned in the shipwreck of the Earl of Abergavenny. The verses he wrote shortly before or after that event express a spiritual awareness that surpasses the joy of any possible “return to nature.” Wordsworth appears to have believed in the soul’s preexistence, as Plato conceived it. He explicitly states that the soul belongs elsewhere and that we have only occasional glimpses of its presence in that ideal realm. He supports his hopes of immortality by a philosophical argument: what is spiritual by nature cannot be subject to decay. His position here differs from the one he embraced in “Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey,” where he argues that through the senses, soul and nature interpenetrate each other and only together form a “blended might.” The feeling of joy strong in both poems has a different meaning in “Tintern Abbey” than in the ode. In the former, the object of joy was the inexhaustible beauty of nature, which allows her constantly to repeat herself, even while individual organisms die. In the latter, the exclamation of joy is evoked by the idea that no spiritual individual will ever be lost. All soulful creatures are returning to their eternal origin. In neither case is the logical argument decisive. In both cases the joy, which normally should follow the argument, determines the conclusion. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home. (59 – 66)

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Via the painful detour of suffering and the awareness of death, the poet may still attain a spiritual vision wherein nature comes to stand as a symbol of the soul. Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; . . . . . . . . . . . . In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. (182 – 85, 190 – 91)

The poem concludes with a hymn of gratitude for the glory of nature and the different one of the human heart. In the final book of the Prelude Wordsworth reports an experience that corresponds to the fearful apparition of the huge, black peak to the young boy in the bark (I, 378 – 85). Unable to explain it, he simply attributes it to a providential move of the Spirit of the universe: “from my first dawn / Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me / The passions that build up our human soul” (I, 405 – 7). In Book XIV he experiences a similar breakthrough of transcendence occasioned by a natural event, but surpassing its normal impact altogether. The revelatory moment occurs during an ascent of Mount Snowdon. The poet began his climb during the night. While he struggles upward in the dark, Instantly a light upon the turf Fell like a flash, and lo! as I looked up, The moon hung naked in a firmament Of azure without cloud, and at my feet Rested a silent sea of hoary mist. (XIV, 38 – 42)

The sudden flash of light caused by the full moon appearing from behind a peak of the mountain brought no harmony with nature, such as the poet had experienced in his childhood. It strikes the climbing poet as a revelation of “transcendent power” reaching him from a different

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realm: “There I beheld the emblem of a mind / That feeds upon infinity” (XIV, 66 – 70). This time he first considers the natural powers of the mind. Was the imagination itself the source of this apparition, as Wordsworth seems to suggest later (“Imagination, which, in truth, / Is but another name for absolute power” [XIV, 189 – 90])? Or did the imagination merely serve as its instrument? It seems that Wordsworth is referring to a power that, though dwelling in mind and nature, transcends both. Certainly, the passage on love in the final book of the Prelude appears to support a religious interpretation. Unless this love by a still higher love Be hallowed, love that breathes not without awe Love that adores, but on the knees of prayer. (XIV, 181– 83)

Still, Wordsworth refers not to a power separate from mind and nature, but rather to a presence that appears in and through the imagination, “the glorious faculty / That higher minds bear with them as their own” (XIV, 89 – 90). Wordsworth insists, “Such minds are truly from the deity” (XIV, 112, emphasis mine). The poet’s panentheism appears similar to that of Emerson and other American transcendentalists. M. H. Abrams, one of Wordsworth’s most sensitive readers, considers “nature” in the later writings a substitute for what at a different time was called God. He cites the English theologian F. D. Maurice’s general judgment on the Prelude as “the dying utterance of the half-century we have just passed through, the expression—the English expression at least—of all that self-building process.”12 But such a reading fails to do full justice, it seems, to the beliefs expressed in Prelude XIV. The imagination is, indeed, the “glory” of the soul, through which the divine reveals itself. It partakes in the divine power from which it derives. Wordsworth’s faith is not a traditional Christian one. Each individual stands alone, to build his life through his own powers: “Here must thou be, O Man! / Power to thyself; no Helper hast thou here” (XIV, 209 – 10). Nonetheless, for him, as for Schleiermacher, full humanity includes God-consciousness, at least in

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the sense that the imagination signals a supernatural presence, which no other mental faculty is able to identify.

Coleridge

One feels uneasy in approaching the work of a major poet who, after his thirty-second year, stopped writing poetry and turned his attention to literary criticism, social commentary, and philosophy—leaving much of it unfinished, uncollected, and unpublished. Various critics have been vocal in expressing their discomfort with Samuel Coleridge (1772 – 1834), perhaps no one more so than the nineteenth-century critic Walter Pater. Still, Coleridge distinguished himself in all of these genres. No one contests the outstanding quality of ballads such as “The Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel” or odes such as “Dejection.” Coleridge was also undoubtedly the first great literary critic in England. His philosophy, often dismissed as a slavish imitation of Schelling, was in fact part of an opus maximum intended to refute Schelling’s position. As with so many of his other writings, he never completed it. Yet the fragments he left indicate that his philosophy substantially differed from that of the German idealist. His education at the Grammar School of Christ’s Hospital in London had included philosophy as well as poetry. He read Plato and some Neoplatonists, as well as Pindarus, the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, and Milton. His philosophy took a specifically religious turn after he started reading some of the Cambridge Platonists. Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe undid much of the effect of a short but total immersion in David Hartley’s associationist theory.13 Yet Coleridge might never have become a major poet had he not met Wordsworth. Their cooperation was one of the happiest instances of poetic cross-fertilization in Western literature. From Wordsworth he learned the primary role that the imagination plays in the creative process. This insight was also to become the guiding principle of his literary criticism and of much of his philosophy. After an extended visit to Germany (1798 – 99), he acquainted himself with Fichte’s and Schelling’s early idealist writings and undertook a serious study of Kant’s critical

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thought. After 1802 Coleridge appears to have devoted himself mostly to literary criticism and to the writing of popular articles on political and philosophical subjects in The Morning Post and later in his own periodical paper, The Friend. His Biographia Literaria (1817), originally intended to serve as a preface to Sibylline Leaves (a selection of previously written poems), mixes literary criticism and philosophy. It contains a penetrating reflection on the creative imagination and its role in poetry. This remarkably perceptive critic’s assessment of the merits and deficiencies of Wordsworth’s poetry, cited in the preceding section, has never been improved upon in either accuracy or depth. Yet as he integrated his literary principles within a general philosophical theory, they lost some of their original edge. Occasionally, we must wonder how much of his theory is truly justified by the poem he analyzes and how much is due to independent metaphysical principles. This question has caused a great deal of controversy. In The Meaning of Meaning, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards have exposed the full complexity of the relation between theory and poetry.14 They deny that Coleridge’s theories can be directly deduced from his poetry, though the theories certainly were inspired by it. No good poem can ever be reduced to a doctrinal statement. Poetry places greater emphasis on how something is said than on what is said. The quality of this how cannot be measured by logical rules. No doubt, the poet does observe rules. One of the first things the young Coleridge learned was that poetry, even the loftiest and the wildest, “had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science” (Biographia, 1:4). But the rules differ from the ones that control systematic thought. Poetry, for Coleridge, is not a matter of understanding but of Ideas, that is, of truths acknowledged by the entire mind—including imagination and feeling—rather than only by the understanding. Philosophy may judge poetry. Yet to do so successfully requires more literary sensitivity than rational argumentation. In moving from poem to doctrine, we translate poetry into a different discourse, which inevitably modifies the content. Coleridge did not always successfully resist the temptation to let speculative theories determine his literary judgment. In the Biographia his literary criticism heavily depends on German idealist philosophy, on which he spends most of the discussion.

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In his early poetry written with, and under the influence of, Wordsworth, philosophical doctrine plays no role. In the Lyrical Ballads the imagination appears as a creative power that transforms memories, fantasies, and perceptions into symbols of a reality that surpasses ordinary experience. Coleridge’s concept of the imagination is more precise and consistent than Wordsworth’s, although his discussions with the older poet may well have been the principal source of it. In chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria he distinguishes the primary from the secondary imagination. “The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human perception, as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had shown that the imagination is not only a reproductive but also a productive function. It was with this productive function that idealist philosophers, as well as Romantic poets, identified poetic creativity. The secondary imagination, as Coleridge describes it, does no more than apply the principles of the primary imagination to the fields of art and poetry. “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” By transforming, through the imagination, events and experiences into symbols of a spiritual reality, Coleridge creates a sense of ultimacy. The imagination converts emotionally charged experiences (in “Kubla Khan” it is a transcribed dream) into images, the symbolic power of which transfers the reader to a dream-like sphere. In some poems, such as “The Ancient Mariner” or “Christabel,” ordinary reality becomes altogether eclipsed by this transformative function. Instead, the mind captures some of that ideal world in which primeval firstness stands revealed. In the Lyrical Ballads he published several poems which he described as “pure imagination,” formalized dreams or dreamlike states, without integrating their content with ordinary reality. This most famously occurs in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Years ago, Maud Bodkin wrote an analysis of the complex psychic process that underlies this poem. According to her theory, some experiences and objects of experience carry a kind of natural emotional symbolism that directly appeals to subconscious feelings. A dominant theme in “The Ancient Mariner,” the alternation between a calm sea that immobilizes the ship and the strong wind that returns it home, is charged with emotional symbolism. So are the small animals swimming in the

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slime of a rotting sea. This kind of symbolism resists rational explanation. It affects the mind directly with the power of fundamental archetypes. Carl Gustav Jung interprets such symbols as signs of regression. After we have accepted this regression, the progressive movement (here the strong wind blowing the ship home) can resume. Coleridge may have read his descriptions of the sea during a prolonged calm in the travel reports of Richard Hawkins or of James Cook. Yet his poetic imagination converted these fragments into powerful new images. He enhances their emotional efficiency by setting them within a timeless, mythical narrative, which fuses a number of related experiences into a single image. In “The Ancient Mariner” emotional archetypes of death (or stagnation) and rebirth, or of guilt and forgiveness, refer not to objective facts but to an indeterminate feeling that something has gone astray in the basic order of things, although that disorder may be followed by a return of peace and harmony. The poem may also have a deeper, metaphysical interpretation. Thomas Pfau raises the question: What was the sin for which the mariner was punished? He reads the poem as a parable on the destructive hybris inherent in modern culture.15 Detached from the mother string connecting us with nature, Pfau argues, we moderns feel free to do to the cosmos whatever the desire for sheer dominance drives us to do. Shooting the albatross was more than averting an assault by an aggressive animal. It was an act of wanton destruction, for which nature took her revenge. Some have surmised that the mysterious, threatening atmosphere of the poem hides a Gnostic allusion to a physical cosmos that has turned into a hostile, evil force. The presence of a Gnostic tendency in the younger Coleridge is confirmed by his view that the earliest, Gnostic interpretations of Christianity were the most authentic ones, a position that Simone Pétrement still holds in her study A Separate God, yet which Coleridge later withdrew. Particularly informative about the nature of Coleridge’s symbolism are some of the odes, especially the masterly “Dejection.”16 The Romantic ode usually moves through conflicting emotions, abrupt changes in meter and rhyme, and stark contrasts between the conditions of nature and the feelings of the poet.17 At the outset, a peaceful, bright winter night contrasts with the unrest in the poet’s heart. He addresses himself to

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a “Lady,” believed to be Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, whom Coleridge’s unhappy marriage had permanently placed beyond his possession. To the dejected poet, she incarnates a joy inaccessible to him. The seeming peace of the moon night is deceptive. The new moon still bears a shadow of “the old one” beyond the rim of its outline. According to a popular tradition, mentioned in the ancient ballad that prefaces the ode, this phenomenon foretells an upcoming storm. In the second strophe, the poet, no longer able to repress a feeling of inner darkness so strongly out of tune with the apparent peace of nature and the assumed joy of the “Lady,” bursts out: A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear— (21– 24)

He hides the deeper source of his sadness, the loneliness left by frustrated love, behind the immediate pain caused by the recession of his poetic powers: “My genial spirits fail.” To the Lady he only mentions the void created by his spiritual impotence and the poverty this sterility has caused in receiving no less than in giving. For such is the rule of nature: “O Lady! We receive but what we give” (47). While reflecting on his decline the poet realizes that it should not affect the source of creativity, the soul, a timeless spirit: “Ah! From the soul itself must issue forth / A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud / Enveloping the Earth” (53 – 55). Those lines announce a reversal of his feelings, though not a full liberation. Nature may deprive him of his joy, but not of his spirit. Joy is granted only to the pure of heart in their purest hour. The poet knew it in his youth, when his mind was still at one with nature. He has become resigned to losing the intimacy of the union, but not to having his poetic power taken away from him. Therefore, the sadness “of viper thoughts that coil around my mind” reappears. Once again he turns his mind to nature. Now the wind has started howling and the Aeolian harp, symbol of the poet’s inspiration, has gone wild in a fearsome noise, like of “an host in rout, / With groans of trampled men” (111–12).

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Suddenly, the wind subsides and the harp echoes the soft breeze in a tinkling melancholy sound, reminding the poet of the crying voice of a child lost in a snowstorm. The poet imagines hearing the voice of little Lucy Gray, commemorated by Wordsworth. It “now moans low in bitter grief and fear, / And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear” (124 – 25). It recalls him to the sadness of his own loss and permanent loneliness. His desolation contrasts with the peace of the Lady now quietly asleep—a “simple spirit, guided from above,” pure of heart, in tune with nature. In this final thought the poet attains a partial resolution. There still is joy, even though he does not feel it; the spirit, source of his former creativity, has not become extinguished, though it no longer flows in poetry. He even finds some spiritual union with the Lady in thinking of her peace and joy, although she will never be his. The dejection has not withdrawn, but the pain has risen to a higher, more spiritual level. The perishing of the natural frees the spirit, even if it fails to reconcile nature and mind. The Romantic soul remains permanently unfulfilled. As mentioned above, at a certain point, philosophical principles became strong influences on Coleridge’s literary theory. His philosophy, although never formalized into a coherent system, contains insights that merit study. After his visit to Germany, he adopted a number of idealist principles without entirely abandoning his former Platonism. Later he criticized both in the light of a newly acquired religious insight, which conflicted with the Neoplatonic idea of an ultimate principle— the One—that neither thinks nor acts nor is. Nor did he admit that all things necessarily emanate from the One. With Speusippus, Plato’s nephew and disciple, he rejected Plotinus’s assumption that, for Plato, the first principle is the Good. If it were, the finite would have emerged with absolute necessity, leaving the Creator no choice.18 More complex was Coleridge’s relation to German Idealism. He accepted its basic principle that ultimately thinking and being must coincide. This principle implies, as Plato had taught, that reality must be in essence ideal. Problems about it had emerged with Immanuel Kant, who had argued that the real, “the thing in itself,” lies beyond the reach of reason. The mind is forced to assume that we think about the real, but is never able to justify its assumption. Scientific knowledge, then, can be no more than a

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conceptualization of appearances. The incompleteness of Kant’s epistemology became inconsistency in his moral philosophy, where he implied that an agent, in order to act morally, must foresee the effect of his action in reality. Coleridge therefore turned to Fichte, Kant’s avowed though unrecognized disciple, who had built the missing bridge between reason and being at the very place where Kant had postulated it, namely, in the moral order. One cannot question the reality of what one wills. Reality is an unconditioned condition of the will. Hence an act lies at the ground of all philosophical knowledge. This foundation of idealist philosophy attracted Coleridge. But two elements held him back from following Kant or Fichte. One was that knowledge remains only subjective. Schelling, for whom nature, though different from mind, is as ideal at its core as mind itself, removed that obstacle. Coleridge found himself so much in agreement with the young German idealist that he began to translate his fundamental theses without mentioning the author and soon had to defend himself against charges of plagiarism. In fact, the theses presented by Coleridge did no more than introduce his own, very different Idealism. He dissented from Schelling, no less than from Fichte, on the thesis that either nature or mind could be that ultimately unconditioned, in which the ideal and the real coincide. In Schelling’s early writings (the only ones Coleridge knew), he had failed to distinguish the finite self from the infinite subject.19 A second reason why Coleridge withheld his full assent from idealist philosophy was the question of God. How can we prove that absolute perfection, of which the mind has a necessary idea, actually exists? With Kant, Coleridge denies that the mind has an intuition of God’s existence. How, then, is reason capable of attaining a real knowledge of God? In a manuscript probably written around 1815 he argued that the idea of God is the precondition of all knowledge. A number of occasional essays (especially in The New Statesman in 1816 and an unpublished “Essay on Faith”), written around the same time, confirmed this thesis by arguing that self-consciousness required a divine presence within the mind. This immanent divine presence was proven by the summons of an unconditional moral imperative, which surpasses the finite order altogether. From the unconditional command of conscience, Coleridge concludes (as John Henry Newman was to do

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later) that the unconditional must be present in the mind and yet surpass the mind.20 This divine transcendence was absent from the early writings of Fichte as well as from Schelling’s. In 1797 Coleridge accepted a position on the daily Morning Post. Beside a stable income, it gave him an outlet for his strong anti-government feelings. In addition, it provided him with an opportunity for instantly publishing poems about recent public events. At the end of 1802 he published five articles on “The Beauty of Buttermere.” Mary, the handsome daughter of the keeper of an alehouse on Lake Buttermere, had married a visiting fisherman. Soon afterward, Coleridge reported, it came out that the groom was an imposter who, under a different name, had been married twice before and still had a wife and children living when he married his Keswick bride. Because of her beauty and dignified behavior, the entire county became concerned about Mary’s fate. In the final two articles, entitled “The Keswick Imposter,” Coleridge turned his attention to the villain, who had now been captured and was waiting trial. He wrapped the story in a haze of mystery: Who was the criminal, and what were his motives for choosing as his bride a poor girl? Had he been involved in the Carbonari rebellion in Italy (some names of Italian cities were found in his jacket)? Or was he involved with Irish rebels? In these articles, did Coleridge, as he had done in his early poems, describe an uncommon event in such colors that it became mysterious? As Jerome Christensen puts it: “Both sentimental and Gothic novels exploit the possibilities of such a slippage in signification, as Coleridge, aggressively moralistic reader of Richardson, Radcliffe, and Lewis, knew full well.”21

Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 –1822), one of England’s greatest poets, belongs to a later, more daring generation of Romantics than Wordsworth and Coleridge, who both had strongly influenced him. Like Heinrich Heine, he placed all his hope in an ideal future, while mercilessly criticizing present political conditions and religious beliefs. Oxford University expelled him for refusing to answer questions concerning a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism that he had sent to the bishops of

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the Anglican Church. In 1811 he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old schoolmate of his younger sister. They had two children. Three years later he left her for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with whom, along with her half-sister Claire, he fled to Switzerland and Italy. Typical of his flamboyant style, he registered his profession in a hotel in Chamonix as “atheist.” His conduct drove Harriet to suicide. The court denied him custody of his children by Harriet, declaring him an unworthy father. Matthew Arnold, an admirer of Shelley’s poetry, has little good to say about the poet’s social entourage. “For the world in which we find him I can only use [a] French word, sale. Godwin’s house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and holding his hat, and the greenspectacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg the faithful friend [expelled from the university together with Shelley]—and lord Byron with his deep grain of coarseness and commonness, his affection, his brutal selfishness— what a set!”22 Despite the net of scandals and destruction Shelley had woven around himself, he managed to preserve an air of personal innocence. He was charming and beloved by many who knew him. The poet and critic Leigh Hunt, one of his admiring contemporaries, claimed that he never met a being “who came nearer to the height of humanity.” Arnold suspected that his moral flaws stemmed from the fact that he was “not entirely sane.” Shortly after Harriet had drowned herself and Mary was still mourning the death of their two children, the inflammable poet was already singing the praises of another “seraph of heaven too gentle to be human,” the nineteen-year-old Emilia Viviani, who was waiting in a convent for a husband to be chosen by her father. The poem he wrote in her honor ends with a dream of dwelling with Emilia on a Greek island. Actions like those understandably predisposed readers to question the poet’s paradoxical passion for morally reforming the world. Yet selfish as Shelley was, he was not completely insensitive. He is believed to have written the untitled “Lines” of sorrowful farewell after Harriet’s death: The night did shed on thy dear head Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie Where the bitter breath of the naked sky Might visit thee at will. (21– 24)23

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The long allegorical poem of his early years, “Queen Mab” (1813), which combined determinism with political Jacobinism, found little sympathy with reviewers. Shelley simultaneously embraced two opposite theses, both equally offensive to the average contemporary reader. First, he argued that there is no God (meaning, no personal God). Next, in the character of Ahasverus, he argued that there is indeed a God, a celestial tyrant whose malice had become incarnate in Jesus Christ. Assertions of this kind were relatively new in England, and many turned away from the poet as a result. Still, he had made it clear that he did not agree with Ahasverus. In later years, Shelley wrote very differently. A real break separates Shelley’s early from his mature poetry. Harold Bloom estimates that the break falls around 1816. Two poems written in that same year illustrate the poet’s internal dividedness. In the “Mont Blanc” poem, according to Bloom, “There is a Power, a secret strength of things, but it hides its true shape or its shapelessness behind or beneath a dread mountain, and it shows itself only as an indifference, or even pragmatically a malevolence, toward the well-being of men.”24 Here Shelley still writes as a disciple of Godwin and the French materialists. The awesome bareness of “Mont Blanc” presents a forbidding sight. “A desert peopled by the storms alone / . . . / how hideously / Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, / Ghastly, and scarred, and riven” (67, 69 – 71). Yet there is another aspect of the mountain, more fundamental than its remote indifference. It speaks of the titanic origin of the world we know. Shelley is reminded of the world that lies beyond the present one: Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep,—that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.—I look on high; Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled The veil of life and death? (49 – 54)

Wordsworth in his Prelude often refers to these gleams or spots, but their revelations for the most part are gentler, dreamlike, and directly

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linked to the poet’s inner life. Here the ghastly indifference of the gigantic shape itself is the revelatory power. Not dreams, but a rude reality that has nothing human about it forces us to question the relation between dream and reality. What is real? What delusion? The mountain speaks, but its message accepts no answer: it merely causes us to doubt and discard all answers as “fraud and woe.”25 It inspires no confidence; it merely demands submission. Yet in that same year of 1816, in his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” Shelley, abandoning his early materialism, began to embrace Wordsworth’s aesthetics within a Platonic vision of the world. The poet here attains a spiritual transparency, which he will maintain and refine to the end of his short life. The first words of the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” announce the new direction. The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen amongst us—visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower— (1– 4)

In the “Hymn” the Power is not hidden behind the immobile, hostile presence of a mountain. It is active, constantly changing, and mysterious. Increasingly, nature appears to Shelley, as it had appeared to Plato, as deeply symbolic. He vows to keep pursuing her “spiritual” beauty. At the end of the poem, he reports that in the solemn harmony of an autumn afternoon her “shadow” fell upon him, and he prays to the divine presence immanent in nature: Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm—to one who worships thee. (78 – 81)

In his poetic drama, Hellas, the entire universe turns into a spiritual vision.

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. . . this Whole Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers With all the silent or tempestuous workings By which they have been, are, or cease to be, Is but a vision—all that it inherits Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams. Thought is its cradle and its grave. (776 – 82)

Still, the spiritual idea never eclipses the physical presence. Shelley’s Platonism seems to have consisted of no more than the theory of Ideas interpreted as archetypes of a spiritual universe penetrated by the Good. That highest Good, coinciding with supreme Beauty, constitutes the “truth” of the universe. In the later “Hymn to Apollo” the Good proclaims through the sun-god: I am the eye with which the Universe Beholds itself and knows itself divine; All harmony of instrument or verse, All prophecy, all medicine is mine All light of art or nature— (31– 35)

The presence of the Spirit of Beauty is never stable or permanent. In the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” the poet had lamented: “From all we hear and all we see, / Doubt, chance, and mutability.” The uncertainty grew in his later years, as he became increasingly distressed by the poor reception of his work. In a letter of 1821, he wrote to his friend Peacock: “I write nothing and shall probably write no more. It offends me to see my name classed among those who have no name.” Yet in that same year, he wrote two of his greatest poems: “Epipsychidion” and “Adonais.” In both he expresses his discouragement, but also his hope that in the end his mind will find repose in the source from which it originated. That hope increases in “Adonais,” a dirge on the premature death of Shelley’s fellow poet, John Keats, which he developed into an elegy on the mind’s return after death to the source of life.

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First let us consider the poems in which Shelley celebrated his unity with nature. Nowhere has he done so more intimately and more beautifully than in his famous “Ode to the West Wind” (1819). Like Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s great odes, Shelley’s poem is built on the contrast between what he had intended and what he has actually achieved. He begins by addressing the wind, as if it were a divine Spirit: “Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere” (13). The wind, both destroyer and preserver, clears the land of dead leaves and sows the “winged seeds” for next spring. Moving the clouds and driving the storms, it awakens the Mediterranean “from his summer dreams.” Having admired the power of the wind, the poet, in the fourth stanza, turns to himself. He desires to expose himself to the West Wind’s strength and, as in his boyhood, to become “the comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven” (50).26 Yet “a heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed” him (55), and he no longer feels capable of competing with the wind. He therefore begs the wind to lift him up like a dead leaf or a swift cloud and to fly where its force blows him. He desires to be the wind’s lyre, and to be so transparent as to lose his identity and be reduced to the poetic voice of nature. “Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!” (61– 62). Only when absorbed by the wind will the poet be able to fulfill his prophetic task. Scattering his thoughts over the universe, the wind becomes “the trumpet of a prophecy” (69). Winter is imminent, but the wind will spread the message of better times to come. “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” (70). The poem is written in terza rima, a form rarely used in the ode. Shelley, more than any other English poet after Milton, had a perfect command of poetic technique and used the most complex forms, rhythms, and rhymes in an easy, playful way. In 1820 he wrote the lyrical hymn “To a Skylark.” Though less densely charged with ideal content than “To the West Wind,” it equals or surpasses the former in musical harmony and in its daring flight of imagination. In it the poet achieves a total harmony of image and form. He addresses the bird flying so high as to be hardly visible. Only its tiny sound reaches him. Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest

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Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. (6 –10)

Is it really a bird? Or a spirit of “unbodied joy,” unseen but heard? In a succession of synaesthetic metaphors the poet attempts to describe the invisible creature: “Like a Poet hidden / In the light of thought”; “Like a high-born maiden / In a palace-tower”; “Like a glow-worm golden / In a dell of dew”; “Like a rose embowered / In its own green leaves” (36– 37; 41– 42; 46 – 47; 51– 52). None of these images applies to the skylark itself; all symbolize its effect on the poet: a joy without languor or sadness. With each stanza the bird-spirit ascends higher beyond human reach. We humans always “pine for what is not” (87)—in sweet memories of the past or anxious anticipations of the future. The skylark sings the same song of joy, without “shadow of annoyance,” day after day, humbling us by the soulful equanimity of its “singing hymns unbidden” (38). The poet concludes with a prayer to be filled with the skylark’s unselfish harmony. “The world should listen then—as I am listening now” (105). In this last verse we hear a note of sadness about his words remaining unheard and unread, an echo of his prayer to the West Wind to “drive my dead thoughts over the universe” (“Ode to the West Wind,” 63). The lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (written in 1819) may well count as Shelley’s greatest single work. It is the darkly symbolic tragedy of the Titan Prometheus, benefactor of the human race, who has brought it language and culture and who had once assisted Jupiter in defeating the chaotic world of the Titans. Shelley begins where Aeschylus ended his Prometheus Bound: the hero, punished by an envious Zeus, is bound to a rock in the Caucasus. According to tradition, the Greek playwright wrote a later drama, now lost, in which Prometheus, freed from his shackles, became reconciled with Zeus. No such dramatic reversal occurs in Shelley’s play: the peripeteia has occurred before the start of the tragedy. In an initial monologue Prometheus declares that he has overcome all hatred of the oppressor who chained him to the rock. Only pity remains for a god unable to control his ambition: “Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee” (I, 1, 53).

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The first act is a prolonged attack on Jupiter, the oppressive god of theist religion, the great obstruction to human freedom. In act II, Asia and her sister Panthea utter hopeful expectations of the future, after the forces of oppression have vanished. Their dialogue alternates with the voices of echoes and the songs of spirits. This act contains some of the most beautiful poetry Shelley ever wrote. Content and style abruptly change into a play of dreams unsurpassed in lyrical lightness and symbolical depth. Asia, Prometheus’s beloved, joyfully anticipates the coming spring, even though winter still holds the world in its frozen grip. Her sister Panthea enters in the happy mood of a remembered dream. She has just witnessed the transformation of Prometheus, released from his chains, into a god of light. But she is unable to remember her second dream. Asia requests her to lift up her head so that she can read the dream in Panthea’s eyes. Beyond the inmost depth of her sister’s eyes she discerns the shape of Prometheus, “like radiance from the cloud-surrounded moon.” The dream vision promises that she will meet “him again when the world will be restored.” Now Panthea remembers the mysterious words “Follow! Follow!” that she had heard in her forgotten dream. These words, echoed from all sides, signal them to depart for a journey to transform their love of desire, which was to be followed by ruin, into unselfish love, which will result in universal peace and happiness. The words guide them to the pinnacle of a mountaintop and from there to a deep cave, where Demogorgon, Jupiter’s disinherited son, rules the earth. The sisters at first discern nothing in the darkness of this seat of power, but then see a shapeless being that has “neither limb, nor form, nor outline,” yet is obviously alive. In short Delphic phrases, the apparition answers the woman’s questions about the rules of power. Who made the world and all it contains and who restores the cosmic order when it breaks down? God alone creates and restores. But who is God? Jupiter? Demogorgon does not respond to that question. Finally he replies: . . . a voice Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless; For what would it avail to bid thee gaze On the revolving world? What to bid speak

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Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal Love. (II, 4, 115 – 20)

Instead of the divisive, oppressive world of myth, Prometheus brings true religion, that is, the cult of nature and humanity.27 The reign of oppression yields to that of love. When Asia further inquires when Prometheus’s hour of liberation will come, the Demogorgon merely answers, “Behold!” while cars driven by unearthly charioteers approach. “These are the immortal Hours, / Of whom thou didst demand.” One chariot takes them and drives them to the top of a snowy mountain. There Asia becomes transfigured by light: as Panthea says, “love, like the atmosphere / Of the sun’s fire filling the living world, / Burst from thee.” Voices in the air are singing her praise, the praise of selfless love, and Asia joins them with her uniquely beautiful dreamlike song: My soul is an enchanted boat, Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing; And thine doth like an angel sit Beside a helm conducting it, Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing. It seems to float ever, for ever, Upon that many-winding river, Between mountains, woods, abysses, A paradise of wildernesses! (II, 5, 72 – 81)

Act III brings the apocalyptic vision of the end of the present rule of fear by a divine tyrant. Jupiter, at the peak of his power, echoes Milton’s Satan in a proclamation that he now has gained control over the world. The only obstacle that remains is the unpredictable heart of man. In the middle of his speech, Demogorgon arrives in the “Car of the Hour” and summons the god to follow him to the netherworld. Jupiter’s final words are:

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. . . Ai! Ai! The elements obey me not. I sink Dizzily down, ever, for ever, down. And, like a cloud, mine enemy above Darkens my fall with victory! Ai, Ai! (III, 1, 79 – 83)

Prometheus’s release and Jupiter’s incarceration take place in one short scene that holds less dramatic significance than the Titan’s inner liberation from hatred and thoughts of revenge at the beginning of the play. Shelley has preserved some characters of the ancient myth, but most of them are his own inventions. They function not as characters in a drama but as impersonal cosmic forces, such as earth, ocean, and echo. Contrary to Aeschylus, the modern playwright felt that reconciliation between the Titan and the oppressive god was not possible. Prometheus simply evicts the tyrant. Essentially a Romantic hero, he feels “a passion for reforming the world” in accordance with the law of love. Most mysterious is the figure of Demogorgon, who in the third act takes Jupiter down to the netherworld. He obviously differs from his namesake in Milton’s Paradise Lost, where he merely was one of the powers of chaos. Shelley’s friend T. L. Peacock, in a note to his poem Rhododaphne, described Demogorgon as the “genius of the Earth,” who brought order to its chaotic elements. According to I. A. Richards, the term refers to Necessity, a power that, like Fate, reigns above the gods and whose name must not be spoken. At the conclusion of act III, the Spirit of the Hour sums up the benefits that the state of freedom has brought. Yet, the Spirit warns, man is not yet free “from chance, and death, and mutability” (III, 4, 201). Still, death may be overcome by love, which, while binding person to person, anticipates their reunion in the single source that produced them. This reunion, the soul’s deepest desire, paradoxically ends individual selfhood. The closer the soul approaches this goal, the more she loses herself, like the moth flittering into the flame. The play concludes with the great song of love among the sun, the moon, and the earth.28 The ideal of universal love, dominant in Shelley’s later period, and probably Neoplatonic in origin, anticipates the return of all things to their original oneness.

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In the later parts of “Epipsychidion” (1821) and in “Adonais” (1821), both written shortly before the poet’s death, the dialectic of love, which had fascinated him since the early “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” received its definitive form. “Epipsychidion” retells the ascent of the soul in Plato’s Symposium: from love of beautiful bodies (here presented by female attractiveness) to love of the beauty of souls, and finally to that of eternal Ideas. Spiritual love gradually transforms sensuous pleasure and erotic attraction into a vision of all beings united in an allcomprehensive harmony. Such a vision stems not from abstract knowledge but from great love. For Shelley, as for Dante, the beloved object is not abandoned but spiritualized. In his “Advertisement,” the poet appropriately refers to Dante’s Vita Nuova, in which Beatrice, though poetically sublimated as a spiritual image of eternal beauty, remains beloved in her concrete physical existence. As the poet describes his search for the “soul out of my soul” (“Epipsychidion”), he realizes that intellectual beauty cannot be constrained within a single form. Still, the desire remains to find at least “one form resembling hers” (254, emphasis mine). In a subsequent letter he lucidly exposes the illusion inherent in the erotic experience that inspired the poem. “The ‘Epipsychidion’ I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno [an allusion to Juno being resolved into a cloud, in Goethe’s Faust II]—The error, and it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal.”29 Reflection may call the spiritual utopia an illusion, but, while it lasts, the dream is wonderful and real enough. Indeed, the poem concludes with one, as the poet sails to “an isle under Ionian skies”: A ship is floating in the harbour now, A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow; There is a path on the sea’s azure floor, No keel has ever ploughed that path before. (408 –11)

“Adonais,” Shelley’s last great poem, an elegy on the death of the young Keats, follows the same Neoplatonic ascent to spiritual union.

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The name “Adonais,” a Hellenized version of the Babylonian Adonis, refers to the beautiful adolescent beloved by Aphrodite but killed by a wild boar. The poet attributes to “Adonais” a hope of immortality, though not an individual survival after death. He envisions the deceased young poet merging with the original One and spending eternity in the source of life. Dust to the dust! But the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal, which must glow Through time and change, unquenchably the same, Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame. (338 – 42)

The deceased poet has at last found true life. We are the ones asleep in a transient existence, full of pain and distraction. “He hath awakened from the dream of life” (344). Shelley’s essay “A Defence of Poetry” (1821), like Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads and the later part of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, is a critical reflection on the nature of Romantic poetry. All three poets stress the primary role of the imagination, a synthetic power that, like reason, unites various experiences. The poetic imagination comes as an unexpected gift. In his “Defence” Shelley states, “We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought . . . always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden. . . . It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases” (emphasis mine). Shelley borrows the words “a diviner nature” from Plato’s Ion, where they mean that the poetic power originates in a source that surpasses the mind. The poet’s capacities, impressive as they may be, are still no more than “the passive slaves of some higher and more omnipotent power.” Inspiration reaches the poet as a “revelation” from a higher realm. In a remarkable synergia, the poet’s imagination combines the elements that enable him to receive that “supernatural” vision. In his aesthetic theory, then, Shelley laid the foundations for a kind of natural religion that had increasingly become apparent in his poetry. He never systematically

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collected these insights, nor did he show how they relate to his earlier negations. Nothing supports Robert Browning’s claim in his “Essay on Shelley” that Shelley was on his way to becoming a Christian, or Gilbert Murray’s claim that he was almost the only Romantic poet inspired by Christian ideas.30 Even in the last year of his life Shelley expressed his aversion to the Christian religion, although by that time he had acquired a sincere respect for its ideal of love. Shelley’s immanentism conflicted even with the little that other contemporary Romantic poets were ready to accept as religion. Though he often refers to the supreme reality as Spirit, Spirit for him is not separate from nature. It resides in nature and transcends it no more than did Plato’s World Soul. Hoxie Fairchild, in his work on the religious poetry of the Romantics, describes Shelley’s position: “His God is the One—the all-pervasive but nonetheless transcendent Spirit which comprises all values and interfuses them in a divine cosmic wholeness. Since Spirit or mind is the only reality, this Divine Mind is the sum-total of everything real in man and in what man mistakenly calls ‘external’ nature, but it can most fittingly be described in terms of Creative Intellect, Freedom, Beauty, and Love. . . . The real and external world is simply the thought of the Divine Mind, perfectly wise, free, beautiful, beneficent, loving.”31 This description may be more “idealist” than Shelley’s poetry turns out to be. Spirit for Shelley is indeed the core of nature, yet in a way that comes closer to Spinoza than to Schelling. To activate its power, spirit must first submit to nature. At the same time, Shelley repeatedly refers to One Spirit that surpasses all. For that reason we may speak of Shelley’s religion as a relation to a transcendent within. This transcendence never refers to a personal God, though the poet frequently addresses it as a person. Nor does the mind ever succeed in transforming its dependence on nature into a permanent vision of the One. It must constantly return to a world of change. The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity. (“Adonais,” 460 – 63)

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Literary critics in the nineteenth century were unusually harsh in their judgment of the great poet. Disturbed by his unconventional lifestyle and his hostile statements about religion, few gave his poetry the attention it deserved. They also found it needlessly obscure. Particularly the dark Prometheus Unbound irritated them. Shelley was what the Romans called a poeta doctus, who charged his poetry with learned allusions and assumed the reader’s acquaintance with the underlying ideas. Even those who appreciated his poetry for the most part rejected his thought. The tide did not turn until the twentieth century. Change came with William Butler Yeats’s encomium of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. Philosophers, of the few who read him, were more receptive of his thought. Both Santayana and Croce admired him. But Shelley continued to have formidable adversaries, such as Irving Babbitt and F. R. Leavis. Today, however, the battle for recognition of Shelley’s thought finally seems to have been won. Philosophically, he remains an important link in the English Platonic tradition. Above all, he is a superb poet, intellectually demanding but never cerebral. Keats

Few poets as closely approached the Romantic ideal as did John Keats (1795 –1821) in his odes and in the unfinished Hyperion. This achievement must have surprised readers of his early Poems (1817). In these Spenserian verses, he seemed destined to become a “poet of poetry,” expert in craft but barely ever touching the hard ground of reality. What saved him from his early aesthetic constructions and escapist allegories was a conversion to a Romantic vision of nature. Even then, however, he did not seek the sensuous presence of nature, as did Shelley, but rather sublimated natural impressions into “Shapes from the invisible world, unearthly singing / From out the middle air” (“I Stood Tip-Toe,” 186 – 87).32 The visionary always dominated the visual in his poetry. In Endymion (1817), his first major work, the poet contrasts lasting beauty with the transitory experience of it. According to the Greek legend, while Endymion was asleep the moon (here presented as Cynthia) fell in love with him. The poet contrasts the harshness of life in time to the permanent vision of beauty.

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Beauty dispels the pain of existence by creating an alternative world. “Some shape of beauty moves away the pall / From our dark spirits” (I, 12 –13). Later the poet avoids this escapist view to find truth and beauty within the pain of existence. Unlike Shelley, Keats was no philosopher. For him, nature’s reality is all there is, yet that reality became fully manifest only in her eternal essence, not in her momentary appearances. In all of his poetry Keats celebrates that permanent core of things. Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks Our ready minds to fellowship divine, A fellowship with essence; till we shine, Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. (I, 777– 80)

In the four thousand verses of Endymion, Keats had only begun to test his extraordinary poetic power—his marvelous aesthetic sensitivity, his firm control of poetic technique. Despite the beauty of numerous passages, the poem as a whole was confused, almost structureless. Moreover, the smooth cadence of the verses of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, replete with ancient mythology, was hardly appropriate for articulating the struggle among the poet’s conflicting feelings. The obvious defects of Endymion help us to understand the two insensitive critics who, in tactless reviews, demolished this work of an immature poetic genius. Few readers at the time, no more than today, enjoyed being taken in thousands of verses from one forgotten god to another, from one obscure idea to another, and from one Spenserian “bower” to another. In the end, Keats agreed with his critics and decided to rid his poetry of this flighty aestheticism. More was demanded, he felt, if he was to follow his call to a “fellowship divine.”33 He had aimed too low in his search for a spiritual union with nature. . . . But there are Richer entanglements, enthralments far More self-destroying, leading, by degrees, To the chief intensity: the crown of these Is made of love and friendship . . . (I, 798 – 802)

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Before Endymion was completed, Keats himself had become aware that his poetic Bildungsroman, drifting along on shifting winds of image and sound, was not moving in the right direction. Book IV of the poem announces a new beginning: a new proemium, a new invocation of the Muse, and a content so new as to upset the original structure of the poem. We find Endymion now sharing the poet’s own melancholy. What was the use of writing poetry? Nothing was left but sterile sadness. Then the mysterious “Indian maid” suddenly appears. In her song “O Sorrow,” she intimates that the price of beauty and love is suffering. She also urges Endymion to reimmerse himself in nature. A surprising deus ex machina lifts him up into the air and sets him down in the Cave of Quiet. Awakening from a dreamless sleep, Endymion realizes what he had been missing: “Now I see / The grass; I feel the solid ground” (IV, 621– 22). He confesses that he had been living in a land of cloudy phantoms. “I have clung / To nothing, loved a nothing, nothing seen / Or felt but a great dream” (IV, 636 – 38). During the summer of 1818 Keats made a prolonged tour of Scotland. The poems he wrote about it—“On Visiting the Tomb of Burns,” the sonnet “Written in Burns’ Cottage,” and especially the long and strange “Lines Written in the Highlands after a Visit to Burns’ Country”—indicate that he had not yet found a poetic balance between his attempt to remain close to nature and the unlimited aspirations of his creative imagination. Nor was the situation he faced at his homecoming conducive to finding it. From his letters we learn of his suffering over the long and fatal illness of his brother Tom. In an effort to distract himself from his sorrow, and anxious to attempt another lyrical epic more in tune with his newly discovered sense of reality, he wrote the first two books of Hyperion (1818), about the lot of the Titans after their defeat by the Olympian gods. Here, Keats’s poetic talent is fully breaking through. The Titans have completed their task: they have converted dead matter into primitive life and thus prepared the way for the reign of light and beauty to be established by their Olympian successors. Now they should be willing to retreat. So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us

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And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness. (II, 212 –15)

Keats’s story of the Titans’ revolt against the new gods shows some similarity with Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. For Prometheus as well, redemption required submission to suffering as well as overcoming hatred and a desire for revenge. With Hyperion begins the poet’s search for a state of mind that includes yet surpasses subjective feeling as well as objective thinking. Why, then, did Keats abandon this work in which, for the first time, he approached his ideal? To John Reynolds he wrote: “There were too many Miltonic inversions in it.” It still labored under some of the problems for which the critics had savaged Endymion. Only in his great odes did he fully succeed in attaining the comprehensive ideal of beauty in pain, struggle, and conflict.34 Milton remains his guide to the sublime, although Keats, faithful to the lesson he learned from Wordsworth, felt that the sublime was to be found in nature, not above it. Having widened the scope of his experience and embraced its pain, the poet is now prepared “to burn through” the “fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay,” as he had promised in his sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” Nothing that he had written before equals Keats’s achievement in the odes. In an authoritative study, Helen Vendler has shown that the odes are poetic experiments made on the basis of sense experiences. The poet suppresses placing an emphasis on any particular sense in “Ode to Psyche.” Only the sense of hearing is fully awake in “Ode to a Nightingale,” and that of sight in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” All senses return in “To Autumn.”35 The “Ode to Psyche” (1819) is still transitional. The poet dreams that he finds Amor and Psyche of the ancient legend, “their arms embraced” in the grass. Why is it that Psyche, more beautiful than other gods, has “no shrine, no grove, no oracle”? The poet vows that he will be her priest and build her a sanctuary in his mind. He will create her into a work of art and thereby move her to an eternal realm beyond myth and history. Psyche will make her dwelling in his soul. Her presence will inspire a new kind of poetry. “Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind.” In the verses in-

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troducing the final strophe, the poet realizes that this poetic construction will demand that he not merely abandon the language of myth but also raise the story unto an intellectual vision, beyond the senses: “The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep; / And in the midst of this wide quietness / A rosy sanctuary will I dress” (57– 59). To do so, the poet needs a new sight, not the sleepy one of the eyes but the unblinking one of insight. Nor will his vision be cold or detached. In the final lines he promises that his “fane” will not be a closed icon, removed from the world, but will have “a casement ope at night / To let the warm Love in!” This prodigious project remains to be realized. A work of art starting from a myth yet independent of myth, celebrating nature yet only as reflected in poetry: was it possible? In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the poet first tries to give form to his vision while excluding all senses but hearing and smelling. This simple, playfully symbolic poem presents none of the struggles typical of the Romantic ode. But the poetic contrast announced at the beginning runs through the entire course of the poem. The poet feels empty, drowsy, and sad. Nearby sings the happy nightingale. The poet both desires and fears to join the bird and “Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget / What thou among the leaves hast never known, / The weariness, the fever, and the fret” (21– 23). He seeks to follow the bird into the embalmed darkness of its dwelling and becomes overwhelmed by the smell of sweet flowers and herbs. This state of pleasant forlornness awakens in the poet a desire to die—“To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” The bird sings the same song heard “in ancient days by emperor and clown.” It will still be sung when the poet will no longer hear it. Is all this more than a dream? Even if it is not, the nightingale’s music for a moment has relieved the poet from the painful conflict between time and everlastingness. Suddenly, the bird flies off to the next valley and the poet returns to common reality. While the poet listened, the unceasing conflict between timelessness and existence in time had been suspended. If John Keats had left no other poem but the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he would still rank among the greatest poets of all times. The ode begins with the usual contrasts: the silent and motionless painted images of a music-playing, dancing crowd, “Thou foster-child of silence and slow time.” Its figures are shrouded in mystery. Are they gods or

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mortals? Are they fleeing or pursuing each other? They remain incomplete, yet “marked with the promise of self-completion.”36 The unfinished nature of Romantic art here appears in the form of a permanently open question. The contrast between the motionless urn and the lively scene it represents appears all the more intense as it reaches us from the silence of a remote past that no longer responds to our questions. Nonetheless, the shifting images painted on the vase seem to evoke a living present. Each stanza presents another image inviting the viewer to a different way of looking at the work of art. The first one hardly surpasses the content of the representation. Who are these people? Why are they here—in the valley of Tempe or in Arcadia? The silence and stillness of a scene that represents music and movement raises an unspoken question. The mystery increases in the second stanza as the scene requires the aid of fantasy. It now presents a young man following a young woman while a piper plays unheard songs. Is it a wedding procession? Or a young man trying to ingratiate himself to a young woman? Or a public celebration? The silence of the scene no longer disturbs the observer. On the contrary, it liberates his imagination to dream about the group. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” The inner ear of memory is able to hear the messages of silence. As direct sensation ceases, time releases its hold on the images: they will never lose their initial freshness. “Nor ever can these trees be bare.” As the scene comes to inhabit the viewer’s mind, he participates in the lovers’ happy love. More happy love! More happy, happy love! Forever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above. (25 – 28)

In this ideal experience, the urn seems to have become more fully real than when the poet first observed it. The poem surpasses the subjective limits of sensation as well as the objective ones of representation. In the third scene (stanza 4), the figure of a priest preparing a heifer to be sacrificed raises another question: “To what green altar, O myste-

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rious priest, / Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies?” Urn and representation have disappeared. What was represented in clay has completely been absorbed by its ideal meaning. The poet has abandoned even fantasizing about the representation. He has joined the priest and the people of the little town and follows their joyous procession. His questions now concern the inner truth of a reality, of which he has become part. In the final stanza, he returns to the original representation, whose truth is now fully revealed. The work of art has become a selfcontained artifact, “complete in itself.”37 Its aesthetic transcendence, has moved us into an ideal, timeless world. “Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity.” Thinking cannot explain what the urn discloses. Its disclosure contains a truth of its own, higher than reasoning ever yields. The poet has attained the spiritual meaning, the truth of beauty, that he was seeking: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The end of the ode returns us to the primary sensation of seeing, with which the poem began. Has it been preserved in the increasingly spiritual later stages? Or was seeing no more than an inchoate perception bound to disappear as the poem proceeded to a more inward reflection? The answer must be that without the enduring presence of a physical seeing (or hearing), beauty would evaporate. The final lines of Keats’s poem remind us that the truth he mentions is that of beauty, namely, a symbolization that, at the end as in the beginning, remains anchored in perception. At no point has the spiritual left sensation completely behind. In the poet’s seeing, the visible and the invisible come to coincide. Seeing retains all the concreteness of an original confrontation with the object, while at the same time it leads the viewer to spiritual insight. Seeing and hearing are as much acts of the mind as thinking.38 The mind’s spiritual power is not restricted to the conceptual sphere. It pervades the sensory realm as well. The “material” sphere, so tangibly present in the representation, belongs as much to the spiritual realm as the insight to which it leads. As the Austrian painter Wassily Kandinsky asserted in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, it is not only the content of painting, that which it ultimately expresses, that ceases to belong to the world as one of its objects. Even the means, which make the expression of this invisible reality possible, belong to the spiritual realm of meaning.39 Keats’s seeing means what Schauen meant for Rilke: the total absorption of sensuous

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viewing into a spiritual vision. The viewer no longer confronts a reality objectively opposed to his subjective being. He views things in their fullest reality, when he views them within his inner experience as well as with his eyes. Being no philosopher himself, Keats felt forced to give the most accurate possible description of this primary experience, without ever being able to rely on the “short shrift” of conceptual abstraction. After completing most of the odes, Keats began rewriting Hyperion. The fragment now called The Fall of Hyperion ended up being part of a retrospective work: it reported an experience that had occurred before he wrote the odes. The mythology of the Titans, so prominent in the early version, has receded into the background. The poet himself has now become the central figure. In a somewhat contrived vision, he sees himself transported to an ancient sanctuary, where he is summoned to ascend an enormous flight of stairs. At the top a veiled female figure addresses him: “Thou hast felt / What ’tis to die and live again before / Thy fated hour” (I, 141– 43). She unveils herself and reveals her name: Moneta, the last priestess of Saturn’s desolated reign. She chastens the poet for being no more than a dreamer, inferior to those who “seek no wonder but the human face” (I, 163) and who work for their fellow men. “What benefit canst thou or all thy tribe, / To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing” (I, 167– 68). The close relation between dream and poetry had, since his earliest efforts, hung heavy over the poet’s mind. Had he himself not written that all kinds of people have their dreams—fanatics, savages, common folks? Moneta takes him to the valley of death. “No stir of life / Was in this shrouded vale. . . . But where the dead leaf fell there did it rest. / A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more” (I, 310–11, 314 –15). She shows him Saturn, sleeping “unsceptred and his realmless eyes closed” in the midst of dead Titans. Against this backdrop of death and a forgotten past, the poet’s doubts return. How can he justify his trading in dreams? Where is his commitment to love? Yet in this passage through the realm of death, he has become aware that his suffering has purified him to begin a new poetic life. The fragment ends with an unfinished sentence: “On he flared. . . .” Hyperion in his flaming robes flies on. Those were not Keats’s last poetic words. The final ones are his “Ode to Autumn,” published a few months before his death. Moneta had en-

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joined him to think only of the earth. All too often in the past his imagination had moved beyond it. In contemplating the autumn’s balmy “mist and mellow fruitfulness,” the poet at last brought his poetic ideal down to a sensuous presence. Here he attains the earthly sublime that his early poems had reached for but seldom touched. In this final ode Keats withdraws the complaint that introduced his early sonnet to Leigh Hunt: “Glory and loveliness have passed away.” In this glorious season, shortly before his life’s completion, they have returned. The poet entirely surrenders to the course of nature. Having given all the riches she promised, the earth in quiet abandonment lets go what must go. No sadness surrounds her dying beauty. The past struggle between time and permanence comes to conclusion in these verses: Where are the songs of spring? Aye, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day. (23 – 25)

chapter 3

German Romantic Poetry

Romanticism, before even having the name of a movement, and with little or no communication among the original groups, erupted in various parts of Europe. A pre-Romantic movement in Germany came to be known as Sturm und Drang, after the title of Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s tempestuous tragedy. Its participants agreed on only one goal: the liberation of German letters from the dominance of French literary classicism. Johann Gottfried Herder, later to become Goethe’s protégé in Weimar, gave it some theoretical support by stressing that the genius of each nation demanded a literary expression that corresponded to the particular character of its people. True “humanity” (Humanität) recognizes the distinctive difference of one’s own nation as well as the qualities that all nations share. Two of those early “pre-Romantics” exercised the strongest influence on the origin of a Romantic Movement: Goethe and Schiller. To understand the nature of the former one needs to know the latter.

Goethe

Goethe’s first two works, the drama Goetz von Berlichingen (1773) and the novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sufferings of the Young Werther) (1774), may count as starting achievements of Sturm und Drang. When, partly under the impact of these works, a “Romantic Movement” originated, Goethe (1749–1832) distanced himself from them. Nonetheless, even his later works continued to influence Roman64

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ticism more than any others. Indeed, young Romantics considered his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as the founding masterpiece of their Movement as well as the model to imitate, while even for late Romantic poets, such as Heine and Eichendorff, his poetry remained the standard of excellence. This remains all the more remarkable since much of his work had solid roots in the Enlightenment. Goethe admired Lessing’s tragedies: Emilia Galotti lay on Werther’s table when he committed suicide. Minna von Barnhelm, with its call for national unity among Germans, also had inspired him. His own tragedy, Goetz von Berlichingen, takes place at the time of the Reformation, the period in which Germany built its spiritual identity. Its hero is a solitary knight who defends ancient German customs of chivalry. The drama was intended to revive the nation’s former dignity and spiritual unity. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, published a year later, made Goethe’s name known all over Europe. The story of this sensitive young man, whom an impossible love drives to suicide, marks the beginning of an overtly emotional literature in Germany. With its appearance, the Sturm und Drang struggle for a national literature scored a major victory. From Goethe’s autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) (1808 – 31), we know that the novel reflected much of the author’s personal experience. Yet, even more than both Goetz and Werther, Goethe’s lyrical poems revolutionized literary life in Germany. In the decade from 1775 to 1785 (his first Weimar period), Goethe wrote so many poems in numerous moods and meters that he surpassed in quantity and quality all lyrical poets of the time. In many of them he reworked ancient ballads that had survived in traditional folk songs. Thus, “Heidenröslein,” now universally known in Schubert’s musical setting, goes back to an ancient story of a boy who breaks off a little flower that vainly attempts to ward him off by its thorns—probably a veiled report of a sexual violation. Some of Goethe’s ballads first appeared in his prose works, among them “Der Sanger” (The Singer) in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and “Der König in Thule” (The King in Thule) in Faust. He called them Lieder (songs), for indeed they excelled in melodious harmony, even before they were set to music. The lyrics could be frightening, as popular fairy tales and legends tend to be. In “Der Erlkönig” a

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dying child’s visions of the awful specter alternate with the father’s soothing words to quiet it. Many lyrics attained their effect through their great simplicity or through a powerful evocation of a “mood” induced by nature, such as “Über allen Gipfeln” (Over all the Hilltops) (1780) or “An den Mond” (To the Moon) (1778). None of them became more popular than his songs of nostalgia, with their deeply Romantic Sehnsucht for an ancient homeland, “Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen blühen?” (Knowst Thou the Land Where Lemons Grow?). All German lyricists followed Goethe, although only Heine in his best work was able to match him. Hence Goethe in the Romantic period became a “classic” in the original sense of a model to imitate. At the same time, he, like Schiller, Hölderlin, and other early Romantics, even Friedrich Schlegel in his early period, was a “classicist” in the later sense of having been inspired by Greek and Roman classical writers. During his early years in Weimar, Goethe wrote his drama Iphigenie auf Tauris, although he postponed publishing it until 1788. One also hears echoes of Pindarus in such early poems as “Harzreise im Winter” (Journey in the Harz Mountains in Wintertime). Goethe’s desire for a direct acquaintance with the classical world led him to depart abruptly for Italy on September 3, 1786, where he remained until June 18, 1788. A new, self-conscious classicism appears in the Römische Elegien and the Venezianische Epigramme (both 1790), as well as in the heavily reworked version of Iphigenie auf Tauris. Rome and the ancient culture attracted him by their sense of wholeness, their naturalness, and the absence of inner dividedness typical of the Gothic North. The Latin poets Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid inspired his Roman Elegies, an erotic exchange between a German male and a Roman female, written in the ancient elegiac meter of disticha (a dactylic hexameter followed by a pentameter). A more cynical tone prevails in his Venetian Epigrams, poetic reflections on Goethe’s later journey to Venice as reluctant companion of the Duke of Weimar. This time Italy appears to have lost much of its attraction to him: the people who live and work there remain unaware of the ancient world that surrounds them. But then, all who visit the classical civilization can be no more than foreign visitors. As Goethe later remarked about his own journey to Italy: “We are all pilgrims, we who seek Italy. It is only scattered bones we revere with happy credibility.”

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The tour cured him of any desire to return. “The Venetian Epigrams seem to have afforded a cathartic effect on Goethe; here he rid himself of black bile.”1 As the Italian experience became more distant, Goethe’s “classicism” settled down to a less literal and more formal imitation of ancient poetry. Goethe’s Romanticism did not end with his so-called classical period. He returned to the writing of Wilhelm Meister, which he had started before 1783. The finished version would not be published until 1795, under the title Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (W. M.’s Apprenticeship). I shall postpone discussing this model of German Romanticism until chapter 6, on the novel. The endurance of Goethe’s Romanticism is also confirmed by the early versions of the later drama Faust, of which he had published a first fragment in 1790.2 Schelling and the brothers Schlegel greeted it as a Romantic masterpiece, “the dawn of genuine art and pure beauty.”3 The conflict between Faust’s ideal of self-realization and the limits of his success in the attempt to achieve it was a prominently Romantic theme. So is the vague pantheism that runs through the play. Yet Faust was also a “classical” drama. Only after having gone through a classical period, and with the critical support of Schiller, did Goethe succeed in transforming what he himself had called a “barbarous composition” into a coherent philosophical drama.4 Around the same time he started preparing the lengthy episode on Helena of Troy, which was to appear in Faust II, the strange result of a classical theme developed in a Romantic style. To describe the “meaning” of Faust is impossible; even Goethe declared himself incapable of doing so. Yet the hero undoubtedly represented a striving to “savor” all experiences that life has to offer, followed by a failure and a rebirth to a new life. The drama begins with a “Prologue in Heaven,” inspired by the introduction to the Book of Job. The devil, who appears in Goethe’s drama as the celestial court jester Mephistopheles, complains about the conduct of humans. They are never satisfied and always desire to possess more. The Lord refers him to his servant Faust, who, although driven by an insatiable desire for knowledge, nevertheless has remained faithful to Him. Mephistopheles replies that Faust fears God only as long as all goes well. He bets that he can lead the man so far astray that the devil will be entitled to claim

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him after death. The Lord merely replies that all men occasionally lose their way and allows Mephisto to “test” Faust. Goethe’s wager substantially differs from the one in the Book of Job. In God’s plan, the test will not prove that Faust’s virtue will survive the devil’s temptations, but rather that Faust, after having committed more moral errors than most humans, may still be saved. Faust thereby becomes somewhat of a Lutheran theodicy, in which God justifies the sinner (simul justus et peccator—simultaneously sinner and justified). Mephistopheles encourages Faust’s ambition to attain much of what he desires, in order to corrupt him through his success in obtaining it, and thereafter to destroy the object of his lust. The play criticizes the modern will to control all aspects of life, even its origin. Wagner, Faust’s assistant, has succeeded in creating a human spirit, named Homunculus, who is now in a laboratory tube waiting for a body. Faust is a tragedy, as the subtitle states, because all of Faust’s enterprises, even the well-intentioned ones, fail. In his Aesthetics Hegel calls the play “the absolute philosophical tragedy.” Yet it is also a comedy, because in the end Faust is saved through the loving intercession of Gretchen, whose life he had ruined. At the conclusion of the drama appear the mysterious Neoplatonic verses that seem to confound any interpretation we might have reached about the play’s meaning: “All that perishes is only a symbol. The inaccessible here becomes attainment” (“Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis; / Das Unzulängliche / Hier wird’s Ereignis”). Perhaps Goethe intimates that success or failure is not ultimately decisive in life: human existence attains its meaning only at completion, and that completion may differ from much of what the person had been pursuing. In this work of awesome complexity, Goethe has plumbed existence to a depth that might be called “endless.” No other literary product more fully verifies Kant’s judgment that the “ideas” conveyed by a work of art are so profound that ordinary concepts cannot express them—explaining why this fictional tragedy has inspired more German thinkers than any modern philosopher has except Kant. In his mid-sixties (1814 – 16) Goethe opened yet another dimension in his poetry. During Napoleon’s final year and exile, when Europe was breaking apart and royal thrones collapsed, the poet sought a more peaceful setting in which to exercise his creative powers. In his West-

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Österlicher Divan he turned to the fourteenth-century Persian Sufi Hafiz, who in lively, elegant songs had celebrated the joys of earthly life and love while “deeply staring into the mysteries of the godhead.” In this collection of poetic translations, descriptions, and imitations of the Sufi poet, Goethe may seem to break with classicism and to indulge in “Orientalist” diversions. Yet these poems reach the same formal perfection as his earlier ones. Some were written during Goethe’s journey through Rhineland in 1814; others during his stay with the Frankfurt banker Johann Jacob von Willemer and his young wife, Marianne. Only Book 1 remains close to Hafiz’s religious vision. A poem such as “Blessed Longing” (“Selige Sehnsucht”) is based on the mystical image of the religious lover who, like a moth, flies into the flame of divine love. Yet in the second book, the poet warns against a mystical interpretation: “They have called you, holy Hafiz, the mystical tongue, these masters of words, without recognizing the value of the word.” The Sufi poet, who owed his reputation to his exceptional knowledge of the Koran, moves beyond and occasionally against Holy Writ in this worldly translation of his infidel interpreter. In the “Book of Love” the poet takes the part of a fictional Sufi lover, conceived in the spirit of Hafiz’s poetry, and Marianne Willemer takes that of the beloved. A poem on the beloved’s rich hairlocks introduces the partner in Goethe’s poetic dialogue. These same locks reappear in Book 8, entitled “Suleika,” which consists entirely of love poems exchanged between Goethe and Marianne, here called Suleika (the name of Putiphar’s wife in the Koran). Despite the profane nature of the elderly Goethe’s love for the young woman, a religious cloud continues to hover over the playful dialogue. The Divan remains mysterious: it is partly an attempt to enter a different spiritual universe, partly erotic lyricism, and partly lighthearted Spielerei. In the poem “Wink” (Book 2) Goethe suggests that its religion is not to be taken too seriously: “The word is only a fan. . . .” Sehnsucht and Heimweh are words that often appear in Goethe’s poetry. But one feels that irony stands always ready to attribute the distance dividing ideal from reality to man’s fickle heart. There is nothing wrong with the world. The ideal is the real world with all that is in it. Rather than longing for what has never left us, a person should busy

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himself searching for his natural vocation, as Wilhelm Meister did, and once he has found it, should collaborate with nature, as Faust attempted to do at the end of Faust II. He may not succeed. Still, “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den sollen wir erlösen” (As long as man strives, we will redeem him). Whatever the outcome, Goethe covers all failures in the poem “Vanitas, Vanitatum Vanitas”: “Ich habe meine Sach auf Nichts gestellt /Drum ist’s so wohlmir in der Welt” (I have set my case on nothing / That’s why it goes so well for me in the world). But that is also how Goethe ceased to be a Romantic.

Schiller

Friedrich von Schiller (1759 – 1805) was born in a Pietist family in Württemberg. Although he soon lost his faith, the religion of his youth never ceased to influence his work, and it strongly reappears in two of his dramas. The Duke of Württemberg, in whose army his father served, sent the boy to a military academy to study medicine. The young Schiller liked neither the studies nor the military discipline. Die Räuber (The Robbers), a play about social rebellion, which he wrote in 1781 while still a student, strongly displeased the Duke. With some difficulty the poet managed to escape from Württemberg and to have his play performed in Mannheim (outside the Duke’s jurisdiction), where he obtained a position as playwright-in-residence at the local theater. After his contract expired he faced years of bitter poverty. During those years he began writing Don Carlos, one of his best plays, as well as a number of poems. In Leipzig he met Gottfried Koerner, who was to become a lifelong friend and a judicious critic of his work. He followed Koerner to Dresden, where he completed Don Carlos and began a historical study of the sixteenth-century rebellion in the Netherlands. In 1789 he was appointed professor of history at the University of Jena. Despite his growing reputation, poverty continued to pursue him, and his health broke down. Yet nothing could prevent him from pursuing the literary task he had set himself. At last, in 1791 the Danish Duke of Augustenburg granted him a generous stipend. In 1794 he began an intense literary collaboration with Goethe on the journal Die Horen. Although Schiller was by then respected as much

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as Goethe and his work had become far more popular than Goethe’s, he always felt inferior to his illustrious friend. As impressive as his literary output was his attractive personality. He devoted his life and creative powers to the political and cultural awakening of Germany and generously assisted young poets, such as Novalis and Hölderlin. Today, readers tend to appreciate Schiller’s lyrical poetry less than his contemporaries did. Nonetheless, a few poems written during and shortly after the six years he devoted to philosophy (1790– 95) have recently attracted new critical attention. Together with Goethe, Schiller belonged to the early, classical period of pre-Romanticism. In “The Gods of Greece,” the poet mourns the loss of the ancient mythical religion, when gods dwelled with humans in a common world. Christianity and the rough spirit of the North destroyed that beautiful intimacy. Alle Blüten sind gefallen Von des Nordes schauerlichen Wehn Einen zu bereichern unter allen Muszte diese Götterwelt vergehn. (All those blossoms have fallen under the freezing northern wind. To enrich one above all others this divine world had to perish.) (I, 85)5

In the bitter poem “Resignation” (I, 60), Schiller blames the severe religion of his childhood, which promised joy but brought only hardship: “Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren / Auch mir hat die Natur / An meiner Wiege Freude zugeschworen” (I also was born in Arcadia / To me also nature / at the cradle promised joy). But, according to Christian doctrine, the promise was to be realized only after death. Rather than waiting for it, the poet, like Heracles, decides to overcome the sufferings of existence by a proud refusal to seek happiness from any powers but his own. Two poetic genres were Romantic favorites: the idyll and the elegy. If the ideal turns out somehow to be harmonious with existing reality, Schiller calls it an idyll. If the two remain opposed, he refers to it as an

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elegy. Following ancient usage, we have come to link both forms to a prosody of dactylic disticha. Yet for Schiller, the meter is less important than the mode of experiencing. Thus, despite Goethe’s artful use of the ancient elegiac meter, he regards his Roman Elegies as elegies only in form, not in content. Schiller did not even consider his own poem “Das Ideal und das Leben” (The Ideal and Life) (I, 93 – 98) sufficiently subjective to qualify as an elegy, even though it opposes ideals to realities and is written in the traditional meter.6 From that same period of poetic output date Schiller’s prose works on literary theory: the elegant Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity) (1793), the influential Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry) (1795), and the philosophical Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters) (1795). All were written in reference to Kant’s moral philosophy. At the beginning of On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller states: “It is for the most part Kantian principles on which the following theses will be based.”7 Finding no adequate literary tradition on which to build his poetry, Schiller turned to Kant for inspiration. In his practical philosophy Kant had solidly justified the ideal of freedom as the goal of ethical life. In his Critique of Judgment, he had philosophically legitimated the aesthetic experience as the sensuous incarnation of this idea. Considering the modesty of Kant’s aesthetic contribution, one cannot but admire what Schiller accomplished with it. He reintegrated the aesthetic realm with the moral one in his two theoretical treatises, On Grace and Dignity and On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In the former he argued that no moral life could be complete without graciousness of conduct. (Kant, in a footnote to his later work on religion, conceded the truth of Schiller’s insight.) In the latter, Schiller argued that only an aesthetic education enables humans to recognize the full comprehension of the moral life. I shall return to both works in chapter 7, on Romantic ethics. A further critical problem demanded Schiller’s attention: How could the transcendent ideals of poetry be more than illusions? How could reality, for the secular mind, still be symbolic of a transcendent meaning, as it had been for the Greeks and even more so for Christians? For Goethe that problem had never existed. He had never sought his

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ideals beyond the actual world. He was both bemused and intrigued by Schiller’s predicament. To him, Schiller’s search for transcendent ideals appeared to create an unnecessary obstacle that could result only in a dualist conception of reality. Neither the aesthetic intuition nor its poetic expression required a transcendent foundation. They provided their own ideals and their own symbolic power. Ideal and reality coincide, for Goethe, in the aesthetic intuition. Schiller’s religious nostalgia had needlessly taken him through the byways of German philosophy and created the need for a complicated process from intuition to abstraction, which then had to be retransformed to poetic intuition. From Goethe’s point of view, in the poetic intuition the particular perception coincided with the universal idea. In this judgment, expressed in the course of his Conversations with Eckermann, Goethe reveals the very issue that had increasingly removed him from Romanticism. For him, no unreachable ideal distanced him from actual reality. The absolute consisted in the totality of what existed, of which he himself was a central part. In his essay “In Two Minds about Schiller,” Erich Heller has appropriately called Schiller the tragic poet of Idealism.8 Tragic, because he considered the ideals of the transcendental philosophy he embraced doubtful in their claims upon reality. “Idealism cannot be absolutely certain of its conclusions: it lacks the ultimate sanction of a theological faith” (p. 70). This unresolved tension between ideal and reality became the main theme of Schiller’s tragedies. Schiller’s reputation has survived primarily through his dramatic and his theoretical works. His tragedies tend to follow the classical model of a hero or heroine struggling with an inescapable fate that in the end destroys him or her. In his dramas the male hero, intensely aware of his power, plays a more active part than he does in the Greek tragedy. He attempts to impose his ideals upon reality, but unfavorable circumstances combine with his own tragic blindness to prevent him from succeeding. Despite repeated warnings, he continues to challenge fate, and in the end ruins himself as well as those whom he intended to save. Hans Urs von Balthasar has called the various modes in which Schiller’s tragic heroes cope with destiny “Einübungen in die Aneignung des Schicksals” (exercises in the appropriation of fate). Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen (1773) had marked the beginning of Sturm und Drang, and Schiller’s first play, Die Räuber (The Robbers)

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(1781), marked the end of it. Its hero, Karl Moor, banned from his ancestral castle by the intrigues of his brother, joins a band of outlaws to repair the injustices suffered by himself and others. He remains naïvely unaware of the limits of his power to change the established social order. Only in the fatal outcome of his noble intentions does he realize that his criminal activities have accomplished much evil and no good. We must overcome evil in ourselves before we can overcome it in others. The later Don Carlos (1787) (III, 5) is the tragic story of Count Posa, a sixteenth-century minister of Philip II, who in his attempt to liberate the Netherlands through his friend, Crown Prince Carlos, ruins the prince’s life as well as his own, without attaining his goal. The tragic outcome of the play is due to Posa’s failure to realize Carlos’s weakness and his father’s political rigidity. Wallenstein (1800) (IV, 5) differs from Schiller’s earlier plays in that the German general, Albrecht von Wallenstein (in the Thirty Years’ War), knows from the beginning the danger he runs by following a strategy that conflicts with the explicit orders of his emperor. He decides to initiate a peace treaty with Sweden and thereby score a decisive victory for the empire. To achieve his ideal he relies on his unique military power: “Freiheit ist bei der Macht allein” (Freedom belongs only where power is). While realizing the risk inherent in an act of extreme insubordination, the general challenges fate by steadfastly ignoring its warnings and attempting to circumvent it by magic as well as by military skill. In the end, he pays with his life for his presumptuousness. The play differs from earlier ones because, as Schiller explains, Wallenstein’s fate resulted from a self-inflicted blindness. He wrote to Goethe: “It is a wholly different operation to idealize realism than to realize the ideal” (Letters to Goethe, May 1, 1798, emphases mine). Idealizing reality was essentially what the playwright had been doing in his earlier dramas. Wallenstein was different: here, Schiller followed Goethe’s poetic realism rather than his own idealism. The play approaches a Greek drama. But Wallenstein’s attitude toward fate differs from that of ancient heroes, who in the end accept its inevitability. Wallenstein resists fate even after he learns that it will defeat him. In Die Braut von Messina (1803) (The Bride of Messina) (V, 284), Schiller deliberately attempted to imitate the classical form of the an-

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cient tragedy of vengeance. Here, fate destroys all hopes without ever becoming intelligible: “What are hopes, what are projects which man the perishable builds?” The opposition between this ancient fatalism and the idea of self-determination, typical of the modern tragedy, makes this drama less credible. Schiller realized that his experiment with the ancient form had failed and never tried it again. Ancient fate conflicts not only with the modern concept of freedom but also with the premodern recognition of a benevolent Providence. The religious believer is inclined to accept the divine will and thus to justify tragic events before they occur. Schiller presents this inner acceptance in the persons of Mary Stuart in Maria Stuart (1800) (V, 6) and of Jeanne d’ Arc in Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801) (V, 145). Piccolomini in Wallenstein (1800) comes close to adopting a similar attitude.9 Schiller possessed a more developed sense of the tragic than Goethe, who, even in plays with such catastrophic endings as Egmont and Tasso, remains more lyrical than tragic. Iphigenie auf Tauris, originally intended to be a drama in the ancient style, fell so far short of meeting this goal that Goethe, after his acquaintance with classical antiquity in southern Italy, decided to rewrite it. For Goethe, as for Hegel, everything had its proper place within a meaningful totality, while Schiller’s view remained more in line with Kant’s concept of freedom as an ideal that must direct our actions yet is never fully achieved. Goethe expressed the difference in his blunt statement: “All Schiller’s works are pervaded by freedom. But what is the good of a freedom we can never use?” (Conversations with Eckermann, January 18, 1827).

Novalis

Novalis, the pen name of Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772 – 1801), began his studies in Jena, where Schiller advised him to study law rather than poetry. Having moved to Leipzig in order to continue his studies, he met Friedrich Schlegel. As inspector of the salt mines of the Duke of Saxony, he soon became an accomplished mineralogist and developed a strong interest in philosophy. The event that determined his poetic life was the death in 1797 of his fifteen-year-old

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fiancée, Sophie von Kühn. A mystical experience at her grave inspired his Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night), which he published in Friedrich Schlegel’s literary magazine Athenäum (1800). It appeared there as a work of prose with some passages in poetic form. Yet in a manuscript that emerged early in the twentieth century, almost the entire composition is written in free verse. I follow the manuscript version, although the Athenäum edition contains a few improvements in the poetic parts. The Hymnen may have been inspired by a German translation of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts on Death and Immortality.10 The Hymns are the first masterpiece issued by a member of what was later called the German Romantic Movement. Novalis’s poetry differs from that of his contemporaries in that it does not record a past experience but rather coincides with the actual one in which it originates.11 The First Hymn begins with praise of the awakening day. Yet soon the poet begins to long for the return of the night, when, removed from the noise of day, he can give his memories and dreams free rein. Only the silence of night reveals our secret feelings and aspirations to ourselves. The recent death of his beloved has driven the poet into solitude, yet at night the deceased takes full possession of his mind. The night is there Enraptured is my soul Past is the earthly day And you are mine again.

This priority of night over day, of darkness over light, and of mystical depth over rational clarity, is typical of Romantic anti-illuminism. Yet one should not mistake it for anti-scientism. Novalis considered the scientific study of nature the most effective preparation for understanding her symbolism. In the Third Hymn, the poet interrupts his nocturnal meditation to recall in a prose fragment the event that changed his life. While visiting Sophie’s grave, suddenly a shudder descended on him and “the bond of birth broke the chains of light.” During the following slumber, he enters into a different world. In a cloud the features of Sophie appear to him. Ordinary days follow, but they do not disrupt his sense of hav-

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ing entered a new life. Death has lost its sting. He rejoices that on his final day, light will no longer follow night and interrupt the union with his beloved. The Hymn concludes with verses that appear only in the Athenäum version. I quote from Charles E. Passage’s translation: I feel now Death’s Youth-giving flood, To balm and aether Is changed my blood. For I live by day Full of faith and desire, In the nights I die In holy fire.12

In the Fifth and Sixth Hymns the mystical awareness of the night expands into a Christian vision of history. The ancient gods of Greece were gods of light, celebrating their victory over the titanic forces of chaos. Humans partook of their bliss. “Life was an eternal feast of gods and men.” Yet “one thought fearsome [the idea of death] walked to the merry tables / And enveloped the hearths with wild fear.” As the old world declined, and its pleasure gardens wilted, the gods disappeared and nature lost its life. Christ arrived in this night of the gods, dispelling the fear of death in his resurrection: “Gehoben ist der Stein / Die Menschheit ist erstanden” (The stone has been lifted / humankind is arisen). The fifth Hymn abruptly changes the mood of the preceding ones. Novalis was to develop its central idea in an essay entitled “Die Christenheit oder Europa.” In the final Hymn he resumes his poetic reflection on night and death. The poet longs for a transfigured state after death, and he decides to die a year later, not by killing himself but by the intensity of his desire for liberation. “Gelobt sei uns die ewige Nacht, / Gelobt der ewige Schlummer” (Praised be the eternal night / Praised be the eternal slumber). Among his philosophical Fragments, one aphorism repeats the same desire for death, although he attributes it to Plato. “The true philosophical act consists in inflicting death upon one-self [Selbsttötung, which might also refer to an ascetic killing of the selfish ego]. This is the real beginning of all philosophy.” One year after Sophie’s

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death, Novalis, rather than dying, became engaged to Julie von Charpentier. He did not forget Sophie, but her image changed: losing all individual, earthly traits, it took on the character of a celestial feminity, occasionally merging with that of the Virgin Mary. Next to the Hymnen, Novalis wrote a collection of Geistliche Lieder (Spiritual Songs) (1802), which were actually used in the Lutheran liturgy. His unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen also contains a number of Romantic songs, including an apocalyptic hymn that introduces the second unfinished part. In his Journals and his Fragments Novalis constantly refers to Goethe and Schiller as his literary authorities, more so than his Romantic friends Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel. Two short pieces influenced later critics. In a one-page essay on language, “Monolog,” Novalis argues that true discourse is nothing but a play of language with itself, of which poetry is the music.13 The French Symbolist poets considered this essay a manifesto for the self-sufficiency of poetry.14 Novalis’s symbolic theory appears in his prose poem Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Disciples of Saïs). Isis, the “Queen of the Night,” represented with a veiled face, had been a central figure in Hellenistic mystery cults. Rosicrucians and Freemasons had revived the tradition. Schiller wrote a poem on this mythical figure, in which a young man presumes to tear down the veil. The next day his friends find him lying lifeless beneath the statue of Isis. In his sketch, Novalis has transformed Schiller’s version of the ancient story. A pyramid in Saïs bears the inscription: “I am all, what is, what was, what will be. No mortal has ever lifted my veil.” The goddess has revealed herself only to one. What did he see? “Himself ” (Werke, 101– 31). Thus Isis becomes a symbolic representation of that inner universe in which time and eternity are conjoined in a coincidence of opposites. The Delphic exhortation “know thyself ” may be rephrased to read: “Raise the veil of Isis.” Here, the injunction against raising the veil has turned into a command. Novalis’s concept of poetry has been called a magic-idealist vision of Being achieved through the imagination rather than through reason. The magical quality of this poetic vision constitutes a virtual universe, an ideal counterpart of the real one. Inspired by the theosophist LouisClaude de Saint-Martin, Novalis considered the physical world a symbol of a spiritual universe. When the poetic imagination converts the

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world into poetry, “the world becomes dream and the dream becomes world.” Novalis’s poetry went further than that of any other Romantic in a quest for an invisible mystery that hides behind the visible world. The reality of his world is entirely spiritual. One of the first modern poets to assume the role of the ancient vates (prophet-poet), Novalis thought of himself as a religious prophet, a successor of Orpheus, the mythical visionary who domesticated humans and animals by his song and lyre. Trained as a mine inspector, he considered it his vocation to interpret nature from a transcendent perspective and thus reveal nature’s inmost secrets. This kind of poetry required a maturity attained only after a direct exposure to death. Death alone reveals the full meaning of life. Orpheus too had visited the underworld. Persephone, the queen of the dead, seduced by his music, had allowed him to accompany his deceased Eurydice back to the land of the living. Yet by looking back as she followed him, he lost her again with no hope of ever retrieving her. Neither should a poet, once he has looked death in the face, ever attempt to return to ordinary life. In a mystical vision experienced at the tomb of his beloved Sophie, Novalis came to look at death as an essential part of life. Only a person who had crossed the border to that fuller life knows the light it sheds on the present one. Viewed from the perspective of eternity, all things dispersed in this life become intergrated within an ultimate unity. The night foreshadows the transition from this life to the chthonic kingdom. In its silent darkness, mortals briefly enter through the door that by day remains closed. Then, they receive dreams and become infused with a hidden energy that transforms their view of life. Death ceases to exist. Such had been the essential meaning of the Hymnen an die Nacht. The nightly visions liberate the dead from the bonds of earthly life. Gradually, Novalis had come to view Christ as the fulfillment of the ancient Orphic symbolism. He also had gone to visit the dead at Sophie’s grave. With some of the Church Fathers, he regarded the mythical hero as a forerunner of Christ, who, in liberating the dead from the underworld, had given a new content to the ancient legend. The poet transferred this alternative version of the Orphic myth into his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Werke, 132 – 286). The first part, the only one completed, acquaints the reader with the preparation of

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life after death. Heinrich encounters the ancient Count von Hohenzollern, who is spending the final period of his life hidden as a hermit in the deepest part of a mine. In this solitude, he is anticipating his nearby transfer to the other shore. To the Count, as to Novalis, death was the entrance to the true fatherland, the blessed life. In the second part of this novel, the poet intended to write about the kingdom of death, which he introduced with his most otherworldly poem, the “Lied der Toten” (Song of the Dead). It contains fifteen strophes, of which I have translated the first and the penultimate ones. In this song, the poet attempts to penetrate the minds of those who have died and who continue to live in a spiritual realm. They remember the past, yet are no longer burdened by it. Lobt doch unsre stillen Feste Unsre Gärten, unsre Zimmer, Das bequeme Hausgeräte, Unser Hab und Gut. Täglich kommen neue Gäste, Diese früh, die andern späte, Auf den weiten Herden immer Lodert neue Lebensglut. (Praise our silent fortresses Our gardens and our rooms, Our handy utensils, Our belongings and possessions. Daily other guests arrive, Some come early, others late, On the ample herds ever Burns new glow of life.)

The song concludes with an address to the living: Könnten doch die Menschen wissen, Unsre künftigen Genossen, Dass bei allen ihren Freuden Wir geschäftig sind:

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Jauchend würden sie verscheiden, Gern das bleiche Dasein missen— O! die Zeit ist bald verflossen, Kommt, Geliebte, doch geschwind! (Could humans only know, They our future companions That in all their joys We have part [or: we are active]: Happily would they leave this life Gladly miss their pale existence— Oh! The time will soon go by. Come, beloved, promptly now!

Amazingly, a mine inspector held this symbolic view of the world. In him, as in Blake, poetic awareness consisted essentially in a search for the absolute, beyond nature and beyond selfhood. The poetry of this quintessentially Romantic visionary suffers under the weight of its spiritual transcendence. Yet in his best poems he is sublime.

Hölderlin

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843), the greatest lyrical poet of the Romantic era in Germany, was born in Lauffen, a small town in Swabia. He received his higher education at the Tübinger Stift, a Protestant seminary in a former Augustinian convent, where Hegel and Schelling were his roommates. The three young men, who influenced one another, were to revolutionize philosophy and poetry in Germany. It was probably Hölderlin who inspired the earliest fragment of an idealist system of philosophy.15 Like Schiller, whom he greatly admired and who provided him with his first position as Hofmeister (private educator of a family’s children), he dreamed of raising his contemporaries to a higher spiritual level. The political emancipation begun by the French Revolution, he believed, was to be completed by a cultural one. This humanist ideal inspired Hölderlin’s early hymns—To Truth, To Humanity, To Beauty, To Friendship, To Courage.16 Today these

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rhetorical imitations of Schiller rarely arouse the enthusiasm they were intended to evoke. In the “Hymn to the Goddess of Harmony,” the young poet praises Urania, the creative principle that unites all things in a comprehensive harmony. In it, the young Hölderlin tried to express a vision centered around the words Hen kai pan (One-and-All), which he had written in Hegel’s album in Tübingen. The words were well known among German Romantics. Jacobi had attributed them to the older Lessing, who had claimed to have no other religion left than this “Spinozistic” principle (although Spinoza himself had never used these words). The saying is ambiguous: it could be either pantheistic (all is God) or panentheistic (God is the being of all that exists). In the later hymns the poet distinguished the one creative principle from the multitude of created, finite beings. Eventually the mother of his first pupil, realizing that her son was incapable of serious learning, enabled her young Hofmeister to attend the University of Jena. He flourished in this center of early Romanticism, where at that time Fichte and Schelling were teaching. Yet having no further means of support, he was forced to seek another tutoring position and ended up at the house of the Frankfurt banker Jakob Gontard. Soon Gontard’s well-educated young spouse, Susette, joined the children as his pupil and fell in love with their instructor. This sensitive woman inspired the poet to write some of his best work, including a large part of his poetic novel Hyperion, which he dedicated to her. After four happy years, an unpleasant confrontation with her husband drove Hölderlin from the house. Yet Susette’s image continued to haunt him, and her later death may have been partly responsible for his mental collapse. Under the name of Diotima—the priestess of love in Plato’s Symposium—Susette became the living image of classical harmony, the part taken in his early hymns by Urania. Two poems directly express the poet’s pain at the separation from the beloved: “Der Abschied” (The Farewell) and “Die Liebenden” (The Lovers). During the following months Hölderlin wrote the three elegies that initiated a succession of great poetry: “Menons Klagen um Diotima” (Menon’s Lament about Diotima), “Der Archipelagus,” and “Brod und Wein.” In the first, the poet laments that the loss of Diotima has transformed the brightness of nature into the darkness of a forest, where the wounded animal retires to die. The second, the long elegy “Der Archi-

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pelagus,” reflects a less melancholy mood. It is spring, the time when human hearts tend to reawaken their first love. The season reminds the poet of the golden age of Hellas, when people lived in harmony with nature. A mystical light spreads over the waters and islands of the Ionian archipelago, animating the sea with a godlike spirit. In this elegy, perhaps more intensely than in any other, Hölderlin expresses his attachment to the land and the culture of ancient Greece. While writing Hyperion, he had given form and substance to his classical dream. He had come to know and to admire Greek poets: Homer, Pindarus, and Sophocles. Above all, he had become acquainted with the gods, who conveyed life and beauty to the ancient land and who continued to inspire his poetry. Of course, he knew that they were gone. Yet, he muses: Your islands are still there—and none of their bloom is lost. Crete stands and Salamis grows, shaded by laurels From all sides surrounded by rays Delos At sunrise raises its animated head. (“Der Archipelagus,” 12 –14)

The soil remains sanctified by the bodies of its heroes. Like Pindarus, the poet will revive the memory of their deeds and return to the heart what the tomb had stolen. Like the Orphic singer, he will step across the threshold of death and once again converse with the spirits of the land. Dort im schweigenden Thal, an Tempes hangenden Felsen Will ich wohnen mit euch, dort oft, ihr herrlichen Nahmen Her euch rufen bei Nacht und wenn ihr zürnend erscheint Weil der Pflug die Graber entweiht, mit der Stimme des Herzens Will ich mit frommen Gesang euch sühnen, heilige Schatten! Bis zu leben mit euch, sich ganz die Seele gewöhnet. (There in the silent valley, at Tempe’s hanging rocks Will I live with you: there often invoke your glorious names And call them at night. And when you angry appear When the plow desecrates the tombs with the voice of the heart Shall I with pious song appease you, holy shades Until my soul becomes fully wont to live with you.)

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Soon, however, the mood darkens. Greece has become a garden of the dead. All who lived there are gone. Ruins fill the places where once the ancient temples stood, and the Delphic god has become silent. Lonesome and empty are the roads that once guided hopeful pilgrims to the god’s sanctuary. Instead of reviving the gods, the poet can only envy the shades who inhabit the peaceful Elysian Fields: O, children of happiness, pious ones, now walking with their fathers In blessed forgetfulness of the days of their fate Above at river Lethe, will you no more return?

Then, the poet remembers Mnemosyne, the oldest and most powerful of the Muses who may grant new, spiritual life to the deceased. Remembrance, in German Erinnerung, interiorizes what remains in the mind and thereby renders it more intimately present. As the poet sings in his elegy: May then the feast [of year’s end] preserve also you, days of the past! Let the people look up at Hellas, and weeping and thanking May the proud day of triumph become meek in remembrance.

“Mnemosyné,” one of the last poems Holderlin wrote before his mental collapse, suggests how much he was concerned to keep the dead spiritually present. In “Brod und Wein” (Bread and Wine), the poet searches more deeply than he did in “Der Archipelagus.” The culture of Greece is irretrievably past, and, since the gods have left us, we are forced to search for meaning in our barren present. The poet laments the absence of gods in his age. The elegy begins with a meditation on night, a time of darkness but also of merciful forgetfulness and holy remembrance. It was during the night that the poets of Corinth, Thebes, and the lands around Olympus dreamed of the coming gods. Through their songs, they brought the gods out of the sacred darkness into the clarity of living persons by giving names and human faces to the nameless revelation of the One-and-All. Where are their successors now? Have all gods departed and closed the heavenly feast because our vessels were too weak

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for their messages? “We have come too late. The gods still live, but high above our heads in another world.” The earth has ceased to concern the heavenly ones. They no longer care whether we live or die. Henceforth they grant us only an occasional dream to remember them. We must harden ourselves to live without gods until we regain the strength to sustain their presence. At this time only poets, priests of Dionysus, wander from land to land reminding us of the heavenly ones. Yet who listens to poets in our time of scarcity? “Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” The last god to leave the earth was Dionysus. In Tübingen, Hölderlin and Schelling had often discussed the significance of this god of many names—both one of the oldest and the youngest of the Greek pantheon. Much later, in his Philosophy of Mythology, Schelling was to present him as the herald of a new era. In “Bread and Wine” Hölderlin anticipates this interpretation. Christ the Redeemer appears as Dionysus’s successor, who, having “descended to the shades,” has brought new hope.17 A “quiet genius,” announcing the end of the gods, he has left us a memory of his short presence among us and a sign of his future return in the gifts of bread, the fruit of the earth, and wine, “the joy of the thundering god.” Do these words symbolize the departure of Dionysus or the coming of Christ? The poem leaves it undecided. Later, when he resumed the image, Hölderlin was to distinguish the time of promise clearly from the time of fulfillment. After even the traces of the fleeing gods have vanished, he wrote, “a torchbearer, the son of the Highest,” appears out of the darkness bringing new light. The night is not over yet, but “divine fires burn also during the night.” The poet was to continue his search for a transcendent presence in his final great hymns “Friedensfeier” (Feast of Peace), “Der Einzige” (The Only One), and “Patmos.” What was the meaning of a historical process wherein one deity had to make place for another? “Bread and Wine” does not answer this question. It remains a transitional poem. Nor does the beautiful “Wie wenn am Feiertage” (As When on a Holiday) shed new light on the subject, although it also has a profoundly religious meaning. At first the poet seems to return to his early poetry of nature: “As when on a holiday, to see the field / A farmer goes in the morning, after / Out of a hot night the lightning fell. . . .” The land has suffered no damage; the early spring rain has awakened it from

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the sleep of winter, and creative powers are, once again, drawing ordered life from chaos. They inspire the poet to compose new songs reminding him of his prophetic vocation at the turning of the time. The lightning suddenly reminds him of the vehemence of divine revelation in poetry. The poet becomes aware that to fulfill his prophetic task, he must be willing “to stand bareheaded under the divine storm and to grasp the Father’s thunder beam with his bare hand in order to give the people the divine gift wrapped in song.”18 The poet is anxious “to name the divine All-Unity,” but he finds no words. He merely mentions the powers that wander forth between heaven and earth. The conflict with the celestial powers remains unresolved, and the poet left his work unfinished. Equally ambiguous and no less profound is the elegy “Heimkunft” (Homecoming). After leaving the Gontards in Frankfurt, the poet had accepted yet another position as Hofmeister, this time in Switzerland. Yet after a few months he abandoned it. In the darkness of the early morning of his departure, the poet, sailing home on Lake Konstanz, is in an expectant mood. Suddenly the luminous snow on top of the Alps appears filled with roses. Joyfully he anticipates bringing the message of his new insights to his loved ones. While reflecting, however, on how powerful the idea of God’s immanence in the world has grown in him, he is overcome by a vague fear. How will his relatives and neighbors receive this message? The happy prospect of seeing them eventually dispels his unrest: “They are still the same!” But soon anxiety returns as he foresees the necessity to divulge what he, during his absence, has learned of “the great Father.” How will that sound to their pious ears? “When we bless the meal, whom may I name? And when we rest from life each day, say, how shall I give thanks? Shall I name the High Ones then? No God loves what seems unseemly.” In this poem again, the poet is at a loss of words for naming the holy. He attempts to quiet his soul with the thought that the beauty of his songs might prepare the hearers to accept his message. Still, worries about his welcome have not fully vanished. Such is a singer’s fate: “Cares such as these, a singer must bear in his heart, gladly or not—and often; but the others not.” In an essay on this poem, Heidegger, a sensitive though not always reliable interpreter of Hölderlin, reminds us that the final “not” is a mysterious call to those “others” to become hearers and thereby learn to know the true

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meaning of “homeland.”19 But is home-coming still possible in an age that has broken the bond of communion with the heavenly ones? The name of God has become frozen in a dead concept. Words that once united now divide. The present reading of Hölderlin’s religious message rests on the three great hymns he wrote at the end of his active life.20 The occasion for writing “Friedensfeier” (the final copy of which was discovered only in 1954) had been the Peace Treaty of Lunéville in 1801, where France, after its victory over Austria, acquired the right to preserve its natural borders. Napoleon had organized a feast of peace to celebrate this agreement. He presented it as the ending of all wars in Europe, notwithstanding the fact that one year later he resumed the war with greater intensity. In Hölderlin’s poem, the gods have convened to celebrate the peace. One divine guest is referred to as “the Son,” “a young man who likes to be near the water source under Syrian palm trees.” All commentators agree that this guest refers to Christ, yet a great deal of controversy surrounds the identity of the “Prince” who presides over the banquet. Several commentators understand him to be a different person than the Son, leaving them with the problem of finding a suitable person for filling the Prince’s part. For lack of a better interpretation, I follow those who identify the Prince with “the Son,” although I admit that the Prince could also be the Spirit who convened the gods. This hymn, like “Bread and Wine,” follows the Pindaric model of triads of strophes. It abounds in biblical allusions, such as “Christ is our peace” (Eph. 2:14) and “Peace to the nations” (Zech. 9:10). Hölderlin here attempts to answer the question he posed in “Bread and Wine”: Did Christ peacefully succeed the Greek gods, or did he simply overrule them, as Schiller had suggested in his famous poem? Hölderlin intimates that in Christ all earlier gods find their final meaning. But his answer remains tentative. No single interpretation fits all elements. The political and world-historical dimension of the setting further complicates its religious symbolism. What distinguishes this poem from Hölderlin’s earlier poetry is that God here acts as “the God of time,” who forms an image of himself in history. Hölderlin’s question about the meaning of the gods comes to a head in the unfinished poem “Der Einzige” (The Only One). Three times he had tried to write this hymn, but no version satisfied him. The poet’s

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inability to conclude the poem is symptomatic of a basic religious problem, for which Holderlin found no solution. In “Friedensfeier” the poet had reconciled the gods and their cults with one another by showing that in the end all will be united. In “Der Einzige” he argues that we can adore only one god, even though he includes all others. The hymn begins with a question, raised in the nostalgic manner of the classical elegy, that sets the tone of the poem: “Was ist es, das / An die alten seligen Küsten / Mich fesselt, dass ich mehr noch / Sie liebe als mein Vaterland?” (What is it that binds me to the old blessed coasts that I love them more than even my fatherland?). Why does this emotional home lie distant in space and time from the poet’s actual one? The bond with his spiritual fatherland recalls his imagination to the places where once Apollo walked and where Zeus sired his sons and daughters. High thoughts and great men sprang up in this land of the gods. They inspired poets to sing of God’s presence among us. Why are the gods of a long-gone ancient world still able to distract the poet from the one God of his own time and place? If Christ is the successor of Heracles and Dionysus, as the poet claimed in “Friedensfeier,” why is he, the last of the divine race and the crown of their house, missing among the gods and sons of gods? Although the poet’s mind dwells in Greece, it is nonetheless the forgotten One he adores. The tone abruptly changes as the poet exclaims, “Mein Meister und Herr! / O du, mein Lehrer! / Was bist du ferne / geblieben?” (My Master and Lord! Oh, you, my teacher. Why have you remained so far?). Why was Christ excluded from the many? And why does serving him make all others into idols? Hölderlin found no answer, and several times he tried to rewrite the following verses. In one version, he accuses himself of having remained too exclusively attached to this one Lord, even though he considered him the brother of Dionysus and of those who preceded him. In another version, the poet expresses remorse at having compared Christ with those “worldly” children of Zeus, even though all stem from a common Father. This tense dilemma lies at the root of the hymn. Was it perhaps Christ’s own law of love that brought him to this predicament? For though love ultimately reconciles all, it also is, by its very nature, exclusive. “Es hänget an Einem die Liebe” (Love clings to a single one). The poet wonders: Have I too much become attached

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to you as to the only One? “Denn zu sehr, O Christus, hang ich an dir” (Too exclusively, O Christ, do I cling to you). Hölderlin’s concern does not stem from theological scruples. He had long ceased to be an “orthodox” Christian. But he blames himself for not having recognized that his own religious ideas are incompatible with his Romantic love for Hellas and its gods. This central question assumes a new urgency in the later hymns: What was the meaning of the coming of Christ after the ancient gods had vanished? In “Heimkunft” he wonders: How in our time can we still speak of God? The very disappearance of classical culture and its gods induces the poet to question all names of the holy. The gods’ disappearance is as mysterious as was their appearance. At this point, the ancient myth of Dionysus, the god who comes, moves to the center. Were the ancient gods forerunners of a more definitive parousia, and was Dionysus the last to precede it? Has the surpassingness of Being become more manifest in the final revelation (by Christ) than in the succession of all earlier gods? By exploring these primary questions poetically rather than philosophically, Hölderlin enhances their significance. What we know only in symbols will best be expressed in symbols. The clearest interpretation of Hölderlin’s worry about the relation between Christ and the ancient gods appears in Walther Rehm’s Orpheus, der Dichter und die Toten (Orpheus, the Poet and the Dead).21 For Hölderlin, the Greek gods, although they had ceased to be objects of a cult, represented an aesthetic truth which, to him, surpassed that of Christian theology. Nonetheless, Jesus occupied a supreme and definitive position in Hölderlin’s piety. Christ’s vision of God surpassed that of any ancient god. To the poet, Jesus remained a living divine presence, whereas the Greek gods are dead, never to rise again. This raises him beyond any comparison with them. Still, to Hölderlin, even as to Schelling, Christ appeared to fulfill an expectation that had been aroused by the Greek gods and especially by Dionysus, whom Hölderlin considered the last of the gods. This made Dionysus the conclusion of a historical progress in which he filled an essential part. Dionysus came out of an ancient, pre-Christian space. That space had ceased to be religious; it had become purely aesthetic. Religion and aesthetics belonged to two different spheres. The question the poet asks thus became unanswerable.

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Indeed, in one of the three versions, the poet himself rejects the very possibility of comparing the ancient gods with Christ in a continuous line of progress. At the same time, while strongly expressing his religious devotion to Christ as “the only one,” he cannot let go of the other gods, who have played such an important role in his poetic inspiration. Hölderlin ends with a prayer: “O Gottlicher, sei gegenwärtig und schöner wie sonst, o sei Versöhnender” (O divine One, be present and more beautiful, as before. O be the one who reconciles!). Hölderlin’s mental problems became apparent after he had served yet another unhappy period as Hofmeister in the south of France. While still in France, he suffered a complete mental breakdown. On his way home, he learned that Susette Gontard had died. As soon as he had somewhat recovered, his friend Isaac von Sinclair took him to Homburg, where he procured for Hölderlin an undemanding position as librarian of the local Landgraf. In the following months of recovery, he wrote his last great poem, “Patmos,” as a birthday present for the Count. “Patmos,” the poet’s last meditation on the existential and religious issues that had occupied his previous years, restructured the motifs of the two preceding hymns, the reconciliation of the gods and the devotion to one. Christ remains the focus of his devotion, but all other gods are now enclosed in him. The hymn is not a “synthesis” but rather an all-inclusive vision that, bypassing the paradoxical multiplicity in the divine, reflects on the living religious act, within which those tensions cease to exist. The poet introduces the poem by a dark saying: “Near is the God and hard to grasp. But where danger threatens, saving also waxes” (“Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch”). Many interpretations have been given of these Delphic verses. Does the danger consist in the very nearness of God or in the risk of misrepresenting God? Hölderlin symbolizes the holy danger through images of awe-inspiring mountains separated by deep gorges, with eagles flying in the dark and travelers crossing tenuous bridges linking one peak to another. The poet prays for wings to cross those “peaks of time,” now that his meditation is coming close to God. In response to his prayer, a rapture transports him to the Ionian coast, where he boards a boat to the Greek islands. He lands on Patmos, “an island less lovely than the others, but hospitable to the shipwrecked

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and the exiled,” where, according to Christian legend, the apostle John wrote the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. In the half-dark of a mystical cave, his identity is taken over by that of the visionary. With him, the poet remembers that Last Supper when “the Son of the Most High” taught the beloved disciple that, despite the raging of the world, the divine unity preserves the peace. The apostle recalls how, after Jesus’ death, the disciples lamented the divine absence, and the Master sent his Spirit to comfort them. The vision vanishes, and the poet returns to his own identity. The holy places have now become deserted, the memories of Christ have paled, and the heavens appear empty. The poet realizes that he would not even recognize an image of the divine Servant. To find some meaning in this emptiness, he turns to the parable of the sower: some of the wheat is lost, yet at the end the harvest will come. “God’s work resembles our own, in that He wills not everything at once.” Humans should not attempt to hasten the process. Yet when it reaches completion, all will recognize “the jubilant song of the Most High.” In conclusion, the poet addresses the man who rescued him after his mental collapse, the pious Landgraf of Homburg, who had asked him to write a religious poem. Und wenn die Himmlischen jetzt So, wie ich glaube, mich lieben Wie viel mehr Dich, Denn Eines weisz ich Dasz nämlich der Will Des ewigen Vaters viel Dir gilt. (And if, as I believe, the Heavenly Ones love me, so much more will they love you. For one thing I know: that the will of the Father greatly concerns you.)

The hymn closes with the threnody previously heard at the end of “Brod und Wein” and “Der Einzige”: “Zu lang, zu lang schon ist / Die Ehre der Himmlischen unsichtbar” (Too long, too long already has the glory of the Heavenly Ones remained invisible). Then follow the cryptic words:

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“But God wants us to preserve the written letter and the right reading of it.” Hölderlin may have added this final line to put the traditional Landgraf at ease. Yet their meaning is anything but traditional. The written letter remains that of Scripture, but its interpretation must not be left to theologians alone. We must also listen to the poets. Shortly after he wrote this hymn, his friend Sinclair was arrested on unsupported suspicions of treason. The investigation also included Hölderlin. He lost his position as librarian and, in a state of aggressive insanity, was brought to a mental hospital in Tübingen. After the doctors declared him incurable, he was placed with a master carpenter’s family. In the tower of their house, he spent the rest of his life. There were moments of remission in his sickness, during which he wrote snippets of poetry. A final echo of the poet’s suffering still reaches us out of his mental darkness in an invocation of the deceased “Diotima”: Wenn aus der ferne, da wir geschieden sind, Ich dir noch kennbar bin, dir Vergangenheit, O du Teilheber meiner Schmerzen! Einiges Gute bezeichnen dir kann . . . [here it ends] (If from the distance that separates us I still am knowable to you, if your past, Oh you partaker in my sorrows! Can still mean some good to you . . .)

In the one drama he wrote, Der Tod des Empedokles (The Death of Empedocles), Hölderlin relived the spiritual struggles that had consumed so much of his life. It became a life work often resumed but never completed. The first and second versions of the play are identical: Empedocles is declared guilty. Yet his fault and the characters differ. Little remains of a third version, written during his period of insanity. Since hearing Fichte’s lectures in Jena, the ideal of the sage who raises the minds of his fellow citizens had inspired Hölderlin. He saw it realized in the fifth-century Sicilian philosopher, poet, and magician Empedocles, who had taught that the four uncreated elements of the cosmos attract each other by “love” ( philia) and that natural as well as human history consists of strife between love and its opposite, hatred.

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Cycles of love alternate with cycles of hatred. The idea of universal love appealed to Hölderlin, as did the image of the suffering hero. Empedocles had been banned from his city of Agrigentum because of his role in a movement to install a democratic government. His enemies later spread the rumor that he had ended his life by leaping into the crater of Mount Etna. Hölderlin’s two-act play represents the Greek sage as a healer who, through some violation of divine law, loses the magic power that the gods had granted him. In the first version, his enemies accuse Empedocles of identifying himself with the Heavenly Ones, as if he were a god. His main crime thereby consists in raising himself above nature, the source of his power. In doing so, he has become forgetful of the One-and-All, for the poet the ground of all true religion. In the later version, the philosopher is guilty of failing successfully to mediate between gods and men: to the former, he owes uninterrupted devotion, to the latter, total dedication. His love of humans induces him to reveal divine secrets and thus to betray the gods, while humans do not forgive him for his frequent withholding of divine gifts. Thus Empedocles has estranged himself from humans as well as from gods. Like the hero of Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles’ drama, which Hölderlin had begun to translate, Empedocles mysteriously disappears. “And when tomorrow you do not find me, he admonishes his followers, say then: he should not have grown old and counted the days, nor should he have become subject to anxiety; unseen did he go away and no human hand buried him and no eye knows of his ashes.” Empedocles’ death initiates the new order that he had preached. Hölderlin wrote only three scenes of a third version, in which he absolves the hero from all guilt: Empedocles dies as a sacrificial victim for the salvation of humankind. Again, he appears as a mediator between gods and men, a half-god charged with the task of bringing the gifts of the gods to the human race. Although the different versions of the play appear to move ever closer to a Christian idea of redemption, the playwright remained unambiguous in his critique of institutional religion. In the first act, a citizen of Agrigentum blames the priest Hermocrates, Empedocles’ main antagonist, for having deprived religion of all meaning and having robbed men of “the love of the half-god” (an allusion to Christ?). The play reflected much of Hölderlin’s own search for

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meaning. This also explains its dramatic weakness: the action remains almost entirely interior. No poet, no thinker, has more poignantly expressed the longing for a divine presence and the frustration of seeing that desire unfulfilled in the modern age than Hölderlin. In expressing the sadness caused by the absence of God, he formulated a negative theology for late modernity. He viewed his poetry as an act of keeping the memory of the sacred mystery alive after the sacred signs of the past had vanished and the new ones had not yet appeared. He spoke the language of those who were waiting between remembrance and hope. Nowhere is the quest of the absolute, the general theme of this study, more prominent than in German Romantic poetry. For Novalis, the very purpose of life consists in exploring how all things are symbolic of the absolute. In Hölderlin’s poetry, the quest of the absolute appears in the form of nostalgia for the ancient Greek culture in its harmony with nature. The distance between the poet and the fulfillment of his desire is augmented by a painful awareness of living at a different time, in a different place, with a sense of religious absence.

chapter 4

French Romantic Poetry

French poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows a remarkable poverty of ideas, despite Descartes’ claim that more profound ideas appear in the writings of poets than in those of philosophers. Ideas in France were traditionally communicated in prose. Poetry, particularly Romantic poetry, did not serve to renew thought, as it had done for Goethe and Schiller or for Coleridge and Shelley. Moreover, Romanticism did not fully take root before the restoration of the monarchy in 1814. During the French Revolution, Chateaubriand had emigrated and André Chénier was executed. France had known an early pre-Romantic period with Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Once Romanticism proper began in France, however, it achieved a radical break with eighteenth-century letters, the abruptness of which still resonates in Hugo’s famous preface to his play Cromwell (1827). The ideas that inspired the Revolution had been those of Enlightenment classicism. The revolutionaries constantly appealed to the authority of ancient Rome and to the law of nature as the eighteenth century had understood it. Yet the passion with which the revolutionaries applied those ideas was entirely Romantic. Nor did rationalism die with the Revolution: it continued with “ideologues” such as the French Enlightenment philosopher of education Destutt de Tracy, who first used the term to refer to his analysis of human faculties and signs of human discourse. Lamartine

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790 –1869) grew up in a royalist family in a village near Macon. His father, arrested in 1793, had remained in prison 95

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until the death of Robespierre. Alphonse began a political career by working for the Bourbon king Charles X. He lived the life of a young man of leisure, having a few affairs, spending much beyond his means, but remaining attached to the beliefs of his ancestors. He regarded poetry as no more than a pastime compared to the serious political obligations by which members of his social class felt bound. Nonetheless, when his Méditations poétiques appeared in 1823, they immediately impressed his contemporaries by the originality of their sound. Here at last was poetry written by a poet, the young Victor Hugo is supposed to have exclaimed. Most of his early poems were inspired by his love for “Elvire,” one Mrs. Charles, who died very young. Their prosody, style, and vocabulary were those of an earlier age. Yet they differed by their musical quality as well as by the freedom with which the poet expressed his personal feelings. “Je n’imitais plus personne, je m’exprimais moi-même pour moi-même” (I no longer imitated anyone, I expressed myself for my own sake), Lamartine wrote in the preface. Some of the poems became models for young Romantic poets in France. “Le Lac” (The Lake) and “Le Vallon” (The Little Valley) have lost some of their luster by the fact that generations of French youngsters had to study and frequently to memorize them. In “Le Lac” the poet revisits the peaceful place where, a year earlier, he had spent such happy hours with Elvire. The beauty of the place, where each rock and each tree had been marked by her presence, contrasts with the sadness of her permanent absence. The poet hopes that nature may preserve the memory of his lost happiness. Qu’il soit dans ton repos, qu’il soit dans tes orages, Beau lac, et dans l’aspect de tes riant coteaux. (May it [the memory] remain in your rest and in your storms, Lovely lake, and in the view of your smiling banks.)

In “Le Vallon” the poet, tired of life, wishes to return to the valley of his youth and there to wait for death. Again, the undisturbed peace of nature stands in conflict with his troubled soul. He seeks forgetfulness for his emotional turmoil in the unchangeableness of the valley:

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Quand tout change pour toi, la nature est la même, Et le même soleil se lève sur tes jours. (If all changes for you, nature remains the same; And the same sun will rise over your days.)

The words may remind us of Rousseau, but, as the contemporary critic Sainte-Beuve observed, the pre-Romantic Bernardin de Saint-Pierre may have been the more direct source of Lamartine’s view of nature. The melodious sound, however, was entirely his own. The poem ends with an exhortation to find the divine Creator in nature. Also in “L’isolement,” the great elegy that initiates the collection, the poet seeks consolation in Ce bien idéal que toute âme désire, Et qui n’a pas de nom au terrestre séjour (The ideal good that every soul desires, which has no name in this terrestrial dwelling)

Lamartine’s poetry turned explicitly religious in his Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (1830), which were inspired by the Psalms. Despite its beautiful sound, Lamartine’s poetry, like that of most French Romantics, labors under a heavy rhetorical tradition that is almost entirely absent from English and German lyrical poetry. He succeeds best in informal conversational poems, such as his “Epitre à M. de Sainte-Beuve.” After the revolution of 1830 he changed his political position and became a republican. In a brochure with the title “La politique rationnelle” (1831) he invited other royalists to follow his example. In his “Ode sur les Révolutions” he openly rejects his early conservatism. His poetry also changes: it becomes less self-centered and draws its inspiration from history. Each civilization moves on the ruins of the preceding ones. Peoples, kingdoms, republics of the past appear to be no more than dust on the road. Yet time orders us to go forward—“Marchez!” Each nation is granted a short time. None is capable of directing the course of history toward a lasting goal. Revolution is the law of life. Lamartine never became a political demagogue, however, and instead of following the chauvinism common during the period of the Restoration, he argued

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for a peaceful union with all European nations. Natural borders should cease to be front lines and become bridges to other nations. In the long poem Marseillaise de la Paix (1841), he pleads for a league of nations as supreme international arbiter of conflicts. His Histoire des Girondins (1847) distinguishes the productive forces of the French Revolution from the destructive ones. The book may have played a role in the revolution of 1848, in which the author as a member of the provisional government prevented major violence. It ended Lamartine’s active political life as well as his poetic production. Before this sudden ending of his poetic career, the poet had published more excellent poetry, such as the moving “Gethsémani” (written in 1834) on the death of his ten-year-old daughter Julia during a voyage to the Middle East. Victor Hugo was to write a similar poem when his daughter died in a boating accident. Both poems excel in what Romanticism was best at doing, that is, expressing a deeply felt private sorrow. In 1836 Lamartine published a memorable epic, Jocelyn, the tragic story of a country priest during the Revolution. To enable his sister to marry, the young man had given up the right to his inheritance and, having no other means for paying for his studies, had reluctantly entered a seminary. When revolutionaries invaded the building in 1793, the young seminarian sought refuge in a cave high in the French Alps. A wounded man, pursued by soldiers of the government, climbed up to his cave and, before dying, entrusted his young son Laurence to Jocelyn’s care. The two grew very fond of each other. One day Jocelyn detected that Laurence was a girl disguised as a boy to escape the revolutionary violence. The discovery transforms their friendship into sexual attraction, and Jocelyn wants to marry her. Suddenly he receives a message that his bishop, who has been sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal, wishes to see him. The bishop orders the young man to become ordained so that he can hear his confession before the execution. Jocelyn obeys, never returns to the cave, and years later administers the last rites to the dying Laurence, whose life had been wrecked by his sudden desertion. The poem, hundreds of pages long, excels by its exquisite portrayals of the mountains. Moreover, the complete devotion of this priest, although ordained against his will, to his pastoral task among the poor

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is painted with a richness of feeling and language as only Lamartine possessed. The tension between his persistent desire and the total sacrifice of its satisfaction gives the poem an intense dramatic power. The final encounter between the dying Laurence, on her way to the old cave, and the priest, summoned to assist an unknown traveler, is deeply emotional. Unfortunately, this beautiful epic lacks all probability. How could any person survive two winters in the high Alps with no physical support beyond the occasional loaf of bread that a friendly shepherd deposits near the cave? How could a bishop impose permanent celibacy on one reluctant to accept it? The truth of the story lies elsewhere, not least in the complex conversion of friendship into erotic love. But this truth lacks the support of a credible narrative. The work suffers from other defects as well. Nine books (here called Epoques) are far too much for an elegy. Long epics, such as Homer’s Iliad or Virgil’s Aeneid, were appropriate only for what Schiller called “naïve” poetry. A Romantic epic, in which feelings dominate, cannot sustain its momentum in a poem of this length. Written in the classical French prosody with a rhyme in each verse, the poem feels like an endless series of disticha. Finally, the pious tone of this religious story impresses a reader as not quite sincere. This problem, endemic in French Romanticism, is mainly due to the rhetorical quality of its poetry, which dictates feelings as well as phrases. Two years later Lamartine published another narrative poem, La Chute d’un Ange (The Fall of an Angel). It possesses some of the qualities of Jocelyn but even more of its defects. It combines heterogeneous biblical stories: the passage in Genesis 6 that the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and generated giants (here identified with Greek Titans), the story of the fall of man, and the story of the fall of the angels in later apocalyptic literature. From this mixture Lamartine fashioned a strange tale about an angel falling in love with Daidha, a member of some primitive tribe. The angel becomes a man to save her from savage hunters. Daidha’s relatives rejoice in her safety, yet despise her savior. When the lovers secretly marry, her tribesmen want to kill both of them. They escape to a peaceful kingdom where an ancient prophet introduces them to fragments of a sacred book. It contains much of Lamennais’ later theology: God is everywhere, but He reveals Himself only in the human mind. In an Avertissement the author declares the poem’s

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subject to be the stages through which moral nature passes on the way to perfection. How the poem achieves this allegorical purpose never becomes clear. Most of the text consists in a succession of impossible adventures, closer to Ariosto than to Milton or Tasso. After the popular as well as critical failure of La Chute d’un Ange and the author’s political involvements, critics doubted that he was still capable of writing major poetry. They were mistaken. Lamartine’s last poem, “La Vigne et la Maison” (1857), may well be his best. The poet describes a visit to the dilapidated house of his youth. He arrives on a late autumn afternoon, and decay appears all around him. He becomes aware of the parallelism between the dying house, still filled with the happy memories of those who once lived in it, and the lonely old man reminiscing on the days of his youth in a warm family nest. In a somewhat contrived dialogue the self, having previously awakened the soul, now offers to sing her back to sleep in this season, when life has become dormant. But the soul is in no mood for rest in a place that reminds her of so much vanished happiness. Even a melancholy autumn evening, however, has its charms. All sounds appear to come from a distance in the silent air. The poet hears a bird’s foot on a hanging branch and the thump of a dark fruit falling on the moss. He notices a late gnat ready to die at the first shiver of cold, and a single bee tarrying at the entrance of the hive. The memories of these sensations make the soul regret the sad instinct that drew her back to this house, with its once flowering vines on the south side. Yet nothing has changed but time; nothing is gone but those who dwelled here. The poet still seems to hear the joy of the wine harvesters and to see the fig tree, now dried-out, under the sagging roof. Yet what do roof and vine mean to him? Or even heaven, if it is empty? He only thinks of those who were there and now are gone. The door covered with cobwebs no longer promises a sweet entrance: it has ceased to turn on its sill. The blinds, dirtied by sparrows and detached from their rusty hinges, beat against the wall. The windows broken by hailstorms allow the swallows free passage for building their nests inside. Their twittering is the only sound heard in these rooms filled with the silence of empty time. A shadow lengthening from hour to hour is the only thing that during the day moves through the house. Yet once

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this dwelling was a vibrant heart of stone that sheltered joyous hearts under its roof. At that time, the blinds now closed remained open and the nightly perfumes of flowering vines wafted in. Now, at dawn one hears no more steps of servants, no more barking of the dog, or, as the day waxes, no more sound of children’s hands on the piano or chirping of crickets in summertime. Each year those sounds had weakened, as windows closed in mourning or as, spring after spring, beautiful brides tearfully embraced by their mother and sisters followed their grooms. One morning a coffin left for “the place of weeping” and an old man alone remained behind. Finally the door closed forever and nettles invaded the yard. Returning to her memories of beautiful evenings with boys and girls “bent over hearth or needle,” the soul seems to perceive their specters swarming around windows and doors and reaching their hands out to her. While the poet forgot the time, so short in this season, the shadows of the house have spread ever farther over the cold grass. Yet their soft impression on the moss has consoled him, “as if an angel had taken a swaddling cloth of my cradle to weave me a sacred shroud.” To Lamartine, poetry came naturally and required little work. He trusted his first expression and spent little time on corrections or improvements. Nor did he regard its practice as a serious profession; to him, it was merely a means for rendering his emotions fully transparent. Much of his work appears unfinished. Even a long epic poem, such as the beautiful Jocelyn, of which the writing alone must have required a major effort, was not polished to the perfection it deserved. As early as 1839 he published his final collection, Recueillements poétiques. When his political career, to which he had begun to devote himself, came to an abrupt end in the revolution of 1848 and his poetic inspiration as well as his fortune had dried up, he was forced to make a living by writing about recent political history. Although his books, especially L’Histoire des Girondins, were quite successful, he had no more patience for historical accuracy than he had for poetic perfection. Sainte-Beuve, the leading French critic, took him severely to task for this defect. Later critics have criticized the vagueness of his poetry, not only in his descriptions of place, wherein familiar locations appear unrecognizable, but even more in the nebulousness of his ideas. He always remained a poet of feelings.

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A l f r e d d e Vi g n y

Alfred de Vigny (1797– 1863) was the most reflective of the French Romantics. His family had suffered during the Revolution. With the return of the Bourbons to the throne, he thought that a new period of chivalry might be at hand. He enlisted in the aristocratic unit of the Gendarmes Rouges and was soon promoted to officer in the infantry. The war with Spain in 1823 made him hope that the time for heroic deeds had finally come. Yet his regiment never moved beyond the foot of the Pyrenees. Disappointed by a life of enforced leisure, he left military service and expressed his discontent in Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835). When he attempted to enter political life, he failed to be elected. His candidacy for membership in the Académie Française was rejected four times before finally being accepted. Although attractive to women, he did not succeed in establishing lasting relations with any. After some youthful affairs he married the Englishwoman Lydia Bunbury, but their union turned out to be very unhappy. A later relation with Marie Dorval, the leading actress in his successful drama Chatterton, ended when he suspected her of infidelity. In 1835 de Vigny stopped publishing, except for an occasional poem in the Revue des deux mondes. By that time he had issued a collection of poetry, Poèmes antiques et modernes (1826), three writings in prose—Cinq-Mars (1826), Stello (1832), and Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835)—and a few plays, of which Chatterton is still remembered. Yet he continued writing. After his death appeared another collection of poems, Les Destinées. It contains a few poems that had appeared in periodicals and a number of original ones. His prose work Daphne and his Journal appeared posthumously. Between 1838 and 1853 de Vigny lived in retirement at the family manor of Maine-Giraud. Disappointment in his military, political, and emotional expectations was neither the only nor the principal source of the poet’s pessimism. A more fundamental cause was the loss of his faith. Born in an ancient Catholic family and raised in the traditional values of the French aristocracy, he sadly reported in his journal: “J’ai la charité et l’espérance, mais je n’ai pas la foi” (I have charity and hope, but I have no faith). Those words should not be taken to mean that the poet was always in a

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somber mood. Some of his early poems were frivolous and overtly sensuous. Others he wrote in the classicist tradition of André Chénier, but without Chénier’s genius. Most of those that appeared in his 1826 collection Poèmes antiques et modernes under the subtitle Antiquité Homérique were written at the age of eighteen. His most enduring poems reported negative experiences. In “Moïse” (1822), his first major poem, Moses complains that God, after having imposed on him the heavy responsibility for the emigration out of Egypt, had remained unresponsive and had isolated him from his people. “J’ai marché devant tous, triste et seul dans ma gloire” (I have marched in front of them all, sad and lonely in my glory). In “Eloa” a female angel, who attempts to return Lucifer to the sphere of light, fails, and is herself lowered to the reign of darkness. This inspired Lamartine’s much longer but weaker Chute d’un Ange. Here, de Vigny protests against the silence of God and attempts in a vaguely Gnostic way to reconcile the principle of good with that of evil. The realm of the divine lies beyond both and remains inaccessible to humans. “L’éternité se voile à notre intelligence” (Eternity remains permanently veiled to our minds). Nowhere did de Vigny express the feeling of abandonment more poignantly than in the posthumously published “Le Mont des Oliviers.” The heaven remains closed to Jesus’ prayer of agony in Gethsemani. When he attempts one last time to speak to his Father, “le vent seul répond sa voix” (only the wind responds to his voice). Christ, personifying humanity’s doubt and anxiety, faces this taciturn God in an attitude of silence and resignation. An entry in the Journal of 1832 reads, “I feel above my head the weight of a condemnation, which I undergo all the time, O Lord, but knowing neither the crime nor the process, I can only submit to my prison term.” Nonetheless, the poet continues to believe, not in the Christian God, but in a Supreme Being unconcerned about the human condition. The poet assumed a posture of Stoic forbearance and submission to what had been decreed from all eternity. The idea of being alone in an empty universe, floating in an ocean of nothingness, already appears in the early poem “Le Déluge” (1823). After the last humans, the good as well as the bad, are drowned, and nothing of the world remains but the sky and the sea, a brilliant rainbow appears: the work is completed. Uninterrupted silence reigns.

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Toujours succédera dans l’univers sans bruits, Au silence des jours le silence des nuits. L’inutile soleil, si le matin l’amène, N’entendra plus la voix et la parole humaine. (Forever in this soundless universe will succeed To silent days the silence of the nights. The useless sun, if morning brings it, Will no longer hear the voice and word of man.)

Despite his protest against the unknown God, de Vigny rejected suicide. In his play Chatterton he pities the poet who, in a selfish society, is bound to fall into despair. Yet despair does not justify taking one’s life. The noble person courageously bears the contempt of the masses, the silence of God, and the darkness surrounding his destiny. Humans need no hope to support their will to survive. Like Albert Camus, some hundred years later, de Vigny preached endurance without expectations. In one of his latest poems, “La bouteille à la mer” (1854), which some consider a spiritual testament, the poet presents a more dignified way of dying. His model is the captain of a sinking vessel in the Pacific Ocean. Before his ship goes down, he encloses his notes on the constellations at the high latitudes of Tierra del Fuego within an empty wine bottle and throws it into the sea. Years later a fisherman finds the bottle and thinks that it contains a rare liqueur. The scientist who opens it declares that it is indeed an elixir of future wisdom. De Vigny transformed into a Romantic ideal what Corneille and his contemporaries had called l’honneur. His ideal of honor differs from the earlier one, however, in that it raises no expectations and promises no hope that the human condition will ever improve, or that virtue will ever produce happiness. De Vigny’s most famous poem, “La Mort du Loup” (The Death of the Wolf ) (1843), symbolizes this code of silent courage. The narrator in a company of hunters surprises a large wolf. The animal attacks one of their dogs and, while being assaulted with knives and pistols, continues to hold on to its prey. At last the wolf lies down, keeping its eyes steady on the hunters. “Et sans daigner savoir comment il a péri / Refermant ses grands yeux, meurt sans jeter cri” (And without deigning to know how he has perished, closes his large eyes and dies without a cry). Humans,

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for all their superiority, still have not learned to quit life with dignity. “Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse” (Silence alone is great; all the rest is weakness). De Vigny’s harsh ideal of the noble person did not prevent him from caring for his weak fellow humans. In his Journal of 1835 he writes: “J’aime l’humanité. J’ai pitié d’elle” (I love mankind. I feel pity for it). His attitude followed the Buddhist rule to feel compassion for those who have not yet been enlightened and still suffer.1 In his Vigny par lui-même, Paul Viallaneix mentions de Vigny’s tendresse naturelle, which, especially in his later work, induced him to regard woman rather than man as the moral model demanded by the times. In “La Maison du Berger” (the hut which the shepherd rolls to the places where his flock grazes), the poet recommends that man regard his reflection in the mirror of woman’s more delicate soul. Having none of the male’s “cowardly prudence,” she more generously responds to human cries.

Vi c t o r H u g o

In the preface to Nouvelles Odes (1824), his second collection of poetry, Victor Hugo (1802 – 85) asserts that the literature of his time could be understood only through the Revolution. This saying also explains why the Romantic Movement in France arrived late, compared to England or Germany. To those who had not emigrated abroad, the rapid succession of political revolutions and social changes had left little time for such reflection. The preface to Hugo’s drama Cromwell, which served as the unofficial manifesto of the Romantic Movement in France, did not appear until 1827. In 1831 his play Hernani, the first Romantic tragedy performed in France, caused a riot in the theater, while in Germany, Romanticism was already coming to an end. Even after the Revolution, French intellectuals remained deeply involved in the political life of the country. This was particularly true in the case of Hugo, whose political position developed from moderately royalist to radically republican. He briefly softened his republicanism after he was nominated to become a peer of France (Pair de France) in 1854. Hugo’s assiduous political engagement explains at least in part the rhetorical quality of his poetry. He always felt charged with a social task: each gesture, each word had to

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carry a message. After the putsch of Napoleon III, Hugo was forced into political exile. He moved to Brussels (1851– 52) and, when he feared imminent expulsion from Belgium, to the island of Jersey. When political problems developed there as well, he took refuge on the other Channel island of Guernsey (1855 – 59). After Napoleon withdrew the exile decree, the poet voluntarily remained in Brussels. In Les Chatiments (1853), a collection of the satirical poems written during his exile, he vented his pent-up hatred of the new emperor, “a monkey draped in tiger skin,” whose succession to the imperial throne his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte would have considered his cruelest punishment. Hugo’s democratic convictions, however, may not have been as pure as he presented them. He had strongly supported Louis Napoleon’s bid for the presidency because he hoped to become the minister of education. When this hope remained unfulfilled, he then joined the socialist party and the resistance and eventually had to leave France in 1851. The years of exile turned out to be his most productive ones. Next to completing Les Misérables, the popular novel in which he expressed his lifelong sympathy for the poor, and publishing two collections of political poems, he wrote Les Contemplations (1856), a reflection on the joys and sorrows of his life, and La Légende des Siècles (The Legend of the Centuries) (1859), a Romantic interpretation of history. After the restoration of the Republic in 1870, Hugo returned to Paris and wrote two lengthy supplements to the Légende, both published posthumously as La Fin de Satan (1886) and Dieu (1891). Hugo’s enormous literary output appears even more remarkable if we consider his constant political activity, as a peer of France, as deputy of Paris, and finally as senator. The Romantic tragedies, to which he owed his early reputation, followed one another in rapid succession. Today, they seem to us overly emotional and unduly spectacular. In these works, however, Hugo achieved a clear break with the classic theater of Corneille and Racine. Based on different aesthetic principles, they recovered a meaning that the classical tragedies had lost. Peter Brooks attributes the use of the melodramatic style to the loss of an operable idea of the sacred, the traditional core of tragedy. After the classical tragedy ceased to function as a communal ritual, the language of the earlier epoch began to sound false. Henceforth, “plays are constructed around a central dumbness, an unspeakable darkness, which is not so much a void of meaning as the over-

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fullness of awful meaning.”2 Classic drama had become unfit to express the existential conflicts that lie at the heart of Romantic culture. The theater needed explicit symbols, emotional words, and exaggerated gestures to convey that surplus of meaning, which neither traditional language nor common speech possessed. As early as his first collection of poetry, Odes et Poésies diverses (1822) (later combined with new poems in the Odes et Ballades of 1826), two characteristics of Hugo’s oeuvre immediately stand out. First, a powerful imagination drives the poet toward the mysterious, the exotic, and the supernatural. In the preface he states that the real world hides an ideal one, wonderful to those who have learned to look beyond the surface. The second characteristic is his remarkable poetic technique, which allowed him to write in any variety of meter and rhyme. This mastery of technique is nowhere more obvious than in his Orientales (1829), a collection inspired by the Muslim civilization of North Africa. The poem “Les Djinns,” about spirits who, in a large, noisy swarm, attack the poet’s dwelling and then, in an equally mysterious way, disappear, is a technical tour de force. The first strophe consists of disyllabic verses, the next of trisyllabic ones, with the number of syllables increasing in each strophe until the eighth one, which counts ten syllables. From there on the syllables gradually decrease to the original disyllabic verse, with each strophe written in a different meter. Such a display of technical skill would not have been acceptable to the more sedate taste of France’s classical period. In Les Voix intérieures (1837), an unprecedented tragic tone emerges in Hugo’s poetry. His brother had died, his wife was unfaithful with one of his friends, and doubt disturbed his religious faith. In the poem “Pensar, dudar” (To think, to doubt) he writes: “Of what are we sure? What remains? What passes? What is illusion and what reality? Children! Let us be resigned and follow our way. Each body trains its shadow and each spirit its doubt.” In this period Hugo had also become increasingly sensitive to the harsh social conditions of his time. Generations of French children have memorized his beautiful “Oceano nox,” in Les Rayons et les Ombres (Rays and Shadows) (1840). Oh! Combien de marins et de grands capitaines Qui sont partis joyeux pour des courses lointaines

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Dans ce morne horizon se sont évanouis! Combien ont disparus, dure et triste fortune Dans une mer sans fond, par une nuit sans lune, Sous l’aveugle océan à jamais enfouis! (How many sailors and great captains who joyously left for long voyages have vanished in this somber horizon! How many have disappeared, a harsh and sad lot, in a sea without bottom, on a night without moon under the blind ocean forever buried!)

Hugo had a marvelous gift for translating moments of private sorrow into the common language of human suffering. The death by drowning of his daughter in 1843, shortly after her marriage, led to a long period of mourning and finally, in Les Contemplations (1856), resulted in a moving poem of resignation, “A Villequier” (the place where she drowned). He knew how to share his pain with his readers in such a way that they felt it as their own. In the preface to Les Contemplations he insists that his suffering is never only his. “My life is yours; your life is mine. . . . Take, then, this mirror and look into it.” French readers sensed this all-embracing nature of his poetry, and when he finally returned from exile in 1870, they gave a triumphal welcome to the man who, during his lengthy absence from France, had become their national poet. He knew how to evoke the darkness that surrounds our destiny, as in the final poem of Les Contemplations, “Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre” (What the Mouth of Darkness Said). He even attempted to penetrate the mystery of suffering and evil. In a Gnostic version of the fall of man, he claims that creation had declined from a spiritual to a material mode of being. Its present form is no more than the hardened carapace left by centuries of sinfulness, even as Tiberius, according to legend, was transformed into the rock of Capri, the place of his most horrible crimes. Still, evil is not eternal. “Pas de deuil infini, pas de maux incurables, pas d’enfer éternel” (No infinite sorrow, no incurable pains, no eternal hell). But this theoretical attempt at finding a comprehensive justification of evil soon appeared too abstract for what he wanted to communicate.

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Hugo realized that, especially in poetry, a more specific reflection on the process of history was needed. He achieved it in the long series of poems, La Légende des Siècles (1859). Later he added a second series as well as a more general reflection on history in two posthumously published collections, La Fin de Satan and Dieu. In the former he reflects on history as a succession of moral failures; in the latter, he meditates on its transcendent ending in which all oppositions will be reconciled, even the one between good and evil. The Légende consists of historical, mythical, and legendary episodes written without concern for continuity or factual accuracy. In the second series Hugo collected those parts of the Légende that he had withheld from publication until the political situation in France had become more stable. It appeared in 1877. The tone of these poems was more vehement, their meaning more apocalyptic, their form less “epic” than those in the first series. In the entire work, as well as in the posthumous poems, freedom appears as a continuous struggle with ever returning political tyrannies.3 Hugo’s contemporaries read it as a justification of the principles of the Revolution and honored it as an epic of the French nation, even though its subject exceeded the history of France. According to the Légende, history has placed some markers from which it never withdrew. Unlike long epics in the tradition of the Iliad and the Aeneid, the Légende consists of petites épopées, as its subtitle indicates. Romantics, particularly children of the French Revolution, had a much keener awareness of the discontinuity between epochs of history than earlier French writers such as Bossuet. The original edition of 1859 consists of two parts and a short apocalyptic conclusion. The first part, entitled “The East” (even though it includes Charlemagne), starts with biblical stories, beginning with the creation of Eve in “Le Sacre de la Femme” (The Sacralization of Woman). The poem of Cain, who, after having murdered his brother, vainly attempts to escape the accusing eye of God, is a typical Romantic horror story. Variations on the biblical pericopes of Job, Daniel, and Judith follow. In the first of these stories Hugo announces the metaphysical significance of his tales. The God who directs this history is the hen kai pan of the German Romantics: “l’Etre resplendissant, Un dans Tout, Tout dans Un” (Being scintillating, One in All, All in One”). The cycle of the Christian Middle Ages,

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consisting entirely of legends, shows how little Hugo’s epics had in common with history. In the long prophetic poem entitled “Le Satyre” of the second part, “The West,” the poet symbolically sketches the development of modern history. Henri Peyre has called the story of the satyr “sans doute le plus grandiose poème français.”4 The tale of the little monster on goat feet with horns growing out of its head is indeed a mytho-poetic masterpiece. One day a satyr living on the side of Mount Olympus decides to visit the gods at the top. His appearance provokes laughter and contempt. Nevertheless, the gods invite him to perform some music. Having lost his reed flute, he decides to sing, beginning with a hymn on the origin of the earth and the sea. His paean lacks the reverence with which Hesiod and the ancient theogonists had approached this topic. With Hegel, Hugo assumes that satire killed the ancient religion of the classical gods. Yet, contrary to the cynical Roman satirists, this satyr announces the coming of a new religious era when God will be immanent in all things. This new Orpheus, half-animal himself, interprets the melancholy cries of humans and animals as voicing their desire to return to the original chaos. Gradually the song develops into a ballad on the freedom of the early days, its decline under kings without virtue and gods without sincerity, and the expectation of a glorious return of freedom in a realm of universal love. The gods stop laughing. They understand that this half-beast is announcing the end of their reign. The dark ages had not yet ended: more war and superstition were still to follow. Nonetheless, the Revolution had inaugurated the final stage of history, in which all national and social divisions would eventually be abolished and humanity would return to its original unity. Even good and evil would be joined together as they had been in the beginning: “Le mal au bien était lié ainsi que la vertèbre est jointe à la vertèbre” (Evil then was tied to good as one vertebra to another). Our common earth indiscriminately receives the bodies of the good and the bad, ignoring all distinctions at death, as she had done at birth. Henceforth divinity would dwell within human nature, not above it. The coming century, a time of great promise and considerable danger, would be an apocalyptic age. Human control over the air and the sea would end the current divisions among nations. Aéroscaphes

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(gigantic balloons) and large steamers would cross boundaries and unite all peoples, at least if inventors would not prefer technical innovation above human interest. Two more prophetic poems anticipate the threats and promises of the future. “Pleine Mer” paints a powerful image of a strong ocean, in the midst of which the wreckage of an enormous ship floats at the mercy of the waves. It is the Leviathan, the 200-meter-long product of French engineering, once considered the triumph of nineteenth-century technology but now known to be its greatest failure. (The ship was too large to dock in any existing port.) For Hugo, it symbolized the fundamental error of a technology that pursues no other purpose than material perfection. “Léviathan: c’est là tout le vieux monde / Apre et démesuré dans sa fauve laideur” (Leviathan incarnates the old world, / Raw and measureless in its wild ugliness). The poem ends with a question: “Ce monde est mort. Mais quoi! L’homme est-il mort aussi?” (This world is dead. But what! Is man also dead?). The answer appears in the next poem, “Plein Ciel.” It presents a science that respects nature and aims at uniting all humans within a single harmonious community. The “aéroscaphe,” a synthesis of science and poetic vision (“Le calcul de Newton monté sur l’ode de Pindare”), might be the harbinger of a new fraternity and even of a more refined religious sensitivity. Hugo had been impressed by the recent political gospels that had sprung up in the wake of the Revolution, those of Saint-Simon, Leroux, and Considérant. The Légende concludes with an apocalyptic judgment on history phrased in the lugubrious image of the Dies Irae, in the poem “La trompette du jugement” (The Trumpet of the Last Judgment). An oneiric vision of a gigantic trumpet waiting for the archangel to blow it seven times announces the horrors of the closing age predicted in the Book of Revelation. The trumpet, made “of steel and justice,” hangs soundless and serene in an impenetrable mist, waiting for “the monstrous day when we shall remove the nails of the coffin above our head.” The poet dreams that he sees it “as one sees a rooster silent in the dark.” Nothing yet disturbs the deadly peace of the cemeteries. But when the trumpet blows, all souls will fly out of their tombs, like a flock of birds at the sound of many waters, hastening to collect their bones and clothes, while the severe face of the judge appears on

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the horizon. A sinister hand reaches out for the trumpet. In this Romantic vision the poet abandons all conventions of prosody and convention to allow his imagination free rein. Although Hugo had rejected the Catholic faith, he continued to be obsessed by its most primitive iconography. Detached from Christian dogma but not from a Christian imagination, he became the poet of religious unrest in a secularized French culture. La Légende des Siècles is a great Romantic poem. At a time when the epic was no longer fit to express the modern sense of constant change, Hugo captured the new awareness of historical discontinuity. It was, as he claims in a projected preface, le confluent d’Homère et d’Eschyle,5 that is, epic and drama combined. Charles Baudelaire called it “le seul poème épique qui peut être créé par un homme de son temps” (the only epic that could be created by a man of his time). Although the Légende was a great success when it appeared, later generations have often failed to appreciate its qualities. Hugo possessed a rare talent for imagining an archaic civilization. In his preface to Cromwell, he had claimed that the Middle Ages had introduced a new sense of truth and realism, an awareness that not all in this world is beautiful and that the ugly and the grotesque are an indissoluble part of it. Hugo wanted to revive that medieval realism, which the Renaissance cult of formal beauty had eclipsed. Indeed, his best poems in the Légende are, next to the biblical ones, those dealing with medieval and Arabic culture. In the posthumous La Fin de Satan, Hugo concentrates entirely on the apocalyptic aspect of history. He traces good and evil to biblical and legendary archetypes. Thus Cain, the first murderer, remains coresponsible for all later assassinations. Nimrod, “the mighty hunter before the Lord,” was the legendary initiator of wars. The principal model of evil, however, is Satan, the father of evil. In a powerful image the poet visualizes the fall of Lucifer, which is repeated by Cain, Judas, Barrabas, and so many others who are gradually extinguishing the light of the world. “Depuis quatre mille ans il tombait dans l’abîme” (For four thousand years he had been falling into the abyss). Later Hugo revises that sinister vision, and Lucifer appears repentant: the fallen angel realizes that the world cannot be governed “by a double invisible.” In a beautiful poem, “L’Ange Liberté,” Satan begs God to continue the fight against

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ignorance in order to free humanity from suffering, hunger, kings, and gods. God responds: “I hate you not. . . . I wipe out the sinister night and nothing of it remains. Satan is dead; be reborn celestial Lucifer.” Hugo’s posthumous Dieu is abstract without being philosophical, religious yet sharply critical of institutional faith. In his attempt to write about the deity, the poet discovers that he can name all things except God. Nowhere in the universe do we hear that name, but all creation speaks of Being. Living under the light of long-extinguished stars, in the fearsome silence of blind waves rolling millions and millions of worlds, the poet exclaims, “O parturition ténébreuse de l’Etre!” (O tenebrous parturition of Being!). What meaning does creation hold for us? the poem asks. Is it more than another word for nature? We have covered that momentous question by inventing divine names: Pan, Bacchus, Astarte, Atys, Gea. The mind ought to listen not to their voices or to those of sybils, prophets, or philosophers, but to the voice of Being at the core of all beings. One cannot but be astounded by the sheer abundance, both in content and form, of Hugo’s poetry. He tried new forms of versification, different genres, and original subjects. In all of them he succeeded. Even more impressive than this variety was the richness of his imagination. Only Hugo could write poems such as the early Orientales or the later apocalyptic ones. His defects are equally obvious, and his reputation has paid a heavy price for them. Hugo had an irresistible tendency to lapse into bombast. The rhetorical quality of his poetry occasionally enhances its effect, but more often it diminishes its poetic purity. Less conspicuous but no less detrimental to his poetry is the lack of individual characterization. Unlike Dante’s poetry, which some of Hugo’s poems imitated, his characters tend to be universal types. Particularly instructive for the dynamics of religion during the Romantic epoch is the transition in both Hugo and Lamartine from their early Christian faith to their later deistic or pantheistic one. Throughout, they continue using the language of the Bible and even of Christian theology, although they have long abandoned the traditional meaning of these sources. They also regret living in a godless age, but they express that regret less poignantly than did Hölderlin. They had joined the secular civilization that they criticized.

part ii

Systematic Discussion of Romantic Aesthetics, Psychology, and Ethics

chapter 5

The Beautiful and the Sublime

Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetics (1750) revived the study of art and beauty, once a subject of vigorous debate, from a long philosophical neglect. Critics, artists, and classicists, however, had given aesthetic theory a great deal of their attention. Diderot, in his Letter on the Deaf and the Dumb, had shown how the theory of art as imitation of nature was self-defeating. Why imitate when we possess the original? In Laocoon, Lessing had argued against an ornamental theory of beauty and had criticized the assumed priority of beauty over expressiveness in modern aesthetics. His contemporary, the famous German art historian Johann Winckelmann, had recommended Greek sculpture and architecture as models because of their formal qualities, yet not without cautioning against slavish imitation.1 In Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), Romantic aesthetics finally received the philosophical support it needed to justify its vision of art and poetry. A number of German poets also appealed to the idealist philosophy of Fichte and Schelling. Among the characteristics that distinguished Romantic theories of poetry and art from the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, we note the following. First, Romantic art is poiesis (creation) rather than mimesis (imitation). Since it does not imitate any finite object, its ideal meaning should be unlimited. Yet since the image in which it appears is by nature finite, there remains an insurmountable tension between the finite form and the unlimited meaning. The poet may suggest this infinite ideal by presenting his work as unfinished or fragmentary, thus suggesting that it is always less than the infinity at which the poet or artist aims. The plastic artist may achieve a similar effect by leaving his work incomplete 117

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(as the older Michelangelo did with many of his sculptures) or, if the artist is a painter, by broken lines or designs that run beyond the limits of the canvas. Second, the same tension conveys to Romantic poetry an intrinsically ironical character. Irony alone can bridge the gap between the poet’s infinite aspirations and the painful finitude of his or her achievement. No Romantic writer has ever explicitly stated those principles. Yet they were implied in the programmatic Fragments composed by members of the group of Jena Romantics, which Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel published in Athenäum. Third, the most telling quality of Romantic criticism of art and literature may well be its creative character. Romantic critics do not merely write about a literary work: they remain symbiotically linked to it. In his Criticism in the Wilderness, Geoffrey Hartman approvingly quotes a statement by Sainte-Beuve that is typical of that critic’s own approach to literary works, namely, that in some instances critical commentary may enter the text.2 This principle distinguishes it from what critics had formerly assumed to be their task, namely, to analyze a work of art, to praise its qualities or censure its defects, and to assist the reader or the viewer in answering the questions it evokes. The critic thereby took the side of reason in confronting a creation of the imagination. This achievement inevitably had a somewhat demystifying effect, whether or not the critic intended it. The critic thus loses what in a Romantic work of art is an essential, often the essential, component, namely, the conveyance of a sense of mystery through which the artist surpasses the reader’s or observer’s ordinary perception of the real. In contrast, the Romantic critic and his successors even today attempt to enter this mystery and render it more tangible by amplifying or intensifying it.

G e r m a n A e s t h e t i c Th e o r y f r o m Goethe to Schopenhauer

With Goethe, art criticism took a new, explorative turn. In an early essay on Gothic architecture (“Von deutscher Baukunst,” 1773), inspired by a visit to the Strasbourg Cathedral, he contested the idea, widespread in

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Germany, that architects and sculptors should follow ancient models. Instead, he argued, art and architecture ought to reflect the culture in which they were born. In the past he had been “a sworn enemy of the confused arbitrariness of Gothic adornment.” Now he understood that the imitation of classical architecture made little sense in a northern climate. Particularly, the columns made German architecture appear as if it had originated in classical Greece. For Goethe, art ought to be true before it can be beautiful. In Germany that meant that it should reflect some of the rough power of the German temperament.3 After his journey to Italy the poet returned for a time to a form of classicism. But, again, exposure to a northern work of art reconverted him. At some time in 1811, while visiting the large collection of Boisserée, a businessman in Heidelberg who had bought or saved many medieval paintings removed from churches by the French revolutionary government, the poet silently gazed at a painting by Rogier van der Weyden. When he walked away from this work he was convinced that the artist had no choice but to express what his people and his land had made him think and feel. In 1797 one of Goethe’s followers, Ludwig Hirt, had published an essay entitled “Über das Kunstschöne” (On Artistic Beauty) in Goethe’s journal Horen, arguing that aesthetic perfection consisted in the correspondence of a work of art to the purpose intended by nature (ultimately a soft version of the imitation theory) or to the ideal sought by the artist. Hirt referred to it as the work’s characteristic. Goethe had originally dismissed this definition as too vague, although others, such as the Romantic writer Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) had accepted it. After the Heidelberg experience Goethe was ready to include the term characteristic in his aesthetic theory. Eventually he gave it the more comprehensive meaning of significant. A related but even more important idea was that a true work of art must grow out of a single source and have all its parts integrated within the whole. Goethe believed that this organic view of art was confirmed by Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which presented the parts of a work of art and those of organic natures as closely related. The notion of the organic henceforth became dominant in Goethe’s interpretation not only of art but of culture in general. The idea that a particular organic form may possess a universal significance

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led to Goethe’s most valuable insight in aesthetic theory, namely, the symbolic nature of the work of art. Before Goethe, the term symbol had referred to any arbitrary sign. Goethe used it for a particular object that, while preserving its particularity, carried a universal meaning. Unlike the allegory, the symbol does not refer to any universal outside itself: the particular remains in the universal. The allegory, as the root of the term (allos) suggests, signifies the presence of an other. In two of his final maxims, Goethe presents the difference as follows: “Allegory transforms a phenomenon into a concept and a concept into an image, in such a way that concept still remains in the image, complete with its limitations” (Maxim 1210, from Goethe’s Maximen und Reflexionen). In the next maxim he describes the status of the symbol: “Symbolism changes a phenomenon into an Idea and the Idea into an image, in such a manner that the Idea remains forever infinitely operative and inaccessible in the image and remains inexpressible in any language” (Maxim 1211). All of this depends on what Goethe means by an Idea. In these maxims he probably adopts Kant’s definition of the aesthetic Idea as a representation of the imagination that induces much thought yet does not have the restrictions of a concept of reason. Aesthetic “Ideas,” then, are heavy with meaning, even though they cannot be compressed in any single concept. This degradation of the allegory was new. Dante and most of his predecessors had a much higher opinion of it. In the letter dedicating his Paradiso to Can Grande della Scala, Dante had ranked the allegorical sense of a text directly under its literal meaning. The allegorical sense even includes other nonliteral meanings, such as the moral and the anagogical. As mentioned in chapter 2, Coleridge distinguishes the secondary function of the imagination from the primary, creative one. This secondary imagination is what Kant calls the reproductive function of the imagination, which also has given rise to a different poetic category, namely, allegory. Coleridge describes it as bringing together “images dissimilar in the main by some one point or more of likeness” (Biographia, ch. 13). Although Coleridge and other Romantics placed the allegory, which is auxiliary of another meaning, far below the symbol, they nevertheless consider the allegory necessary not only for practical purposes but even for literary ones. Henry James also ranks it on a lower level

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than the products of the primary imagination: “allegory, to my sense, is quite one of the lighter exercises of the imagination.”4 Yet that would still include moralizing texts that also promise to give literary pleasure, such as are constantly used in The Pilgrim’s Progress.5 Goethe has also been credited for having dealt the final, lethal blow to the theory that art must imitate nature. In his Italian Journey Goethe mentions having met the German poet Karl Philipp Moritz in Rome. He somewhat condescendingly refers to the conversations on the theory of art he had with the poet, in which Goethe played the leading role. Tzvetan Todorov in his Theories of the Symbol persuasively argues that Moritz, not Goethe, deserves the credit for having decisively refuted the imitation theory. In an essay published in 1785, “Begriff des in sich Vollendeten” (Concept of What Is in Itself Complete), a year before their meeting, Moritz had proven that a genuine work of art never imitates nature; only the artist does so. The artist imitates the creative power of nature, but the work of art is a totally independent product of the mind. Each work of art or poetry is a self-sufficient spiritual totality. Todorov calls it intransitive, while all works that are dependent on a nonaesthetic purpose, such as propaganda or morality, are transitive.6 In a perfect work of art, all elements must relate to the whole in a perfect harmony. Applying this principle to his theory of aesthetic harmony, Goethe in his Maximen und Reflexionen writes: “True symbolism is present when the particular represents the more universal, not as dream or shadow, but as a living, immediate revelation of the unexplainable” (Maxim 451). Goethe’s influence on Romantic writers in Germany was enormous, but no less was that of Schiller, who, prior to his acquaintance with Goethe, had formulated his aesthetic principles in three theoretical works, as discussed in chapter 3: Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity) (1793), Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters) (1795), and Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry) (1795). The former two primarily deal with the impact of aesthetics on moral life. Here, I limit the discussion to the aesthetic principles contained in the second work and briefly revisit the third. In his Critique of Practical Reason Kant had strictly separated

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morality from any link with feeling (which includes the aesthetic experience). His treatise on aesthetics, the Critique of Judgment, had done nothing to weaken this separation. In his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller attempted to show that, contrary to Kant’s position, aesthetics and morality are inextricably linked, because the moral consciousness presupposes some degree of aesthetic sensitivity. Beauty mediates between sense perfection and morality. Moreover, aesthetic creation does not merely form allegories of moral truth: it constitutes a moral truth of its own. In the dynamics of both cognition and desire, Schiller distinguishes two different forces. The sensuous drive impels the mind toward the ever changing realm of sensation and desire, while the spiritual drive aims at creating permanent form in the intellectual and moral realms. The two drives differ but ought to act together. On this point Schiller takes issue with the Enlightenment, of which he, in other respects, remained a loyal follower. A culture that is predominantly rational recognizes only the intellectual-moral drive. To this one-sided view Schiller opposes the view of the classics, in which the sensuous and intellectual drives remain in harmony. At the same time, Schiller admits that a separation of the two fundamental drives was inevitable. Greek civilization could not have progressed without losing its marvelous but static balance. The Jena Romantics took a less classical direction than Goethe and Schiller had done. Even so, they readily accepted Goethe’s theory of the symbolic interpretation of art. On imitation, Novalis wrote what Goethe could have written: the poet should imitate nature’s creativity but not nature’s products. He brought the notion of poetic independence to a paradoxical conclusion. In the short essay “Monolog” he extended this independence to all linguistic expression on the ground that all language had a poetic beginning. Language, he concluded, is not primarily about objects but about itself. Even literary theory cannot justify its existence except by becoming itself part of poetry. All segments of the closed totality of the work of art must be internally related in a perfect harmony, even if it includes opposites. Schelling, the philosopher among the Jena Romantics, showed that the creation of beauty consists for a great part in the overcoming of contrasts. “Just as aesthetic production proceeds from a feeling of seemingly

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irresoluble contradiction, so it ends likewise, by the testimony of all artists—in a feeling of an infinite harmony.”7 As an example of opposition in the aesthetic representation, he refers to the “unexpected concurrence of unconscious with conscious activity.” Unconsciously, the artist of genius conveys an infinite meaning to a finite representation. The aesthetic communication between the conscious and the unconscious occurs in two ways. Either the finite reflects the infinite as a symbolic image of it, in which case we call the object “beautiful,” or the finite appears as intrinsically incapable of expressing the infinite, yet indirectly refers to it. In that case we call the aesthetic representation “sublime.” The closer a work of art approaches perfection, the more the artist (or the hearer or observer) realizes that the ideal lies beyond his actual achievement. That is why the highest degree of beauty always has a touch of the sublime. According to Friedrich Schlegel, the cultural impact of Christianity, the main factor responsible for the difference between classical and Romantic art, caused a fundamental revolution in aesthetic norms. Christianity’s infinite ideal totally surpassed that of a perfect, self-enclosed form. Yet since aesthetic expression is by nature bound to a finite form, there always remains an opposition between the infinite ideal and the finite form. Schlegel concluded that the artist, especially the poet, must express this discrepancy in such a manner that he overcomes the opposition while stating it. This he attempts to do by irony, which implicitly asserts the infinite ideal that the finite form denies. The Romantic should do so in all his expressions: he ought to question formal norms in every area. Schlegel himself shocked his contemporaries by his novel Lucinde (1799), which challenged the restrictions of sexual morality in the name of the infinite aspirations inherent in love. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Language, based on lectures delivered in Dresden (1828 – 29) and interrupted by his death, Friedrich Schlegel presented a less radical interpretation of irony. There he claims that true irony, such as Socrates practiced (in Plato’s early dialogues), is rooted in the speaker’s awareness of his insufficiency in attempting to live up to his infinite aspirations. He calls it “the thinking spirit’s surprise about itself, which breaks open in a smile.”8 “Irony thereby originates in the feeling of one’s finitude and limitations, insofar as this feeling

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seems to conflict with the idea of the infinite included in all true love” (357). Socratic irony arises from the mind’s understanding of its inability to express divine truth in human words (460). Schlegel’s theory became widely known for the analysis of the comical. The reason why humor, the mildest and most spiritual form of the comical, became characteristic of Romantic literature is that its authors aimed at an ideal that lies beyond the reach of human efforts. They thereby drew attention to the discrepancy between the infinite subjectivity projected in the aesthetic ideal and the finite character of all objective achievements. All aspirations, all objects, even taken in their totality, become insignificant when compared to the infinite subjectivity of the mind. This disparity might paralyze the creative impulse. Yet the comical offers the mind a relief from this tension: it contrasts the two opposites, yet reconciles them in a quasi-religious trust that, in some way, all finite reality may be absorbed in the infinite without being destroyed. Jean Paul considered irony a subcategory of humor. Yet irony in the strict sense is precisely the opposite of humor. Irony never reconciles the ideal with the multiple imperfections of the finite: it establishes a provisional truce between the opposites, but not a permanent peace. The reconciliation is momentary and purely aesthetic. People laugh at the abrupt, comical confrontation of the oppositions in themselves, but they feel uncomfortable with the tension that remains. The reconciliation, if there is any, occurs exclusively in the ironist’s aesthetic sense, by which he places himself above others in the room. Yet irony softens to humor if the ironist aims his barbs at the human condition, including his own, rather than only to other persons. One of Jean Paul’s examples of the exclusive character of irony consists in seriousness toward what is merely a semblance of a serious matter (der Ernst des Scheines). If someone, particularly a person of learning, wants to express a serious opinion, he does so (or did so in Jean Paul’s time) with hesitation and even excuses, as if he were trespassing on someone else’s territory. Irony consists in assuming that same air of seriousness with respect to a position or opinion that does not deserve to be taken seriously. The irony usually hides in the adjectives in which the ironist wraps his statements. Thus, when one chooses to trample an enemy by irony, one will heap undeserved praise either on the person or on his work.

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Three years after the appearance of Jean Paul’s Vorschule der Ästhetik, Hegel published the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807). It contains a Romantic interpretation of the work of art in the section entitled Spirit. After the mind has ascended from self-consciousness to reason, the self becomes aware of itself as being its own world. Art fulfills an indispensable function in rendering this transition possible. So does religion, which in the past had provided the main subject of art. The new selfconsciousness reached at the level of Spirit celebrates this triumph by raising the representation of itself to a divine status. Greek art of the classical epoch, which transformed images men built of themselves into gods, did indeed mark a triumph of mind over primitive chaos. In classical tragedy, art reaches its highest achievement when a human actor, in words and actions, directly represents a god. But soon, in the classical comedy, drama lost this religious significance. When the comic actor, dropping his mask, speaks his own, frequently vulgar, words, his language hides no more sacred secrets. What the spectator hears and sees is all too common. Here, according to Hegel, art became separated from religion and secularization began. It would, of course, be incorrect to identify the comedy, which in ancient Greece had accompanied the tragedy, with religious skepticism. Yet Hegel thinks of the ancient comedy as anticipating the modern one, which, in the sarcasm of Voltaire, Diderot, and Wieland, eroded the basis of religious beliefs. Most significant in the aesthetics of the Phenomenology is that it takes the art object out of the subjective realm of taste, where the eighteenth century had left it. For Hegel, art combined with religion represents the highest form of truth. By the time Hegel began to lecture on the philosophy of art at the newly founded University of Berlin in 1820 (which he repeated in 1823, 1826, and 1828), he had become critical of Romantic aesthetics. He remained faithful, however, to the Romantic view that all genuine art should have a transcendent meaning.9 However, the text we possess of these lectures must be read with great caution. It consists of notes taken by some of the auditors, which were later combined with Hegel’s own preparatory notes and arranged into a continuous narrative by Heinrich Gustav Hotho, the editor of the three volumes entitled Ästhetik in the original Berlin Gesamtausgabe (1833 – 38).10

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Hegel praises Kant’s Critique of Judgment for having partly overcome the subjectivism inherent in the theories of taste. Yet for Kant, the aesthetic quality of a work of art still primarily depends on the formal qualities of harmony, symmetry, and so forth, while for Hegel and the Romantics, art in the first place discloses a spiritual truth. Standards of formal perfection remain subordinate to that purpose. Classical art had attained a quality of formal perfection that we will never cease to admire. Yet it represents only a particular stage of culture, which should not serve as permanent model for later generations. In his Philosophy of Religion Hegel pointedly observes that the Greek gods died as gods of their formal perfection. A similar fate would await art in the vacuous formalism of modern classicism. Romantic artists, once again, were clearing the mind’s inner sanctuary of the ancient idols and formalist standards. “In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and in place of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence” (Knox, 1:519). The Greeks had understood that only the human form suffused by spirit could be a proper object of a truly spiritual art. But, Hegel notes, the spiritual light was missing in Greek statues, which “had no eyes.” Instead, the Romantic representation of the human form stares at the viewer as an equal. “Subjectivity is the spiritual light which shines in itself ” (Knox, 1:521). Romantic art confronts the person with his own spiritual depth. Hegel further develops Schlegel’s insight that Romantic art originated in Christian principles. It received its introspective nature from the doctrine that God is Spirit, and therefore (in his interpretation) “pure subjectivity.” For Hegel, all Christian art that followed the classical era deserves to be called “Romantic.” Hence, Romanticism, for him, no longer begins with the time of the French Revolution. Indeed, at that time a number of Romantic artists and critics (Shelley and Byron in England, Schiller and Heine in Germany, Stendhal in France) considered a liberation from Christian dogma an essential part of their emancipatory program. At the beginning of his Lectures Hegel stated that the art of his time no longer related to religion, which had once inspired aesthetics. He had therefore concluded that art with respect to its high vocation had become “a thing of the past” (Knox, 1:11). Henceforth the artist

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finds his content in himself. Deprived of a religious content, art has lost much of its significance in modern society. These statements, which appear in each set of the preparatory notes Hegel wrote for the four semesters he offered the course in aesthetics, led to the legend of the socalled “death of art” (an expression Hegel never used). The issue was obviously more complex. Toward the end of the second part of his Lectures, Hegel held Protestantism responsible for the modern secularization of art. With approval, but not without concern, he notes: “To Protestantism alone the important thing is to get a sure footing in the prose of life, to make it absolutely valid in itself independently of religious associations” (Knox, 1:598). One might object that what Protestantism lost in the plastic arts, it regained in poetry and music: Milton and Klopstock, Handel and Bach in their works had expressed a deep Protestant piety. Calvinist Netherlandish painters such as Rembrandt, Ruysdael, and Van Goyen succeeded in evoking a strong sense of mystery. The religious inspiration of their landscapes superseded that of the endlessly repeated sacred figures of their Catholic predecessors. Hegel meant that the Reformation had restored the dignity of the finite and the secular. Yet once the “Kingdom of God” had been reestablished, a negative attitude toward the world was no longer religiously appropriate. It might well prepare the way to a new religious culture that would reconcile secular contingency with religious infinity. When the Spirit of the God-man would have reached the entire human race, the sacred would become secular and fully restore the autonomy of the finite. Whatever the value of Hegel’s deduction here may be, it is a fact that most artists of his time had not realized this religious potential. Should a discussion of Romantic aesthetics include Schopenhauer, the forerunner of Nietzsche and Bergson? A look at his sources shows that he largely shared them with the idealists (whom he so severely criticized), namely, Kant, and Fichte. He posed the same fundamental question as other post-Kantian thinkers: Is the mind capable of knowing reality as it is in itself, or only in its own ideas? In the first part of his principal work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation) (1819),11 Schopenhauer argues that, indeed, ordinary knowledge discloses more about the mind’s own structure than about the “thing-in-itself.” The declaration made at the beginning,

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“The world is my idea,” or more correctly, “The world is my representation” (Vorstellung), succinctly restates the fundamental principle of subjective Idealism. At first glance, Schopenhauer’s epistemology may seem to consist of a shortened version of Kant’s theory of knowledge: perceptions yield only phenomena, not things in themselves. Yet Schopenhauer replies: “I grant this of everything; with the single exception of the knowledge which each of us has of his own willing.” With Fichte he agrees that in the act of willing the mind’s hold on reality cannot be questioned. Here, at least, the mind reaches the solid ground of the thing-in-itself. To become aware of the thing-in-itself, the mind merely ought to move beyond time, space, and causality, and entirely focus on that mysterious will—the only direct, unquestionable reality—as it unfolds itself in the multiplicity of phenomena. It must learn to view the things that surround us as pure ideas, mere appearances in which a higher will has objectified itself. It must ignore all questions of where and why and concentrate entirely on the what of things. Was this not what Plato meant when recommending the contemplation of Ideas as the gateway to true reality? Only the person of genius is fully capable of performing this comprehensive abstraction. Great artists alone possess an imagination powerful enough to liberate the mind from the restrictions inherent in mere particularity as well as from the abstract universality of scientific concepts. They know how to attain the inner stillness which enables them to keep their eyes or ears on a single perception and to view things “in their inner nature” (§37). Schopenhauer distinguishes beautiful works of art from sublime ones. In contemplating the beautiful, the mind concentrates on the aesthetic object. In contemplating the sublime, the object induces the mind to reflect on its own act of contemplation. It usually does so by evoking visions of silent, empty spaces or of tempestuous seas with howling winds and mountainous waves. Or it may recall memories of past striving and struggles, over which time has drawn a veil of quiet. The contemplation of the beautiful as well as of the sublime requires an attitude of detachment from personal concerns and an exclusive concentration on the ideal form. Nowhere is the creative will expressed more perfectly than in the human body. Therefore, aesthetic attention should

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concentrate on human beauty. Yet over the centuries, artists and viewers have frequently changed their ideal of human beauty. The Greeks fixed this ideal in an aesthetic canon. Schopenhauer prefers the less restrictive norm of what Goethe called the characteristic, that is, those traits that “give prominence to a particular side of the Idea of humanity” (§48). They consist in the first place in those that suggest ethical nobility. For Schopenhauer as for Kant, nothing is more sublime than moral sanctity. His analysis of music surpasses that of all other Romantic art critics. The representation of plastic arts depends on preexisting models, which the artist reframes into an original image. “Music is entirely independent of the phenomenal world, ignores it altogether, could to a certain extent exist if there was no world at all” (§52). Nor does music copy Ideas. Schopenhauer ranks music at a level equal to that of Plato’s Ideas in that both directly objectify the creative will, albeit in different ways. Music displays some analogy with organic nature: as the tones rise or fall, they may evoke the upward or downward motion of life. Yet, the philosopher cautions, all those analogies are no more than indirect references. Music never refers to anything but itself. It may be joyful or sad, but it never expresses a particular joy or sadness. To keep it purely ideal, moreover, composers and performers ought to avoid any kind of imitative sounds. Schopenhauer criticizes Haydn for echoing natural sounds in The Seasons and in some passages of his Creation. Today, the imitations of the sound of birds in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony or in a number of Olivier Messiaen’s orchestral works might offer more appropriate examples. Yet those fragmentary echoes of bird songs have become integrated within an original composition. A more serious objection could be made against Schopenhauer’s claim that music totally differs from the imitative nature of the plastic arts. Abstract painting or sculpture, which did not exist in his day, hardly imitates nature more than music. Schopenhauer concludes his theory of art with a warning. The artist himself presents the highest instance of the blind will. Even if he constantly struggles to subdue this will, as a person he remains subject to it. “[Artistic] creation does not deliver him forever from life, but only at [privileged] moments, and is therefore not for him a path of life, but only an occasional consolation in it” (§52). For the non-artist,

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the aesthetic experience has an even more modest significance. A permanent liberation from the blind will to live may be exclusively the privilege of sage and saint. Schopenhauer mentions the mystical writings of Vedanta Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism, as well as some Christian mystical texts, as capable of raising the mind for prolonged periods above the restrictions of time and desire. As soon as they become frozen into dogmas, however, they lose their redemptive value.

British Romantic Aesthetics: Ru s k i n ’ s R e t r o s p e c t i v e Th e o r y

British aesthetics during the Romantic period coincided with a second scientific revolution. Bernard Bosanquet in his History of Aesthetics claims that science planted the first seeds of Romanticism in England. “It was rather through Lyell and Darwin, than through a Winckelmann, a Lessing, or a Schiller, that the new renaissance dawned in England. The insularity of our country had to do with this detachment. . . . The sense of history and the spirit that is sympathetically critical of the religions and philosophies of past times were wanting to the leaders of our thought.”12 According to this view, without a new, scientific interest in nature, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats would never have written their poetry, nor would Constable, Turner, and their followers have painted their landscapes and seascapes. This judgment seems particularly appropriate in the case of John Ruskin (1819 – 1900), the British art critic, whose works present a unique combination of art and science. The first volume of his Modern Painters did not appear until 1843, when most English Romantics had passed from the scene.13 Nor did its author consider himself a Romantic, though he clearly was one. Much of his aesthetic criticism dealt with painters of the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, his presence in a study of Romantic aesthetics is indispensable. He began writing his magnum opus to defend Turner, the quintessentially Romantic painter, against detractors. During the eighteen years that linked the first volume of Modern Painters to the final, fifth one, the British master remained at the center of Ruskin’s attention, even while he constantly expanded his theory to include earlier artists.

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Being true to nature, in his view the principal rule of art, included an obligation to acquaint oneself with what he called the laws of nature. He tried to live by this self-imposed rule by studying chemistry, geology, and botany in preparation for a life devoted to art criticism. Geological observation of mountains, stones, and clouds, as well as physical theories about light and color, occupy such a large part in Modern Painters, especially in the first and fifth volumes, that the reader might wonder about the author’s intent. In discussing works of art he stresses the presence or absence of aesthetic merit according to the painter’s observation of nature in light, power, and motion. Still, he firmly rejects a narrowly mimetic theory, as if art “copied” nature. The aesthetic truth of nature appears not in careful observation or scientific study, though both are indispensable for the attainment of it, but in an ideal vision. Ruskin’s Romantic emphasis on light, power, and motion led him to issue some disconcerting assessments of the old masters, especially in the early two volumes. Thus he ranks Tintoretto’s Baroque Annunciation (Scuola di San Rocco), in which the angel enters like a whirlwind and the Virgin draws back in astonished fear, as superior to Fra Angelico’s far more appropriately “serene” Annunciation (San Marco). Even more surprisingly, he discards Perugino’s peaceful, open visions as being too “busy” to excite piety. Remarkably, he rarely has a good word to say about Rembrandt. Better than any other critic, however, Ruskin has defined the role of the creative imagination in Romantic art. His theory begins with an unpromising report on associationist psychology, which limits the function of the imagination to assembling and separating impressions according to their apparent similarity. Yet he fundamentally weakens the naturalist determinism inherent in this theory by adding that, in an aesthetic selection, the resemblance may be purely subjective and hence not restricted by the laws of association (2:138 – 41, 145). The real test of the aesthetic association is whether the work displays simplicity, harmony, and truth. In Ruskin’s view, some famous painters fail this test. One of them was a Romantic favorite, Claude Lorrain. Most successful in composing a variety of images into a single, highly complex unity was Joseph Turner. Interest in the landscape hardly existed before the modern age. Premodern artists, Ruskin claims, cared only for the human person, “in no

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wise for the external world, except as it influenced [human] destiny” (3:153). Modern artists are the first to pay full attention to what we have come to call scenic beauty. In two long chapters, one about Homer, the other about Dante, the author argues that neither one knew anything like a landscape, that is, a scene of nature worth describing for its own sake. Homer’s regard was directed either to the gods, as they were active in nature, or to humans as they used nature for their own benefit. A place pleased Homeric Greeks only when it had a spring, a shady grove, a meadow, or at least some sweet smells or bright colors. They had no eye for “the picturesque,” the most popular category of the aesthetics of nature in eighteenth-century England. Although Ruskin overlooks the refined sense of nature characteristic of Greek lyrical poetry of the late classical period, it remains true that the landscape in the modern sense did not exist in ancient Greece. The medieval attitude differed from the classical. The person still stood at the center of nature, but he no longer appeared to be a part of it. The idea that the earth was a gift of God, to be treated with respect, stimulated a less selfish interest in plants, trees, and animals. The beauty of gardens, flowers, fruits, and animals became a source of aesthetic delight probably unknown to the Greeks. Mountains ceased to be mere places of gloom; they acquired a sacred significance, as places where hermits and monks communicated with God. For Dante, Ruskin’s guide through the Middle Ages, Christians experienced the world in a new way. Even so, before Joachim Patinir and his followers during the Renaissance, they seldom approached and never reached a disinterested contemplation of a landscape. Modern aesthetics of nature began when a new sense of freedom detached persons from their natural environments. It induced them to travel to remote cities, uninhabited places, and high mountains, or at least to imagine them. This widened interest in nature was not religiously inspired, as that of medieval pilgrims had been. According to Ruskin’s surprising interpretation, at the same time that the sense of human freedom developed, the colors of painting began to darken and to appear less joyful than before. He gives an even more dubious justification of this questionable claim: “On the whole, these are much sadder ages than the early ones; not sadder in a noble and deep way, but in a dim wearied way, the way of ennui, and jaded intellect, and of un-

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comfortableness of soul and body. . . . The profoundest reason of this darkness of heart is, I believe, our want of faith. There never yet was a generation of men (savage or civilized) who, taken as a body, so woefully fulfilled the words ‘having no hope, and without God in the world’ as the present civilized European race” (3:258). To the same alleged unbelief Ruskin attributes a modern preference for beauty over truth. As a punishment for this choice, we suffer a loss of real beauty. Once truth ceases to be the ultimate criterion of all mental activities, we lose the ability to distinguish beauty from ugliness. The principal means for preserving truth in aesthetics, Ruskin argues, consists in avoiding the pathetic fallacy, by which the spectator distorts the impressions of the external world by conforming them to his subjective disposition. Poets commit this fallacy more frequently than plastic artists. Only great writers succeed in avoiding it altogether. Ruskin claims that Walter Scott, of whose poetry he had an inflated opinion, never gave in to it, even when he depicted a violent passion. “There is no passion in Scott which alters Nature. . . . Instead of making Nature anywise subordinate to himself, he makes himself subordinate to her—paints her in her simple and universal truth” (3:274 – 75). I am not convinced that Ruskin’s own critique avoided the pathetic fallacy, nor do I see how art can altogether do so. In a chapter in his first volume entitled “The Moral of Landscape,” he argues that aesthetic truth may be determined by an emotion or by the memory of an earlier experience of one, in a way that strongly affects our representation of it. Indeed, an aesthetic representation is never a mere copy of the sense perception to which it refers (5:16). The truth of nature must be imagined. Until the imagination transforms them, impressions lack the ideal quality essential in an aesthetic vision. For that reason, Ruskin opposed the kind of realism that many of his contemporaries considered normative. Aesthetic truth, for him, may be reached only when the “penetrative power” of the imagination attains the ideal core hiding under the external appearance. Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare possessed the unique ability to capture in a short phrase the ideal truth of an event or situation. Dante, for example, concludes the Francesca da Rimini episode with the simple words: “Quel giorno più non vi legemmo avante” (That day we read no further). Similarly, a single brush stroke may reveal more

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than a meticulous copying of external details. That is what Ruskin calls “true naturalism.” A genuine work of art stands out from its surroundings: it appears encompassed by a kind of material “vacancy,” as if the painter “having told the whole pith and power of his subject disdains to tell more” (2:167). It creates its own space. Nor is the light in which it appears static or uniform. Light appears filtered through constantly moving shadows. The color of nonwhite objects varies with the motion of these shadows. In Ruskin’s estimate, Tuscan painters missed this variation of light altogether. Their attention focused entirely on form and expression, presented in a homogeneously white light. As a result, the subtle nuances in nonwhite color escaped them. The problem is not remedied by sharp contrasts between light and darkness. Chiaroscuro artists reduced all objects around a single patch of light to uniformly colorless shadows. In the first volume Ruskin had stated that color was “a most unimportant characteristic of objects” (1:67). In the later volumes he considers it essential for achieving aesthetic truth. In a long footnote at the end of volume 5, he returns to the question. While admitting that color is secondary to form, he now refers to it as “the reward of the veracity of purpose” and thus the quality that distinguishes a great painter from a merely good one. Turner undeniably excelled among his contemporaries in his use of color. Does Ruskin’s unqualified praise of the early Impressionist’s use of light not betray his own principle that aesthetic truth surpasses perception? Elsewhere he recommends “softening” the clarity of perception, not merely to suggest physical distance from the object but also to imply the spiritual distance between the vision of the imagination and physical perception. The preceding observations merely raise the question, in what does the truth of art, the center of Ruskin’s aesthetic attention, consist? The work of art, for him, is neither a copy of a perceived reality nor a mere addition to that reality. It seems to consist in a dynamic relation between the physical appearance of the object and the artist’s creative intuition of it.14 Reality reaches its ideal truth only in the work of art. In the long section on the imagination in his second volume, he asserts that the viewer’s response to the work of art consists “in a belief in the truth of

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the vision [the imagination] has summoned” (2:189). Once the aesthetic vision has become internalized, it ceases to be a mere object of perception and becomes part of a spiritual vision. Ruskin speaks of “a supernatural ideal” that enters the aesthetic experience in the process of moving from physical perception to spiritual vision. With this transcendent ideal he joins earlier Romantics in assuming that the aesthetic vision moves toward a goal that lies beyond perception. Schelling had stated that in the aesthetic experience and, even more, in the reflection upon it, the mind surpasses itself. We have noticed a similar idea in several German and English poets. Contrary to them, Ruskin interprets this transcendence in a specifically religious way At least, he did so before he moved to Venice for a prolonged study of Italian art. The transition caused a crisis in his evangelical faith in the years following the publication of volume 2 of Modern Painters. He first reported on his Venetian experience in The Stones of Venice. According to this first impression (radically revised later), Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese showed no evidence of any religious inspiration. Whatever religious symbolism the works of these “sensuous” artists contained was purely conventional. The encounter with this blatant paganism in a city that, half a century earlier, had produced such spiritual artists as Giovanni and Gentile Bellini deeply disturbed Ruskin, especially because he greatly admired the pictorial qualities (color and light) of the later Venetians. His evangelical religion made him question: Where was the sense of evil in this sensuous richness? Despite this religiously disconcerting experience, Ruskin remained faithful to his original insight that art ought to have a transcendent intentionality. The work of most modern artists lacked this quality because of what he called a universal absence of faith in modern society. “Nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the plurality in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can what practical work lies ready to their hands. Most of our scientific men are in that last class. . . . In politics, religion is now a name; in art a hypocrisy, or affection. All sincere and modest art is, among us, profane” (3:259). This attitude, he adds, leads to sadness or superficiality and is at the root of our discomfort and wantonness.

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Ruskin himself abandoned the faith of his youth after attending a Protestant service in Turin, because years of thought and struggle had still left him “unconverted.” This by no means entailed an inclination to embrace the Catholicism of his admired Italian artists. The Catholic Church, he thought, with its bad art, its traffic in indulgences, and its neglect of the proper duties of daily life, might have been at the root of Venetian secularism. This suspicion induced him, in the midst of his inner conflict, to write a blistering attack on the Roman faith. In the chapter “On Mountain Gloom” in volume 4 of Modern Painters (1856), he realized that the same sensuous secularism had also undermined his own evangelical commitment. Could any form of Christianity ever be reconciled with the animal quality that marked all great painters of the modern age, not merely the late Venetians but also Reynolds, Rubens, and Turner? He reached some sort of conclusion in the final volume of Modern Painters (1860), where he attributes the decline of the spiritual in art to the very fashionableness of landscape painting. He repeats Plato’s opposition to imitating nature: no work of art can equal the beauty of nature (5:197). In the preface to the second edition of Modern Painters he reasserts these charges: “Landscape art has never taught us one deep or holy lesson; it has not recorded that which is fleeting, nor penetrated that which was hidden, nor interpreted that which was obscure; it has never made us feel the wonder, nor the power, nor the glory of the universe; it has not prompted to devotion, nor touched with awe; its power to move and exalt the heart has been fatally abused, and perished in the abusing” (1:xxi–xxii). In other texts written around the same time, Ruskin defends landscape painting, which began, he claims, as a reaction against the stifling by Christianity of our animal nature. In a complete reversal of his earlier appreciation of the Venetian School, he now holds that its painters, alone among the Italians, had succeeded in balancing Christian idealism with a healthy naturalism. Only Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese had successfully overcome Christian anti-naturalism in the majesty of their palaces and in the richness of their garments and decorations. They had preserved a healthy pagan naturalism without giving in to the horror of nature that had haunted the Christian mind. Venice, the critic now paradoxically concludes, was “the last believing school” of Italy. Obviously,

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something had changed Ruskin’s idea of spiritual decline. In The Stones of Venice he had declared the Venetian painters to be devoid of religion. He now presents them as “noble naturalists,” sensuous but with a sensuousness that reflects an immanent divine presence. The Venetians, both naturalist and spiritual, appear as harbingers of the spiritual art of the future. The critic, of course, is again thinking of Turner.15 Still, in the chapter “The Wings of the Lion” he appears to return to his earlier judgment. “[Venetian art] is often conventional, implying as little devotion in the person represented, as regular attendance at church does with us. But that is not hypocrisy.” Nevertheless, he concludes: “You will discover by severest evidence, that the Venetian religion was true. Not only true, but one of the main motives of their lives” (5:225). Spiritual decline came later. Ruskin regards the religious unrest of the Reformation as its cause. Two iconic figures impersonate this unrest: Albrecht Dürer, the true believer tortured by the fear of death, and Salvator Rosa, the wild, self-destructive Neapolitan. Both are bearing “the last traces of spiritual life in the art of Europe” (5:291). By the seventeenth century, landscape painters abandoned all belief in a benevolent God. Artists such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin assumed poses of self-restraint, which gained them the title of “classics.” Like the subjects of their paintings, they were civilized, virtuous, and amiable. They represented men and women within peaceful, natural scenery, surrounded by ancient gods and nymphs but void of spiritual content. In this judgment Ruskin projects upon seventeenth-century artists much of what he dislikes in eighteenth-century art. The critic’s assessment becomes even more controversial in his discussion of the lowly “pastoral” art (scenes of rural life and daily labor) that marks the Dutch school as “the effect of an arrested Reformation.” In this strange “school” he includes Rubens, Van Dijck, and David Teniers, who were neither Reformed nor Dutch. To the British critic, they represented the “faithless and materialized mind of modern Europe” (5:255). In dismissing believers such as Rembrandt, Aelbert Cuyp (the alleged “leader” of the school!), and the just-mentioned Flemings as atheists because they painted landscapes, Ruskin completely undermines the thesis of a healthy religious naturalism that he defended thirty pages earlier in this final part of Modern Painters. The inconsistency is all

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the more glaring because many of these condemned “secularists” painted or sketched more religious scenes than landscapes.16 The author’s strange conclusion, that “in the pastoral landscape we lose not only all faith in religion, but all remembrance of it” (5:258), tells us more about his own problems than about the state of art in seventeenth-century Europe. If there ever was a case of pathetic fallacy, it certainly appeared in Ruskin’s artistic judgment of that period. Even the qualities that Ruskin admires in Turner’s landscapes and seascapes become vices in other painters. What he calls “Dutch” vulgarity he praises in Turner’s illustration of “the effects of dinginess, smoke, soot, dust, and dusty texture” (5:295). He exalts Turner’s light but despises the changing shades of light as pale sunshine travels from one room to another in the works of Pieter de Hooch and Gerard Terborch. He takes his examples from minor masters, such as Phillips Wouwermans and Claes Pieterszoon Berchem (whose names, like all the preceding ones, he consistently misspells), while ignoring the great ones. How different this was from the attitude of Turner, who for years tried to imitate Cuyp and Willem van de Velde. Even the Venetians, whom Ruskin knew so well, are often misinterpreted in the final chapters. To call the sensuous Giorgione a model of spiritual art shows an amazing lapse of critical objectivity. The critic’s problem may have been due, at least partly, to the fact that, while completing his work, he was still groping for a new concept of the spiritual. Obviously, he had not found it when he published the final volume. The notion had followed the ups and downs of his religious wanderings. Even though he avoided identifying spiritual with religious, as he had done in the first edition of The Stones of Venice, he tended to relapse into a subtler version of that ancient mistake by introducing a moralistic strain into his art criticism. The doomsaying and demonizing of modern art disappear in the final four chapters of Modern Painters. In those inspired pages he offers a Romantic analysis of two early works by Turner. I call them “inspired” not because their conclusions are less paradoxical than those described above, but because their analyses are memorable. In his reading of The Garden of Hesperus and Apollo Slaying the Python, the myths told by Hesiod receive new moral significance in Turner’s work. In this unlikely context, Ruskin expresses his hope for a future religious renewal,

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which neither the Church nor contemporary artists had been able to achieve (5:354). The Gothic Revival in England had begun before Ruskin wrote Modern Painters. He was to play a short but important part in spreading it. It had emerged from a Romantic concern to preserve the nation’s architectural heritage, which had fallen into an alarming state of disrepair. How should the surviving medieval cathedrals and palaces be restored? By adding modern elements to the old architecture or by strictly adhering to the plans of the original construction? The great advocate of a purist restoration, Augustus Welby Pugin, the son of an aristocratic refugee from the French Revolution, discovered his vocation while designing Gothic ornamentation for the restored Windsor Castle. Gothic cathedrals since the thirteenth century had all been Catholic houses of worship, and Pugin came to identify the style with the faith. In 1834 he converted to Catholicism, and two years later he compared the old faith and its Gothic architecture with contemporary Anglican church architecture in a book so controversial that no publisher dared to print it. Pugin published Contrasts; or, a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day at his own expense. Despite a universal outcry against his Popism, it established him as the foremost specialist both on the theory of Gothic architecture and on the most satisfactory method of restoring it. By the time of his death in 1852, the new style had been solidly established, imitated, and often trivialized by incompetent architects.17 Ruskin published his own study on architecture, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), after the second volume of Modern Painters. In that work, he analyzed the relation between architectural standards and moral life. The same qualities that he had stressed in Modern Painters dominated his idea of architecture, namely, light and color. The Gothic Revival is mentioned only once, when the author expresses doubts concerning the new movement. By the time of the second edition (1855), however, these doubts had evaporated. During his prolonged stay in Venice, Ruskin had become acquainted with the architectural qualities of the Gothic style. He expressed his admiration in a beautiful chapter, “The Nature of Gothic,” in the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853). His conversion to the new style had begun in Venice, yet later

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he extended it to embrace the Northern Gothic, which, in his judgment, reflects the noble savageness and naturalism of the still uncivilized Germanic tribes. The ancient Greeks achieved artisanal perfection by imposing strict geometrical rules on the builders, and their refined architectural and sculptural achievements were obtained through servile, uncreative labor. Gothic architecture, in contrast, displays one of the noblest aspects of medieval art, namely, its freedom. It left considerable initiative to the builders, who invented not only new forms but forms open to continuing innovation. Northern architects even encouraged their whimsical workers to place grotesque devils and monsters on the roofs of sanctuaries, at their entrances, and in their stained windows. In contrast to the Renaissance style, Gothic architecture leaves much undefined: the slope of the roof, the presence and form of buttresses, the size and shape of the building. Though solidly resting on the earth, the vertical form of the Gothic church responds to the upward movement of religious aspirations. Even the unfinished state of many buildings symbolizes the style’s transcendent quality. Ruskin’s writings influenced the progress of Gothic architecture in England, although eventually he tired of the Gothic Revival and came to dislike intensely the bland imitations that had invaded the midnineteenth-century English landscape. It is also of interest that Ruskin extended his admiration of the Gothic beyond aesthetic critique; in particular, he compared the free creativity of the Gothic builders with the slavery of workers in the industrialized society of his own time. The application of Frederick Taylor’s theories of industrial efficiency had reduced the worker on the assembly line to a machine, executing all day long the same stultifying motions. As Ruskin saw it, the reason for the dissatisfaction of the workers “is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means to pleasure” (2:179 – 80). Ruskin here merely confirmed Friedrich Engels’s 1844 report on the conditions of the working class in England, one of the founding documents of Marxist socialism. Ruskin even devoted two books, Unto This Last (1862) and Time and Tide (1867), to the social problems created by industrialized labor. Ruskin searched for an absolute in aesthetic perfection. Yet he never found it, nor did he know what he ought to look for. Did it consist in

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the spiritual element alone or combined with “a healthy naturalism”? And what makes art spiritual: religion, or the conversion of religion into some constraining quality? Which element should dominate in painting: light or form? On all of these questions Ruskin changed his mind, time and time again. During his long critical career he kept only one standard unchanged: the model of Turner’s aesthetic perfection. But how could he generalize this norm, since the qualities that he most respected in Turner he rejected in other artists? Did he have no objective criteria, then, and did all depend on subjective, personal taste? The charge of pure subjectivity does not seem fair, given that Ruskin carefully analyzed the qualities that impressed him at various stages of his search for perfection, although he did not consistently maintain them. This meant, however, that he never succeeded in forming a synthesis of his criteria. His books, despite their length, remained fragments, although brilliant ones.

S t e n d h a l’ s A e s t h e t i c i s m

Although Romanticism was rich in aesthetic achievements, “aestheticism” in its literature and the arts remained rare. The cult of formal beauty pursued for its own sake agreed little with the dynamic, often tempestuous character of many Romantics and even less with the melancholy, downcast mood of others. Nevertheless, as early as 1836, the French poet and critic Théophile Gautier (1811– 72), who is remembered for his fantastic stories in the style of E. T. A. Hoffmann, began to defend a theory of L’art pour l’art. Only one major Romantic at the time might be considered an aestheticist: Henri Beyle (1783 – 1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal, who began his literary career as an art critic. At the age of seventeen Beyle had enlisted for Napoleon’s campaign in Italy against the Austrian occupation. In Milan his fascination with Italian nature, culture, and love (discovered in the person of Angela Pietragrua) overcame his military ambitions. Nonetheless, he later rejoined Napoleon’s army and eventually was awarded for his service with a position as inspector of imperial buildings. He followed the emperor to Moscow and played an active role in the retreat from Russia.

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Left with no serious military or political prospects after Napoleon’s defeat, Beyle prepared himself for a literary career, first as a critic and later as a novelist. Even in his schooldays he had declared that he aimed at becoming “the greatest possible poet.” His first efforts to realize his ambition occurred in less than honorable ways. During his stay in Milan from 1814 to 1821, he published Lifes of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio (1815), in which he shamelessly plagiarized an Italian work on Haydn, translated and combined two short German studies on Mozart, and paraphrased two Italian publications on Metastasio. After six years this concoction had sold only 124 copies. Not discouraged, Beyle ordered his publisher to place a new wrapping around the remaining copies and to sell them as a second edition. He repeated his dishonesty in his Histoire de la peinture en Italie, published under a pseudonym in 1817, which so heavily relied on uncredited Italian sources, especially on a work by the art historian Lanzi, that it earned him the sobriquet “thief of Lanzi.” In the same year he published Rome, Naples, Florence as authored by “Stendhal,” the name of Winckelmann’s birthplace, which Beyle had visited during the campaign in Germany. In 1821, under suspicion of belonging to the revolutionary carbonari, he was “advised” by the authorities to leave Italy. In France, few people knew him. That changed with the publication of his Racine et Shakespeare (1825). The essay on Racine contained an appendix on the Romantic Movement, in which Stendhal argued that any writer who wrote for the needs and expectations of his own time must be considered a Romantic. Thus, Dante, Racine, and Shakespeare all had been Romantics in different ways, while those who imitated them or ancient writers were “classicists.” The Romantics whom Beyle had known in Italy—Silvio Pellico, Foscolo, Leopardi, and Manzoni—had been nationalists, some even revolutionaries. Two anti-Romantic outbursts in France had provoked Beyle to write this essay: a chauvinist protest against an English performance of Shakespeare in Paris and an attack on the Romantic Movement by the president of the Académie Française. Through this publication the author associated himself with writers of whom he had been persistently critical.18 In his youth Stendhal had hoped to become a playwright. He had studied Molière for years and intended to emulate him. Yet none of his

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dramatic projects ever reached completion, and he gradually lost faith in Molière as a dramatic model. The sense of drama, he concluded, had vanished in France’s “classical” theatre. The stage had become a servant of the monarchy. In elegant verses, French tragedy confirmed the static political and cultural situation. Even comedy was subservient to the king’s will and pleasure, and open laughter at contemporary situations was no longer admissible. It obeyed the rules of courtly conduct upon which the ruling system was built. The king was the model whom all had to imitate. After the civil unrest caused by the Fronde, the restless aristocrats had been called to Paris and later domesticated at Versailles. The classical theatre existed to justify this palace revolution. Comedy’s humor consisted in showing how ridiculous were those who imitated the royal model poorly or who lacked elegance in so doing. It had degenerated into bitter satire. France’s classical drama, according to Stendhal, had no choice but to imitate the established social reality. Artistically, this meant a full restoration of the mimetic theory of aesthetics. The epic had penetrated the drama and deprived it of all dramatic power, whereas the drama had subverted the leftovers of the ancient epic and prepared the way for the new dramatic “epic” of the novel. Stendhal and Balzac wrote novels that had nothing in common with the ancient epic but much with the ancient drama. Such was Stendhal’s critique of seventeenth-century classicism. Yet his own theory of aesthetics also deviated from common Romantic principles. He took music as the model for all arts, especially literature. Here, at least, no simple imitation of an existing reality was possible. He refers to Rousseau, who had been an excellent critic of music and who, in his article “Imitation” in the Dictionnaire de Musique, had claimed that music imitates nature. Yet Rousseau had ruled out any direct copying of natural sounds in music. In mentioning the imitation of nature, Stendhal interpreted Rousseau as having meant that music should not imitate other cultural achievements. Moreover, harmony, as Stendhal conceived it, differs from the harmony that Rameau, a composer of the classical period, had claimed to imitate from nature. Music never imitates: its ideal is pure beauty. Like Schopenhauer, Stendhal returned to Plato’s idea of beauty. Henri Lefebvre, in a long and rich essay on Stendhal’s aesthetics, shows that his aesthetic ideal, in writing as well as in

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music, had remained the classical one.19 Stendhal was disappointed in his expectations that the Romantics might be able to realize his ideal of pure beauty. In fact, that ideal perished during the Romantic period, and it probably did so because of Romanticism.20 Unable to write dramas in France’s classicist climate, Stendhal decided to settle for novels. In his own copy of Le Rouge et le Noir he noted: “Since democracy has populated the theater with vulgar spectators incapable of understanding more refined things, I consider the novel the comedy of the nineteenth century.” Henceforth he was to write romans de moeurs, on the virtues and vices of the age, as well as romans psychologiques, analyses of emotional life. Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), for the most part, belongs among the former in its portrayal of a social climber who incarnates all the vices flourishing during a period of unrestrained pursuit of riches and social advancement. I return to this work in chapter 7, on ethics. La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), while amply describing the social conditions in northern Italy at the same period, deals nevertheless first and foremost with the psychology of one man. Here I shall only touch on the superior aesthetic qualities of this work. The topic, the angle of approach, and even the plausibility of his story mattered less to Stendhal than the detached observation of his subject. His characters display a similar aesthetic detachment. Fabrice, the hero of La Chartreuse de Parme, gazes down on the world from the Farnese tower, in which he is imprisoned, with the same indifference with which Julien Sorel of Le Rouge et le Noir, while waiting for his execution, reflects on his past life.21 The author unemotionally analyzes his subject with the meticulous care of a scientist. Paul Bourget, in his still unsurpassed Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine, remarked that Stendhal does so with the lucidity of a Maine de Biran, the most analytic French philosopher of the Romantic era.22 His characters observe themselves while being intensely engaged in action. They act reflectively. Yet the dominating quality in this novel is the aesthetic one. Stendhal attempted in the first place to create a work of beauty. He subordinated all other concerns evoked by his novel to the one of bringing a complex story to the most aesthetically satisfactory ending. Stendhal took his basic story, which he placed in his own times, from a collection of Italian manuscripts of the Renaissance, which he

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had copied during his tenure as French consul in Cività Vecchia. One of them, an antipapalist tract entitled Origine delle grandezze della famiglia Farnese (Origins of the Glory of the House of Farnese), reports the crime, imprisonment, and escape of the young Alexander Farnese, later elected pope under the name of Paul III. The novel begins with a widely drawn historical picture of Lombardy in 1814. The French, who had conquered and, under Napoleon, reconquered the region from the Austrians, are retreating everywhere. As the emperor, who has just escaped from Elba, prepares for the decisive battle of Waterloo, Fabrice del Dongo, the young son of a noble family residing at Lake Como, leaves home to join the French troops. At Waterloo he is caught in the confusion of the retreat but manages to find his way back. But he has no home left: his older brother has denounced him as a traitor to the Austrian authorities. His mother and a young aunt accompany him on the way to Milan, but are stopped before their arrival in Milan by the Austrian police. Fabrice, however, escapes across the Lombardian border. In Milan, Count Mosca, prime minister of the Duchy of Parma, falls in love with Fabrice’s aunt and succeeds in finding her a position as lady-in-waiting to the princess of Parma. When the political situation in Parma becomes safe, his aunt invites Fabrice to join her, and Count Mosca promises him an ecclesiastical career with a right to succeed the elderly archbishop. Fabrice receives minor orders, but competition for the favors of a young actress leads to a fight with her impresario, in which the young cleric kills his adversary. The prince of Parma sentences Fabrice to twelve years incarceration in the Parma fortress. The second part of the novel, dramatically superior to the first, describes the young man’s life in the tower and his escape with the help of Clelia, the daughter of the prison governor. After the old prince dies, Fabrice returns to Parma, where a jury trial acquits him. In the meantime, Clelia, who still loves him, has been forced by her father to marry a man of his choice and has promised “never to see Fabrice again.” Fabrice, at last remembering that he is a monsignore, enters upon an ascetic life. Soon he succeeds the old archbishop and becomes highly respected for his piety and sacred eloquence. Yet the sight of Clelia at one of his sermons revives his passion, and the lovers start seeing each other in secret. After three years, a boy is born to them, but the child dies as a

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result of Fabrice’s scheme to bring him to the episcopal palace. Both parents interpret his death as a warning from heaven. Fabrice resigns his see and enters a Carthusian monastery near Parma, where he dies soon afterward. In a sustained flow of creative energy, Stendhal completed La Chartreuse in fifty-two days. The work combines moral insight with a powerful fantasy that is absent from his earlier writings. From the tower of Parma, Fabrice looks down on the land below, bathed in Correggio’s golden light. The author drew on his memories of the scenery around the lakes Como and Maggiore, “where the distant sound of the bell of a village hidden under trees, carried by the softening water, assumes an air of quiet melancholy and resignation.” His mind restored halfforgotten memories “from the mythical in-between of time.”23 La Chartreuse is a novel about what Stendhal considered the only sources of happiness, love and beauty. In his early days he had believed in the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy’s view that contentment depends on the avoidance of error and the attainment of truth. Later he had learned that one attains peace through the heart rather than through the mind. Stendhal deliberately avoids ornamentation and condemns the inflated rhetoric of such Romantics as Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand, and Hugo, as “linguistic hypocrisy.” He aims at what he calls un style sec. When Balzac, in an otherwise favorable letter on La Chartreuse de Parme, drew attention to the author’s spare style, Stendhal replied, “I see only one rule: style cannot be too clear and simple” (Letter of Stendhal to Balzac, October 16, 1840). He added that he knew only two books that he considered well written: Fénelon’s Dialogues des Morts and Montesquieu (without further specification). Stendhal still held to Boileau’s rule: only the true is beautiful. He and Balzac were the Romantic creators of realism in modern French literature. Stendhal’s masterpiece was neither a lucky strike nor an unrepeatable accident. Only a lifetime of experience, reflection, and an unceasingly refined craftsmanship had made it possible. The four stories he published in 1839 under the title Les Chroniques Italiennes, taken from the seventeenth-century Italian collection from which he had drawn the subject of La Chartreuse de Parme, display the same aesthetic refinement

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as his novels. In “L’Abbesse de Castro,” the last and the longest among them, he completely transformed its original source. Its subject, an unfulfilled, ultimately destructive love, closely resembles that of La Chartreuse. Also typical of Stendhal’s Romantic aesthetics is his fascination with the past. Although La Chartreuse has been described as a contemporary novel, the author deliberately preserved the distinctive qualities of its Renaissance source. He chose a location (Parma) that had still maintained the customs of an earlier time. His descriptions of Lombardy equal the beautiful ones that appear in Manzoni’s Promessi Sposi. Finally, the sphere of mystery and soothsaying, which envelops the story, is characteristically Romantic. In contrast to his critical writings and his personal attitude, Stendhal, faithful to his aesthetic observations, fully enters into the beliefs and religious practices of his characters.

chapter 6

The Romantic Image of the Person as Reflected in the Novel

The concept of the person, central in Romantic thought, has had a long and complex history. Its earlier meanings are all derived from the Greek term proso¯pon (literally, face or mask). During the late Roman epoch, a person was defined more precisely as a subject of rights and duties. The concept gained additional dignity from the Christian teaching that all believers are equal in God’s eyes, despite the fact that both Church and state continued to preserve the old hierarchical class system. The late medieval Nominalist theology considerably loosened the dependence of the concept of a person on the traditional communities of Church and state. The cities of Northern Italy and Flanders had begun to abolish feudal institutions by recognizing only one overlord, and even he had to swear loyalty to the town’s established rights and privileges. During the Renaissance, “personhood” became increasingly defined in terms of individual merit or power. It thus acquired a new characteristic: the moral recognition of others. To be accepted as a person in the full sense of the term, the individual had to deserve the respect of others through his or her own efforts. Thus, for example, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister complains that by being born into a bourgeois family, he could not count on the instant recognition of his name, as could a member of an aristocratic family: he first had to “make a name” for himself. Many possibilities were open, but it took energy to find them and to turn them to one’s advantage. Women faced even greater obstacles than men, particularly if they came from a family of modest means. As we learn in 148

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Jane Austen’s novels, in a society where all initiative belongs to the male, a woman could meet the challenge only by being reasonably attractive, financially well-endowed, and practical in the art of finding a good husband. One effect of the isolation of the individual in modern society was a widespread feeling of loneliness. It had increased in parallel with the atomization of the individual in an economically oriented society. We find these symptoms of isolation in the nostalgia of Gérard de Nerval’s memories of lost love, in the lamentations of Goethe’s Werther, in the loneliness of the young Chateaubriand, in the rejection of Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser, and in the melancholy of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe.

Romantic Psychology: Attempts to Overcome the Soul/Body Dualism

With his gradual isolation from social structures, the individual’s identity had become a critical question. In past centuries this question had caused few headaches for most Western theologians and philosophers, who, with Plato, argued that the soul was the essence of personhood. Yet as Aristotle’s treatise on the soul reentered Western thought, Scholastics were forced to assume a tight cooperation of soul and body, thereby raising the problem of the soul’s survival after death. Renaissance Aristotelians such as Pomponazzi wondered: How could the person be immortal once the original unity between body and soul had been broken? Did the human individual consist of two substances, of which only one survived after death? Descartes did indeed assume that two substances cohabited in one person. Neither he nor his followers, however, succeeded in satisfactorily explaining how these independent substances cooperated in a single action. What was the vinculum substantiale, the vital link that made the one person responsible for both? Scientists tried to supplement what had been missing in philosophy by attributing the active communication between mind and body to electromagnetic stimulation of one by the other. As early as the sixteenth century, William Gilbert, an English physician, argued that animated magnetic forces united the body and the mind. Nineteenth-century

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psychologists revived the notion of such mediating powers between mind and body in a less mechanical way, by positing a magnetic communication between body and mind, which surfaced in dreams. The notion of the unconscious had been known since Leibniz, who had declared that unconscious perceptions were the foundation of the mind’s conscious apperceptions. Psychologists, concentrating on the functioning of the unconscious rather than on its nature or origin, made the unconscious an object of empirical study. By the time of Romanticism, enough questions had been raised about the working of the mind to invite novelists to a new, deeper exploration of the human psyche. The German psychologist Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert in his Symbolik des Traumes (Symbolism of the Dream) (1814) had shown that unconscious emotions become conscious in dreams. Schubert’s work, although based on the questionable theory of magnetic communication, nevertheless remarkably anticipated Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. It even uses the concept of displacement (Verstellung), according to which representations that might have a strong emotional import become concealed in symbolic images. As a result, a number of psychic phenomena were viewed in a new light. Dreams that previously had been dismissed as random fantasies suddenly appeared to be messages emerging from the unconscious depth of the mind. Some Romantic novelists had long suspected that the dark side of the mind secretly influenced conscious life. The writer Gérard de Nerval, well aware of the pathological nature of his experiences, sought medical treatment for them, yet at the same time feared the disappearance of this rich store of hidden knowledge. Similarly, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Charles Nodier, and Théophile Gautier projected in their stories the mind’s hidden anxieties, which seldom surface but influence our ways of thinking and feeling. In France, the practice of religious self-examination that was common to the piety of Port-Royal and of the Quietist movement prepared the introspection typical of Romantic literature. The eighteenth-century Cambridge Platonists, inspired by an Augustinian theory of spiritual enlightenment, had initiated a similar move toward religious interiority. Shaftesbury, the eighteenth-century English politician and moralist, had undergone their thought and published one of their treatises. Through his own philosophy, he spread their influence on English culture.1 In

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Germany, Pietism had touched even secular thinkers such as Goethe. Its impact appears in his early novels, Werther and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. In general, a search for the inner core of selfhood was characteristic of much Romantic literature. Nothing illustrates this better than the Romantic novel. Critics in the seventeenth century considered the novel a direct successor of the medieval chansons de geste, which in turn often imitated ancient epics. Chrétien de Troyes, the principal French composer of knightly chansons, had studiously reworked such Latin epics as Virgil’s Aeneid and Statius’s Thebaid into chivalrous stories. In fact, the modern novel had altogether different sources. The Hungarian critic Georg Lukács, in his classic study on the novel, argues that the epic (as well as its medieval imitations) depended on the belief of its writers that they and their characters formed part of a single, meaning-giving totality. The various aspects of reality and culture were integrated into a coherent complex. The ancient tragedy, according to Lukács, caused a first crisis in the belief in a stable world order assumed by the epic. Conflicting characters in the drama questioned firmly held institutions and assumptions. Ancient comedy in particular showed the fragility of the assumption of a universal harmony that could so easily be toppled by laughter. Still, in the final act of classical tragedy, order is somewhat restored. “Even after being has lost its self-enclosed totality . . . the drama may yet find a world that, although problematic, is still capable of containing everything and remaining self-sufficient.”2 After the Hellenistic empires had absorbed the Greek city-states, the ancient idea of a universal order was further weakened. However, Stoic and Epicurean philosophies, and especially Christianity, laid a new foundation of a society sufficiently homogeneous for the epic to thrive once again. Confidence in a divine Creator who rules the universe and conveys a transcendent meaning to all that occurs inspired the Christian epics of Camoëns, Tasso, and Milton. At the end of the Middle Ages, however, another crisis lay in waiting. Nominalist theology had undermined the basis of the previously assumed universal harmony by making it dependent on the inscrutable will of God, thereby depriving it of its intrinsic necessity. A person could no longer rely on a transcendent source of meaning to support his trust in a given order of nature.

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Once the faith in a coherent community of meaning had vanished, the epic ceased to convey a credible interpretation of life. Henceforth, the poet himself had to create the meaning of his story. The subjective turn of the Romantic mind intensified this uncertainty. In his story “The Sandman,” E. T. A. Hoffmann has evoked the anxiety caused by the loss of trust in a stable source of meaning. The young hero questions whether he really exists and whether other people are like him. After all, he thinks, he possesses nothing but images and representations in his own mind. Hoffmann’s story shows how the subjectivism of the modern mind threatens to separate the self from reality.3 The person ceases to conceive of his ideas and representations as resulting from a dialogue with the other; he regards them as born in a private self-understanding. Once a word, such as “Sandman,” establishes an idea in the mind, the idea needs no further testing by the outside world. In Hoffmann’s story, the word initiates a nightmare feeling of self-confinement. The problem of solipsism had begun with Descartes’ doubt and had become critically dangerous in Fichte’s early philosophy, which reduces all otherness to a dimension of the self. The increased role of the imagination in Romantic writers, such as Hoffmann, Chamisso, Brentano, and Eichendorff in Germany, Nodier and Gautier in France, and Byron and Maturin in Britain, further weakened the border between dream and reality. To counteract this dangerous subjectivism, the individual all the more strongly asserted his freedom and selfdetermination. The Bildungsroman tells the story of this assertion.

Th e B I L D U N G S R O M A N : G o e t h e ’ s W I L H E L M M E I S T E R

During his first journey to Italy, Goethe, who was already famous through the publication of his Werther and Goetz von Berlichingen, had occasion to reflect on his life and work. As a poet, he had been distracted by his administrative duties at the Weimar Court. In Italy he realized that his difficulty was more fundamental: not only had his activity been dispersed, but also a lack of discipline had deflected him from his goal. All too often, he had rushed into writing before adequately preparing the ground for it. In the diary of his Italian journey, he notes: “I was

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never prepared to learn the appropriate craft, which is why, despite great natural potential, I have done and achieved so little.”4 In an attempt to resolve this creative crisis, he returned to his unfinished novel Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (W. M.’s Theatrical Vocation). In the spirit of Sturm und Drang, the young Goethe had intended to use literature to awaken a national consciousness in Germans, and to do so through the theater. Wilhelm, the hero of this early project, wants to become an actor. On returning from his Italian journey, Goethe planned to transform his original idea, which he found too narrow, into the story of a young man confronted with the need to make a crucial choice about his life. Goethe’s treatment of the choice of a career as actor or playwright as all-important may seem strange to us today. Yet especially in Germany, the theater had reached a period of great popularity. All major writers wrote dramas. Sturm und Drang began in the theater. As we learn in Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785 – 90), talented young men attempted to gain social respectability through the theater. Soon, however, Anton Reiser and Wilhelm Meister come to see the limits of this choice. In the first five books of Goethe’s revised version of Wilhelm Meister, the theater continues to play an important part, but it no longer dominates the entire novel. Wilhelm still wants to become an actor, yet after a performance of Hamlet (analyzed in Book 5), he realizes that his talent is limited to playing characters who, like Hamlet, reflect his own uncertainty. A true actor must be able to play parts that differ from his personal inclinations. Moreover, Wilhelm decides, the lively but restless crowd of the theater is not the world in which he wants to spend the rest of his life. He decides to choose an occupation more congenial to his aspirations. The novel takes a surprising turn in Book 6, with the mysterious “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” the spiritual journal of a young woman who leads a secluded life and who has learned to accept all of the pains and pleasures of life with equanimity. In the process of practicing this inner discipline, however, she has isolated herself from the joys and obligations of a life in the world. Her relatives admire her uncompromising search for spiritual independence, yet they intimate that she may have missed an important part of a young woman’s development.

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This passage, which is at the center of the novel, may appear to be out of place. But in view of the inward direction that Wilhelm’s life is taking, it plays an important role in his choice. “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” may be ironical, as is all of Wilhelm Meister. Nonetheless, it reflects an essential stage of Goethe’s own educational history. Katharina von Klettenberg, a member of a Pietist sect and a friend of his mother, had strongly influenced the young poet at the time when he was recovering from a moral and physical collapse. After his recovery, she had continued to advise him on moral and religious matters. He had occasionally consulted her even on aesthetic problems, and he mentions her with great respect in the second part of his autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth). In the second part of the novel, Wilhelm abandons the theater altogether. While staying at a castle of Lothario, a nephew of the author of the “Confessions,” he decides to visit his former theatrical companions for a final farewell, including Mignon, a young girl whom he had rescued from a group of traveling performers, and little Felix, a child whose origin had remained unknown to him. One night the aged housekeeper of his former lover, Marianne, the woman who had first introduced him to the theater, informs him that her mistress has died and that Felix is his son. Wilhelm adopts both children but temporarily leaves them with a friend. At the end of the Lehrjahre, Wilhelm is initiated into a secret Masonic League, of which Lothario’s castle was the lodge. A voice declares at the close of the ritual: “Good luck, young man! Your apprentice years are over. Nature has set you free.” Henceforth Wilhelm’s task will consist in raising his son and assuming responsibility for the next generation. Goethe describes this task in great (and often tedious) detail in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, the second half of the story. The many adventures and scenes of unexpected recognition throughout Wilhelm Meister show the strong links between Goethe’s early novel and the early British novel. Like Tom Jones, Pamela, and Clarissa, Wilhelm Meister moves through a succession of improbable encounters, which in the end all turn to the young man’s benefit. Yet Goethe’s work differed from the English models through the educational orientation he gave to Wilhelm’s adventures. His hero attempts to attain what Herder had called Humanität, the ideal of full humanity. That ideal, as Goethe

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informs us, emerged from the aspirations of the rising middle class of his time. For a nobleman, human refinement came naturally, starting with birth. All a noble had to do was to display the gracious manners and elegance in dress, gait, and speech that he had learned at home. But only personal merit, exceptional abilities, or considerable possessions would enable a person belonging to the middle class (ein Bürger) to stand out from the nameless mass. Wilhelm had hoped that the theater would teach him all that he was missing, especially refinement of language and taste. He discovers that Bildung requires more. The ideal of Humanität, he now understands, includes being “useful” to society. Novalis criticized Goethe’s self-centered idea of Bildung. With most early Romantics in Germany, he at first had applauded Goethe’s novel. Yet shortly afterward he noted in his diary: “Meister is fundamentally a repulsive and foolish book—a satire on poetry, religion, etc. Everything turns to farce at the end.” Three weeks later he wrote to his friend Ludwig Tieck: “In Meister, poetry is being shipwrecked in the background, while economy safe on land carouses with friends and shrugs its shoulders at the ocean.” This negative judgment contrasts with what other Romantics thought of Wilhelm Meister. Friedrich Schlegel rated the novel, together with Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, the most significant literary achievement of the age. Yet what he and his fellow Romantics praised was not Goethe’s ideal of making oneself “useful” to society, or the essentially bourgeois style of its characters, but rather the break with the Enlightenment’s moralizing, rationalist view of life. The freshness of Goethe’s story as well as the lyrical poetry interspersed throughout the narrative and the thoughtful reflections on dramatic poetry contrasted with the stuffy ideals of the previous century. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, when the belief that one is surrounded by a comprehensive, meaning-giving community vanishes, the person is forced to find a new sense of purpose based on different assumptions. Wilhelm Meister must choose his life in a world that sets physical and social limits to his choice. The outcome will be his own creation, whether he succeeds or fails. The individual no longer feels determined by a preexisting order. Previously, in literature, mimesis, the link with what had always existed, had been a primary condition of literary veracity. In the Romantic epoch the novel had ceased to follow

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earlier models. The modern novelist must create a context within which a struggle occurs between the hero’s subjective aspirations and the restrictions inherent in life at a particular time and place. In such difficult conditions, the novel’s hero is in some respects bound to fail. The writer, therefore, is forced to look at his hero’s efforts, although wellintentioned and seriously pursued, with a touch of compassionate irony. Before Goethe, irony in such comical novels as Tom Jones, Pantagruel, or Simplicissimus arose primarily from the objective situations in which the hero becomes entangled, or, as in Tristram Shandy, from a conflict between the formal aspects of the narrative and the nature of the content. Goethe’s irony stems from an awareness of the limits inherent in a situation in which the hero must choose his life within the boundaries defined by the author’s potential. In the concluding chapters of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Goethe frees irony from all restrictions: each man marries the right woman, little Felix, who was given up for dead, mysteriously returns to life, and Lothario’s brother suddenly enters from nowhere to tie the remaining loose ends together.

Th e I n t e r i o r J o u r n e y : H ö l d e r l i n ’ s H Y P E R I O N

Hyperion is a Romantic Bildungsroman, but one so different from Wilhelm Meister that the two can hardly be compared. In various events, encounters, and decisions, Goethe’s hero actively builds his life. Hölderlin’s epistolary novel mainly presents an exploration of the inner self that is interrupted only rarely by a free decision. An early fragment of the work, in which Schiller’s influence is strongly noticeable, had appeared in 1794 in Schiller’s journal Thalia. The final version of the novel barely resembles the early fragment. The novel reports not the hero’s actions but his remembrance of them. Hölderlin, like Schiller and Goethe, distinguished a state in which humans still depend on nature and tradition from one in which they choose their life and take responsibility for it. The transition from the former to the latter requires them to abandon a sheltered, unreflective life for one of doubt and reflection. Crucial in the early fragment is the role of Melite, who in the later version is replaced by Diotima, a model of ancient virtue, who encourages Hy-

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perion to follow his ideals and comforts him when he fails to live up to them. By the time Hölderlin developed the definitive version of his novel in Frankfurt, under the eyes of Susette Gontard, the main theme had shifted from emancipation to self-discovery. In the definitive version, Hyperion is living with his father on a remote Greek island during the Turkish occupation. One day, Alabanda, a young athlete who plans to liberate his country, visits them and invites Hyperion to join him. Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the legendary friends who killed the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus in the sixth century BC, Alabanda and Hyperion enter into a pact of friendship and prepare for an armed rebellion. Yet after Hyperion meets Alabanda’s other friends, he breaks with Alabanda in a fit of jealousy and distaste and moves to Salamis, intending to retire to a life of leisure. On the nearby island of Kalauria, he meets the beautiful Diotima, his ideal of spirit and nature combined in one person. He wishes nothing more than to spend his days with her in love and beauty. Diotima, however, protests: “Hyperion, you are born for greater things. Only the absence of a proper object has held you back.” In 1770, the war between Russia and Turkey offers Hyperion a chance to test his determination. Reconciled with Alabanda, he joins him in a rebellion supported by Russia. The Turkish army crushes the revolt. Even more painful to Hyperion than the defeat, however, is the discovery that most of his fellow rebels were robbers and bandits, whose only motive was to enrich themselves. Dejected, he writes to Diotima that he will continue the fight against Turkey on a Russian warship and that she should forget him. He is heavily wounded in a sea battle, and Alabanda rescues him from death minutes before the ship explodes. While recovering, Hyperion regrets his message to Diotima and writes again, begging her to ignore it. But his letter arrives too late: Diotima is dying. In the final chapter we find Hyperion in Germany, deciding to leave the country. Yet the beauty of spring holds him back. At the end of the letter in which he reports this to his correspondent, Bellarmin, Hyperion writes: “Nächtstens mehr” (Next time more). These final words have led Lawrence Ryan, an American scholar, to argue that the end is actually the beginning of the story, and that all of the preceding chapters were a remembrance of earlier events. If this interpretation is

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correct, as I think it is, the entire novel consists of a meditation on events and experiences that occurred in the past. The retrospective character of the novel symbolizes the fact that only by remembering his life can the hero gain access to his real self. Hyperion, then, is the Romantic counterpart of Wilhelm Meister, the active hero, whose mind is always on the future. The two young men are complementary parts of the Romantic personality. One represents the unrestricted sense of freedom and is anxious to conform the world to his ideal; the other is waiting for the full revelation of his identity before he will find his way in the world. If he starts his active life prematurely, as Hyperion did when he went to war, he will fail. In the hero of Jean Paul’s Titan, discussed below, both phases appear: the passive in the first volume of the novel, the active in the final two volumes. Self-knowledge for Hölderlin was never an end in itself. Its aim was to arrive at an understanding not of his actual self but of his ideal self. Hölderlin’s concept of an ideal selfhood had come to him from Fichte, whose lectures he was attending at the time he conceived the idea of Hyperion. Reflecting upon one’s past actions was a method for attaining that essential, universal selfhood of which the philosopher spoke. The ontological meaning of Hyperion’s search for a transcendent selfhood appears in an unpublished preface to the penultimate version of the novel, in which the author claims that humans have torn themselves loose from the original given unity with nature, such as they possessed in ancient Greek culture. “The blessed unity, being in the unique sense of the word, has been lost for us and we had to lose it, for we had to regain it through strife and struggle. We tear ourselves loose from the peaceful hen kai pan (One and All) of the world in order to establish it through ourselves and what was formerly one is now in conflict with itself. Mastery and servitude alternate on either side: it often seems as if the world were everything and we nothing, but at other times as if we were everything and the world nothing.”5 To restore a state of harmony, existence must follow an “eccentric” path. Hyperion’s final reflection confirms this: “We separate ourselves only in order to be more one, more divinely at peace with all, with ourselves. We die in order to live” (4:6). “We had to lose it, if we were to aim for it and to regain it” (“Wir mussten es verlieren, wenn wir es erstreben,

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erringen sollten”). “The name of the ontologically ultimate, the Oneand-All, is beauty. But the second one is religion” (2:19). Heraclitus had not understood that the One is differentiated within itself (hen diaferon heautou) and hence that the unconditioned One consists in harmony rather than in undifferentiated unity. By the same token, Hyperion suggests that the One is known not by reason alone but also, and in the first place, by aesthetic contemplation and religious reverence. Hyperion must be read in conjunction with the great elegies and hymns of Hölderlin’s later years. The ideal of classical Greece as the home of beauty and truth, which Hyperion discovers during his (and Diotima’s) visit to Athens, attains full lyrical perfection in the magnificent hymn “Archipelagus,” and it is remembered in “Der Einzige” (The Only One). Hölderlin’s filling a novel with philosophical content resulted in the paradoxes to which Wilhelm Dilthey refers: “A Bildungsgeschichte in the course of which the hero’s power seems rather destroyed, a statement of aesthetic pantheism which ends with the flight from life and suffering, a novel that proceeds in the language of a lyrical poem . . . . This work transgresses every rule of our classical poets. Lonely as the poet’s life stands his work. Hölderlin’s greatness primarily consists in his attempt to open new possibilities.”6

Th e S e a r c h f o r I d e n t i t y : J e a n Pa u l’ s T I T A N

Born in Wunsiedel near Bayreuth in Bavaria, Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, known as Jean Paul, studied at the University of Leipzig but was forced to abandon his studies after the death of his father, a teacher and Lutheran pastor. He became a Hofmeister and, to alleviate his family’s harsh circumstances, began to write. His first book failed. But his next one, Die unsichtbare Loge (The Invisible Lodge) (1793), established his literary reputation. He considered Titan, published in four installments from 1800 to 1803, his best work. When it did not receive the attention he had expected, he wrote Vorschule der Ästhetik (Preschool of Aesthetics), discussed in chapter 1, to redirect attention to his novel. Despite his interrupted education, Jean Paul possessed a solid knowledge of philosophy. He knew and admired Kant’s three Critiques and

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was deeply influenced by Fichte. From Herder and Jacobi, the philosophers of intuition and belief, he learned the significance of dreams and feelings, which play an important role in all his novels. He wrote Titan in Weimar, where Goethe’s theater was the center of cultural life, and appears to have absorbed some of the classicism of the place. Yet he regarded Goethe’s theater as a source of immorality. Indeed, he may have conceived Titan as a critical counterpart to the early version of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Reflecting on his stay in the cultured Saxon city after his return to his native Bayreuth, he observed: “Weimar is for me an island in the Atlantic, sunk below the waves.” Charles Brooks, a nineteenth-century Unitarian minister in Newport, Rhode Island, and the heroic English translator of Titan, quotes an anonymous French critic about the encyclopedic nature of the book: “It is a poem, a romance; a psychological résumé, a satire, an elegy, a drama, a fantasy; having for theme and text the enigma of civilization in the eighteenth century.”7 Its whimsical and often obscure style (imitated with mixed success by Carlyle), as well as the author’s ironical intrusions, make the reading at times tedious to the modern reader. Some critics consider Jean Paul a provincial writer, a transitional figure who, for commercial reasons, produced old-fashioned novels disguised in a Romantic plumage. To me, the opposite seems to be the case. Titan’s subject is an essentially Romantic search for origins. Its hero, Albano, is not creating himself, like Goethe’s Wilhelm, but rather, like Hyperion, attempting to find out who he is. The novel begins when the young German, Count Albano, returns to Isola Bella, one of the Borromeo Islands in northern Italy, where he spent the first three years of his life. Raised by foster parents, he has not seen his father since early childhood. Now Count Gaspard, his reputed father, summons him back to the island for a meeting. While there, Albano spends a night sleeping outside, and “a figure all dressed in black, with the image of a death’s head on its breast, came slowly and with trembling breath, up the terraces behind him” (Titan, vol. 1, ch. 7; Brooks trans., 1:44). The horrible apparition, calling itself the “Father of Death,” makes some strange announcements about Albano’s future, which he claims to come from his deceased mother. All of this confuses young Albano.

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Albano lives at some distance from the Prince of Hohenfliess’s castle. His teacher persistently describes Liana, the daughter of the prince’s minister, as a model to imitate. As a result, Albano falls in love with a girl he has never seen. Soon the old prince dies, and on the day of his solemn reburial in a new church, Liana appears in the funeral procession, led by her brother Roquairol. That evening, while walking toward the ruins of the old castle, Albano suddenly finds himself in the midst of a ghostly world: a pale head appears in the sky, and a voice of his unknown sister calls: “Linda de Romeiro I give to you.” Suddenly Roquairol emerges from the dark. When Albano tells him about the message, he becomes disturbed: Linda had been his first love. Liana, who has begun to return Albano’s love, suddenly resigns all prospects of a marriage with him. Obviously, the secret has to do with Albano’s identity. Soon afterward, Liana dies. Albano, unable to accept her death, obsessively begs her to reappear. Only after the young prince’s sisterin-law, who bears some resemblance to Liana, impersonates her, can Albano accept the loss of his love. Over this first part of the novel hangs a shroud of mystery and death: the voice of Albano’s dead mother, the reburial of the old prince, the death of Liana. Yet the dead constantly maintain a relation with the living. What is real and what is delusion? Gothic novels of horror and mystery had become commonplace in the late eighteenth century, yet Romantic writers focused less on the sensational element than on their hidden meaning for the viewer. The French critic Albert Béguin, in a study of the important role of dreams and dreamlike states in German Romanticism, singles out Jean Paul as a master of supernatural literature.8 How remarkable, then, that in the Vorschule der Ästhetik, Jean Paul denies that any supernatural cause should be operative in fictional writings. Even in the novel, Count Gaspard declares: “Wonders or the entire world of spirits reside only in the mind.” Albano agrees, but responds: “Der Geist will Geister” (But the spirit [i.e., the mind] wants spirits). In the second part of the novel, Albano, while visiting the lands and ruins of classical civilization and acquainting himself with the past, becomes aware of his own freedom and moves a step closer toward finding his identity. He accompanies his supposed father Count Gaspard, the young prince’s wife, and the young prince’s sister Julienne on

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a long-planned journey to Rome. The statues of the ancient heroes seem to challenge him: “Who are you?” Only through heroic deeds will he find his identity. Albano resolves to join the revolutionary forces in France. But first, while the rest of the company returns home, he travels to Naples with Julienne. In the beauty of sun-drenched Campania, he feels united with nature in a way that quiets the restlessness of the search. The travelers arrive at night and leave at daybreak on the ferry for Ischia. The descriptions of the boat trip around Posillipo and Capo Miseno, with the distant scene of Mount Epomeo on the island of Ischia, as if rising out of the sea, marvelously evoke the freshness of a first encounter with the classical landscape. On the island, Albano encounters Linda de Romeiro, whose place in his life his dead mother’s voice had foretold. All three decide to climb the mountain next morning. While waiting for Linda, Julienne discloses to Albano that she is his sister but postpones giving further explanations. Albano promises not to enlist in the French revolutionary war before the mystery surrounding his identity has been cleared up. The mystery thickens after his return home, when it appears from an old portrait of the old prince’s wife that Linda exactly resembles her. Is Linda actually Albano’s cousin, or even another sister? The final part of the novel is as horrible as it is incredible. Roquairol misleads Linda into thinking that Albano has invited her to meet him in the evening near the castle. In the dark, Linda, who is entirely nightblind, thinks she hears Albano’s voice. Roquairol impersonates Albano and rapes her. The next evening, in a play that he wrote about his life, Roquairol enters the stage armed with a pistol and, before the horrified audience, kills himself. Shortly afterward Albano receives an anonymous note informing him that Roquairol played his part with Linda “through all the acts.” When he confronts the innocent Linda, she realizes the true identity of her rapist and exclaims: “Fly from me forever, I am his widow.” Albano instantly leaves her. This brutal episode, however, resolves none of the mysteries of his identity. In the end, Albano’s friend Schoppe, the voice of common sense all through the story, remembers that Gaspard, Albano’s reputed father, had told him to visit the tomb of the old princess. There he finds a letter declaring that Albano is her son, the younger brother of the young prince, whom he is to succeed. His par-

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ents had decided to keep his existence secret because they feared the constant scheming of the neighboring principality, which was legally entitled to incorporate Hohenfliess if the ruler of that duchy had no male descendant. Therefore, they entrusted Albano to Count Gaspard to raise him as if he were his son, while Gaspard temporarily surrendered his daughter Linda to the prince, hoping that she would eventually marry Albano. Some account of Jean Paul’s lengthy and complex story was needed to appreciate his bizarre way of turning a Bildungsroman into a mystery of lost identity. Jean Paul opened a new field of Romantic interest, which others explored in numerous stories and novels. The best among them is Adelbert von Chamisso’s witty yet frightening tale Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, about a man who sells his shadow to the devil. In all of these works, fantasies, dreams, and unconscious fears take the place of what in Goethe’s Meister had been self-directed action. Jean Paul justifies these ghostly phenomena in Albano’s words: “There are moments when the two worlds, the earthly and the spiritual, sweep by near to each other and when earthly day and heavenly night touch each other in twilights” (vol. 4, ch. 7; Brooks trans., 2:178). Another important Romantic theme also runs through Titan. Jean Paul, an advocate of German freedom, was critical of the hundreds of principalities that separated Germans from each other and that, like Hohenfliess, were subject to absurd statutes of succession. At the same time, he felt a Romantic attachment to this quaint old-fashioned aristocratic society, which was doomed to disappear. Titan’s characters are not psychologically consistent. Some change from one chapter to another. Others briefly appear and are never heard from again. Still others are merely mentioned and not developed at all, as is the case with Linda. Liana is so strongly idealized that she ceases to be a real person. Jean Paul’s psychology is one of emotions rather than of persons. Characters nearly evaporate in the lyrical passages, especially in the first part of the novel.9 In this respect Titan differs from the great Russian and French character novels of the later nineteenth century. It is a typically Romantic work with its loose format, its mysterious appearances, its beautiful descriptions, and its emotional richness. Yet as a whole it lacks credibility.

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Th e Vo i c e s o f t h e U n c o n s c i o u s : G é r a r d d e N e r v a l’ s S Y L V I E a n d A U R É L I A

The French novel had always been psychological, whatever the nature of the subject. As Ernst-Robert Curtius concluded in his Essai sur la France, “La littérature française est un discours continu sur l’homme.”10 Yet few works have been as informative about the unconscious depths of personhood as Gérard de Nerval’s two novellas Sylvie (1853) and Aurélia (published posthumously in 1855). In Sylvie, a thoughtful tale of love, time, and memory, the author shows how the remembrance of past feelings may permanently affect a person’s view of the present. Aurélia, written during a period of mental sickness, explores the dreams and visions experienced during the author’s emotional crisis. Both stories, written in the first person, anticipate a trend in literature that became popular only in the twentieth century, mainly through the writings of Marcel Proust. Sylvie begins with the words “Je sortais d’un theâtre . . .” The narrator is leaving the theater that he attends every night, regardless of the play, to watch a young actress. This actress is the link between the two novellas: his love for her forms the core of his obsession in Aurélia. Opening a newspaper, he notices an announcement of an upcoming archery competition in a rural town of Valois, where he used to spend his summer vacations at the home of a maternal uncle. (Nerval’s father had been a surgeon in Napoleon’s army, and his mother, who accompanied him on the campaign against Germany, had died in Silesia at the age of twenty-five.) A similar competition had taken place during Nerval’s visit to the village some ten years earlier. On that occasion he had invited Sylvie, a little peasant girl whom he liked, to the children’s dance in front of the castle. At one point, a rule of the game sent him to the center of the circle to dance with Adrienne, the girl who lived in the castle. Adrienne had to sing before both would be allowed to rejoin the circle of dancers. Her song, an ancient melancholy romance of love, brought all the children to a rapturous silence. As soon as the song was finished, the young Nerval ran to the flowerbeds and picked her a beautiful bouquet. Little Sylvie, however, felt neglected and cried all the way home.

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During his visit the following year, Sylvie informs him that Adrienne intends to join a religious order. After his uncle dies, Nerval’s yearly visits cease. Yet he remembers visiting Sylvie in Valois once more, during his studies in Paris. At his arrival, the dances were almost over, but Sylvie, now grown into a beautiful young woman, was still there. Anxious to make up for his long absence, Nerval decided to stay another day, and they made a wonderful excursion to the ruins of a nearby castle. But when he inquired about Adrienne, Sylvie curtly dismissed him. “Ah! Vous êtes terrible avec votre religieuse . . . Eh bien! Cela a tourné mal.” Adrienne has died. Gérard is overwhelmed by conflicting feelings. Now, the newspaper reminds him that the annual festivities will take place the next day, and he decides to return. He finds Sylvie, still unmarried, occupied as a glovemaker at her home. His joy at reconnecting with the past is mixed with a vague regret for having missed the chance of sharing a simple life with Sylvie. He also recalls the death of Adrienne. Not only have seemingly similar experiences changed, but even his memories of them have differed from one year to the next. After his return from the country, he immediately attends the theater to watch the young actress Jenny Colon, whose features remind him of Adrienne. In his memory the two images have merged into one, whom he calls Aurélia. In the course of time, he becomes acquainted with the actress and, as a young playwright, even accompanies her to the various theaters where she performs in his plays. One day their travels take them to Valois, where he is anxious to show her the castle and the lawn on which he met Adrienne, now dead and reborn in Aurélia. Jenny, however, is not pleased by having to stand in for another woman. She replies, “Vous ne m’aimez pas,” and shortly thereafter marries her director. The painfulness of this blow for Nerval is evident in the mental illness that follows. Not only has he lost the woman he courted for many years, but his ideal of life has been taken away from him. Here begins the story of Aurélia. Nerval introduces his second novel as “a transcript of the impressions of a long sickness that had occurred entirely in my mind.” The first part reports the events that led to his nervous breakdown of 1841. In the second part he records another crisis, which lasted from August 1853 until October 1854, months which he mostly spent in a mental

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institution. Dr. Emile Blanche, the perceptive therapist who takes Nerval into his own house, as his father had done during Nerval’s first crisis, allows or, more probably, advises his patient to keep a diary of his visions and dreams. Nerval plans to rework this diary into a literary piece but does not complete the task. He believes that the dreams and visions experienced during his sickness have a spiritual significance. In the beginning of Aurélia, Nerval mentions that Dante, Apuleius, and Swedenborg served as models for his study of the human soul. He might have added the name of Jean Paul, who had long inspired him and whose poem of a dream about the crucified Christ announcing the death of God he had reworked into a cycle of five sonnets, “Le Christ aux Oliviers.” It may well be that Nerval calls his visions “dreams” under Jean Paul’s influence. In fact, he prefaces Aurélia with Homer’s words about dreams: “The dream is a second life. I have not been able to enter into it without shaking the doors of ivory and of horn that separate us from the invisible world.”11 Nerval compares the spiritual journey that he completed during this critical period to the one Dante describes in his Vita Nuova. Just as the poet must be deprived of Beatrice’s physical presence in order to attain the spiritual ideal she represented, so the dreams and visions that followed Aurélia’s marriage must cleanse Nerval’s love from the selfish attachment to her physical person. Next to Dante, Goethe’s Faust, the second part of which Nerval had finished translating shortly before his mental breakdown, influenced the interpretation he gave to his loss and his hope for redemption. Gretchen, Faust’s beloved, also dies and becomes a spiritual presence to Faust, and she, in the end, saves his soul. The author begins by soberly stating the events that led to his mental breakdown. “A lady whom I had loved for a long time, whom I shall call Aurélia, was lost to me” (696 – 97). He claims that she rejected him because of a fault he could never hope to repair. His love for Aurélia, which had cooled after her marriage, flames up again after the mediation of the pianist Marie Pleyel, for whom Nerval had felt a brief, unrequited infatuation. Shortly after their encounter, he begins having strange experiences. While he is passing a house that bears the number of the year of his age, a pale woman with hollow eyes, who reminds him of Aurélia, appears at the entrance. Is she a sign of Aurélia’s death or of

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his own? That evening, dreamlike visions continue to haunt him. At one point an enormous specter slowly flies over him and crashes to the ground. Certain that he is about to die, Nerval takes leave of his friends and begins following a star, which, he thinks, determines his destiny and in which Aurélia dwells. He stops in the middle of the street, refuses to move on, and takes off his clothes in preparation for an ascent to the star. Guards of the night watch attempt to arrest him, place him in a straitjacket when he resists, and take him to their station. Nerval notes that he remained conscious of his physical surroundings during these experiences. He never lost his sense of the real world: his mind oscillated between hallucination and reality. His attitude toward the psychotic visions is ambiguous. He knows that they are pathological and wishes to be cured, but at the same time he believes that they have enlightened him. Reluctant to abandon them altogether, he considers it a duty to write them down. “The mission of a writer consists in sincerely analyzing what he experiences at the serious moments of his life” (700). The reader, however, is in a quandary about how much the author actually experienced and how much the literary version of Aurélia owes to earlier writers. The idea of “the double,” which plays a significant role in Nerval’s story, was a common topic in Romantic literature. Nerval may have remembered it from reading Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir or de Musset’s “Nuit de Décembre,” and possibly Théophile Gautier’s story “Chevalier double” (in which a man fights an entire night with himself ). He first mentions having seen his double when, after being arrested and stretched out on a field bed, he experiences a separation of himself into a visionary and an ordinary self. Later he sees his double again in the guise of an Oriental prince, whom he recalls meeting and whom he had mentioned in his book Voyage en Orient. When Gérard calls this ghostly apparition, the face it turns to him is his own. At the onset of Nerval’s second major crisis in 1853, the double attempts to substitute for Nerval as Aurélia’s spiritual lover (720). Carl Gustav Jung considered the idea of the double a pivotal archetype of the mind, one which can play a devastating role in psychic conflicts. It symbolizes the fact that self-knowledge divides the self into a knower and a known. Its appearance suggests that the former no longer coincides with the latter.

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As Nerval descends deeper into his unconscious, he increasingly dreams about the beginning and the end of things. At one point he meets some of his unknown ancestors, who warmly receive him at a family dinner. One of them embraces him, and the dreamer recognizes his deceased uncle. “It is true, then, I exclaimed with great happiness, that we are immortal and that we preserve here the images of the world we have inhabited! What bliss to think that all that we have loved will always exist around us” (704). Soon, however, he realizes that he is only a visitor among the dead and will have to return to the land of the living. Gradually he comes to understand that Aurélia, whom he knew to be ill, had to die in order to be spiritually accessible to him. The theme of Dante’s Vita Nuova reemerges: the beloved has been transformed into an eternal ideal. Aurélia merges with Adrienne, with the Virgin Mary, and with the Egyptian goddess Isis into a single mystical image of eternal femininity. At the end of November 1841 the author had recovered sufficiently to be discharged from Dr. Blanche’s clinic. He resumed his active life and, after learning that Aurélia had actually died, set off on a yearlong voyage to Egypt, Lebanon, and the Greek islands. The fruit of his travels, Voyage en Orient, appeared in 1851. He revisited Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands and published Lorely, impressions of German cities and culture, in addition to a play and two sketches of the Low Countries (“Rhin et Flandre” and “Les Fêtes de Hollande”). In addition, Nerval wrote a number of dramas, several of which enjoyed considerable popularity in his time. His enormous productivity may have caused an exhaustion that proved fatal to a person of his fragile psychic constitution. Mental disturbances restarted in the midst of this frantic activity. After a fall from a staircase, he was transferred to a hospital room that overlooked the cemetery where Aurélia had been buried. He attempted to evoke her image in his dreams, but she no longer appeared. Instead, the idea of the double regained a terrifying hold on his mind. He recalled a text in Goethe’s Faust (it also appears as an epitaph to “Pandora”): “Two souls, alas, share my body and each one wants to separate from the other: one, ardent of love is attached to the world by the body’s organs; a supernatural movement draws the other far from the darkness to the high dwellings of our ancestors” (717). Will the

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two spirits separate at some time? In his torment, an idea strikes him like lightning: his double may have run off with Aurélia. The myth of Orpheus also begins to obsess him. While leading his beloved Eurydice out of the underworld, Orpheus, through his own fault, has lost her again. Above the second part of Aurélia appears as a motto Orpheus’s tragic cry for his beloved: “Euridice! Euridice!” followed by Nerval’s words, “Une seconde fois perdue” (A second time lost): “All is finished, all is over. All that is left for me is to die and to die without hope” (722). Until now he had continued to hope that after death he would receive what life had denied him. Now cold reflection kills this hope. During this painful mental torture, Aurélia returns in a dream, takes his hand, and whispers: “We shall see each other later . . . at the house of your friend” (727). He begs for her forgiveness, but she disappears. He describes a cataclysm in the stars; they suddenly all become extinguished, “like candles in a church.” A pale sun rises as if it were dying, and he predicts that it will return for only three more days. He begins to wander and ends up at the home of Heinrich Heine, the poet, whose work he had translated into French. There, he exclaims that all has ended and that we must prepare ourselves for death. Heine’s wife arranged for Nerval to be brought to a hospital, where he stayed for a few weeks, until he felt sufficiently improved to resume his writing. But the insomnia that followed drove him again to the streets at night. Hallucinations returned, and Nerval was transferred to a new clinic in Passy, also headed by Dr. Emile Blanche. Against the doctor’s advice, he left prematurely, relapsed into bouts of alienation, and killed himself while wandering around on a cold winter night in January 1855. Aurélia mainly reports the dreams and hallucinations that he experienced during these periods. During the final months of his life, Nerval felt that only a religious faith might save him. He had never had any religious instruction. His mother had died when he was only two years old, and his favorite uncle in Valois had lost his faith during the Revolution. Despite the difficulty of attaining a kind of mystical peace after all dogmas of faith had collapsed, the idea of universal harmony still gave him hope that it might be possible. The ideas of integration and reconciliation that dominated Nerval’s dreams, and that, according to Jung, are most readily found in

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religious beliefs, would have been crucial for restoring the disruptions of his psychic harmony. In the depth of his mental sickness Nerval experienced what in various ways is central to the Romantic mind. Jean Guillaume, the editor of Nerval’s work in the Pléiade edition, places Aurélia foremost in Romantic thought. “Aurélia is one of the rare French texts one may call Romantic and compare to German works of the beginning of the same century. If the term Romantic means anything, it refers to the search for unity lost since the instauration of modern science” (1330). In Sylvie, Nerval explored time and memory as foundational in the structure of mental life. In Aurélia he complemented this theme with the insight that only dreams and visions reveal the dark side of the mind. None of his explorations would have survived, however, if he had not been a highly sensitive writer. He does not “explain”; he describes, but does so with an accuracy of expression that requires no further argument. He places his ideas within a psychic space prepared by Virgil’s Aeneid, Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Dante’s Vita Nuova, and, closer to his own time, Jean Paul’s novels. His work enabled later French writers on memory and the unconscious, such as Alain-Fournier, author of Le Grand Meaulnes, Maurice Barrès, and Marcel Proust, to find their voices.

LE

MAL DU SIÈCLE:

WE RT H E R , R E N É , a n d A D O L P H E

Wilhelm Wundt, the father of modern experimental psychology, spent the last twenty years of his life writing his monumental Völkerpsychologie (1900 – 1920). This work introduced regional and historical distinctions to a field of science that had been treated up to then as basically independent of cultural variations. Well before his psychological study, however, Romantic novels had drawn attention to such differences. The French poet Alfred de Musset referred to a particular state of emotional dejection that affected young adults between the late eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century as la maladie du siècle (the disease of the century). Those afflicted with it not infrequently committed suicide. Saint-Preux, Julie’s lover in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, described it as a lassitude of the soul. In France it often appeared linked to

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the social emptiness that followed the Revolution.12 In La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (Confession of a Child of the Century) (1836), de Musset attributed it to the sudden separation between past and present experienced by the generation growing up between 1793 and 1814. “What once was, no longer exists and what will be, exists not yet.” Lukács in his Theory of the Novel views the phenomenon from a more universally human perspective, describing it as the frustration of a soul that is too large for any prospect that life offers. In England, the term spleen had entered the vocabulary with the poems of William Collins and William Cowper, as well as with the graveyard poetry of Edward Young and Thomas Gray. In Germany, the undefinable Weltschmerz that had broken out at the turn of the eighteenth century had found its expression in Goethe’s Werther. In that novel, a young man’s feeling of aimlessness vanishes when he falls in love with a fresh country girl. Lotte, however much she includes him in her affections, is engaged to another man and no longer feels free to respond to his love.13 We know the ending: both lovers decide to separate and never to meet again, and Werther, convinced that he is unable to live without Lotte, kills himself. In Werther, as well as in Chateaubriand’s René and in Constant’s Adolphe, an unhappy love appears to be the cause of the melancholy. Yet why did Werther’s love result in such catastrophic consequences? The novella René, like Atala, was originally a part of an enormous, shapeless novel called Les Natchez, which Chateaubriand had written during his stay in the North American wilderness. He never published it, but he kept plundering it for spare parts. René appeared in the second part of Génie du Christianisme, where it is surprisingly used to show that Christianity has become the only possible refuge from the passions of the age! The author later published the novella separately, as the sad love story that it was. The mood in René remains as heavy as in Goethe’s Werther, and, like Werther, it had some ground in the author’s own experience. At the beginning of the Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, he tells us that he had been very attached to his youngest sister, Lucile, who never seemed to receive much attention from her parents. In René, the author transforms this affection into a passionate erotic love between René and his sister Amélie, which drives René to the edge of suicide. Amélie, who

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had moved away from her brother, returns and makes him promise that he will not kill himself. René never reveals the cause of his despair. Shortly afterward his sister enters a convent. During the general confession that precedes the ceremony of her final vows, René, who has secretly entered the convent church and remains hidden in a dark corner near the choir, overhears her accusing herself of an unnatural, sinful attachment to her brother. Having learned that their love was mutual, René emigrates to French America, where he confesses his story to an old sachem and a French missionary. The erotic attraction between brother and sister is a typically Romantic theme. It implies an attempt to move from physiological relatedness toward an intimate, erotic union, cleared of the hazard of encountering a stranger. It also appears in Achim von Arnim’s Die Kronenwächter (The Guards of the Crown) (1817). More recently, in Robert Musil’s novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), the common search for a noble ideal leads a brother and sister into an exclusive intimacy. Erotic love between brother and sister merely intensifies the fundamental attraction inherent in consanguinity. In his Phenomenology, Hegel characterizes ordinary love between siblings as the noblest and purest, precisely because in its origin it is free of selfishness. “They are the same blood, which, however, in them has entered into a condition of stable equilibrium. They stand in no such natural relation as husband and wife, they do not desire one another. . . . Individual selfhood, recognizing and being recognized, can here assert its right because it is bound up with the balance and equilibrium resulting from being of the same blood and from their being related in a way that involves no mutual desire.”14 Chateaubriand has simply transformed his experience of fraternal protection into erotic attraction. A totally different novel of loneliness and unfulfilled desire is Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe. The plot here is as simple as the emotions are complex. Youthful insolence inspires Adolphe to attempt the conquest of Ellénore, the common-law wife of a French aristocrat. She resists Adolphe’s advances but thereby only turns an ambitious desire into a passionate love. Touched by the sincerity of his feelings, however, she eventually yields to his love and leaves her husband and children for him. Her decision paralyzes Adolphe, who is both unwilling to marry

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her and unwilling to dismiss her. She falls seriously ill. The prospect of permanently losing her revives Adolphe’s love. He promises to marry her, she forgives him, and then dies. Among her papers he discovers an unsent letter that she had neglected to destroy, in which she asks: “What is my crime other than that I love you and cannot live without you?” In a “Letter to the Editor” attached to the story, Constant adds a personal observation: “The great question in life concerns the suffering one causes. Even the most ingenious metaphysics fails to justify the man who has killed a heart that loved him.” Those who knew of Constant’s numerous love affairs considered the story a largely autobiographical confession and attempted, in vain, to identify the character of Ellénore. All his loves had contributed to the story, and all had ended in a similar impasse. Still, a more immediate occasion for writing the story may have been the never-ending frustration caused by his relationship with Germaine de Staël. Her persistent scheming and irascible temperament had resulted in the two hating each other, yet each felt incapable of abandoning the other. Simonde de Sismondi, Constant’s boon companion at Coppet, Germaine’s paternal house, understood immediately that Adolphe was primarily about Benjamin himself: “When I knew him he was exactly like Adolphe, with just as little love, no less temperamental, no less flattering and deceiving again, out of a feeling of goodness, the one he had wounded.” Adolphe may have served Constant as a means to free himself from a heavy burden of guilt. But at the same time he exposes the underlying ambiguity of his character. He accuses himself of causing pain to others, but his fictional confession may also have been a defense of his conduct toward the aggressive Germaine de Staël. Benjamin Constant was a restless man, constantly searching for stability and affection, yet never finding it. When a woman responded to his emotions, he felt as incapable of developing a permanent relation with her as of leaving her altogether. In the case of Germaine de Staël, the struggle continued until she died. Despite his repeated personal failures, Constant wrote beautifully about the psychology of love. One passage admirably describes how love suddenly transforms the experience of time: “Whereas other affections require a past, love creates, so to speak, the impression of having lived for years with a person who, shortly before, was almost a complete

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stranger. Love, although only a luminous point, seems to take possession of all time. A few days before, it did not exist; soon it will have ceased to exist. But as long as it does exist, it spreads its light over the period that preceded it, as well as over the one that is to follow.” Georges Poulet, the French literary critic, in his study of the transformation of inner time consciousness in literature, found in Adolphe a particularly rich ground of observation.15 The memory of love still sheds light, although no longer warmth, on the time that preceded it, Poulet argues. Remembering a lost love, a person feels inclined to return to his past. He or she wants to revisit places where they were together as lovers, which are now empty—a feeling poignantly described in Lamartine’s early poems and in Nerval’s novellas. From Constant’s diary we know how much the unstructured passage of time prevented him from finding joy in life. The prospect that everything will end in death paralyzed him. His description of a visit to a dying friend, the actress Julia Talma, shows his terror at the abrupt ending of life. “After all the convulsions and a last effort to survive follows a silence never again to be broken. From this abyss in which so many creatures of so many species have crowded in upon one another, some of them strong and audacious, others sensitive and passionate, but all attached to the earth by so many interests and bonds, never a cry has escaped. No instruction has reached us from this pit filled with swallowed experiences. The earth opens up and remains silent: silently she closes and the surface becomes even again, leaving our questions unanswered and our regrets uncomforted.”16 Even the return to religion at the end of his life did not quiet Constant’s fear that this ultimate moment might render all others meaningless.

Th e C h a r a c t e r N o v e l : J a n e A u s t e n

In his discussion of tragedy, Aristotle gives priority to plot (mythos), that is, the arrangement of events (synthesis ton pragmaton), over character (Poetics, ch. 6). Jean Paul reverses this order and, in his Vorschule der Ästhetik, ranks character first in Romantic writing. Character, he argues, is the nucleus around which an author weaves all qualities of his hero

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or heroine. It distinguishes one person from another and defines how each views the world that he or she inhabits.17 Ideas do not determine character; rather, character determines a person’s ideas. Had Fichte not asserted that the philosophy one embraces depends on the person one is? Especially in modern tragedy, everything depends on the hero’s choices and decisions. The modern novel resembles the tragedy in that the hero’s will directs the course of events. This is particularly the case in Romantic novels. As examples, Jean Paul mentions Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, his own Hesperus, and the final three volumes of Titan. I would also include the novels of Jane Austen (1775 –1817). Austen’s characters differ from those of other Romantic novelists in that they are neither sentimental, like Constant’s and Chateaubriand’s, nor aiming at superhuman ideals, like Hölderlin’s and Novalis’s. Nor do her heroines change much, other than by gaining some self-knowledge. Emma may be an exception: she develops from an overly confident young woman into a loving person aware of her own limitations and needs. Some critics therefore prefer to rank this book in the pre-Romantic company of Richardson and Fielding. To others, it appears to skip the Romantic style altogether and to anticipate the Victorians. Undoubtedly, Emma was ahead of its time and strongly influenced the great Victorians: without Austen’s portrayal of its heroine, George Eliot and Henry James might not have become the great writers they were. Jane Austen remains nevertheless a basically Romantic writer, comparable even to the early Romantic poets.18 All her characters are pictured with the gentle Romantic irony that Jean Paul described as “a laughter through tears.” They seem to stand at the opposite end of Romantic heroes in Bildungsromane such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister or Hölderlin’s Hyperion. Yet a closer look reveals a great deal of similarity. Jane Austen’s women also have to find their way through life, although that way is limited to the possibilities open to genteel Englishwomen at a time when there was no question of social equality between the sexes. That a woman should choose a career was unheard of: she could not even choose a husband. All she could do was wait and cleverly prepare the terrain. I focus here on the two earliest novels, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), and compare them to Emma (1815),

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the last one published. Sense and Sensibility, on which Austen had been working since 1795, may have suffered from the repeated changes she made during its lengthy preparation. It is a relatively straightforward story, geometrically divided into clear oppositions: between the men and the women, between the two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, and between their suitors, Edward and Willoughby. Elinor is reflective and wise, Marianne impulsive and moody; Edward is good but paying for mistakes committed in his youth; Willoughby is selfish and abusive, yet repenting in the end. The novel concludes with Elinor marrying her beloved Edward and Marianne marrying a better man than her first choice, that of Willoughby. Few people count this as Jane Austen’s best novel. The construction is simple and the characters insufficiently developed to sustain the complex plot. The psychology consists primarily in an analysis of emotions. The author’s subtle distinctions among their various shades, reminding us of the French moralistes, do not quite justify the dramatic actions that occur in this story. Compared to later works, the two heroines appear rather simplistic. Marianne considers marriage with Willoughby a matter of course, since she loves him; Elinor knows how to wait, but once her beloved has explained why he failed to break off his engagement to another woman, she raises no further objections. Neither of them weighs the obligations of married life, as the more mature Anne Elliot does in Persuasion (posthumously published in 1817). Pride and Prejudice is psychologically more coherent. In one long but credible move, Elizabeth, the independent protagonist, takes us from a feeling of positive aversion for the proud Mr. Darcy to an attitude of love and devotion. Even in Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen had displayed a unique talent for interweaving private feelings with social conditions. Barbara Hardy refers to her “capacity to glide easily from sympathy to detachment, from the extreme of inner analysis to that of public life.”19 All major English novelists of the nineteenth century tried to imitate her. In Sense and Sensibility, the social conditions of the time were at the root of the suffering the two sisters undergo. For political and economic reasons, society easily condoned the abusive conduct of young males, especially if they belonged to socially important families. Jane Austen repeatedly refers to the feeling of gratitude expe-

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rienced by a woman in this male-dominated society when a man invites her to an unconditional surrender in marriage. Often, the proposal initiates a love she has never felt before or which she had to restrain herself from feeling. The transformative magic of the man’s proposal appears most strikingly in Pride and Prejudice, when Darcy asks Elizabeth to marry him. Despite her resistance to a man whom she profoundly dislikes, she experiences “a pang of gratitude” for his unexpected offer. She responds, however, that Darcy’s words do not compensate for his previous contempt for her lowborn family. Yet when she receives a letter from him explaining, though not justifying, his past behavior, she feels ashamed of her response, and an instant reversal of her feelings begins. Austen’s heroines knew that in the social-economic conditions of the early nineteenth century, marriage for a woman might make the difference between a life of sufficiency, even of plenty, and one of poverty. The author criticizes the economic obsession of her age, but nonetheless stresses the necessity of making a rational financial decision in accepting a marriage partner. She never neglects to mention (and to compare) how much each of her male lovers is “worth” in annual income. Because of this concern with practical matters, some critics agree with Charlotte Bronte’s exasperation at Austen. When Henry Lewes (George Eliot’s lover) tried to defend Austen’s insight into the affective life of women, she exploded: “She [Austen] rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood [of the passions] . . . and vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition [of feelings].”20 To later generations, Austen has often seemed more “bourgeois” than Romantic. Indeed, she was no social reformer like Mary Wollstonecraft, her radical contemporary. For the most part, she accepted the institutions of her time and generally seemed satisfied with the social status quo. Yet her female models present moral ideals far superior to those of the greedy, complacent society in which they live. In one moving episode, while Marianne is slowly recovering from a near-fatal illness caused indirectly by the betrayal of her lover Willoughby, her sister Elinor is sitting downstairs. Suddenly Willoughby appears. Elinor accuses him of the injustice he has done to her sister. He admits his guilt but claims that throughout his infidelity to Marianne, he had continued to

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love her alone. Upon hearing that she was near death, he had traveled all day to ask her pardon. As he is leaving, Elinor takes his hand and forgives him, knowing that her sister has forgiven him. Her generous gesture shows that she honors an ideal of humanity superior to that of her contemporaries. It is not justified, then, to profile Jane Austen as a wholehearted supporter of the social standards of her time: her noblest characters act in accordance with an ideal that surpasses them. Indeed, her satire is nowhere sharper than when she exposes moral mediocrity, such as that of the young vicar Philip Elton in Emma. In a well-known essay, “Regulated Hatred,” D.W. Harding points out that satire provided her with a means to attack the vices of her society without offending her readers.21 Through her clever use of satire, her readers were amused by comical characters who actually portrayed their own petty vices. In recent years feminist critics have broadened the scope of Jane Austen’s social criticism. According to Claudia Johnson, Austen’s critique aimed at the entire social order of the late eighteenth century. That order seemed beneficial to women of the educated, gentry class: it granted them protection and respectability in exchange for their conforming to it. In fact, it oppressed those whom it claimed to protect. Others have accused Jane Austen of being guilty of the very insensitivity she criticizes in her culture. Maaja Stewart, following suggestions made by Edward Said in a chapter on Mansfield Park in his book Culture and Empire, maintains that the unfairness toward women of this social order grew out of the practices of the young British Empire (which Austen honored even in some of her most noble characters), which enriched itself by slave trade and exploitation of its colonies.22 The “good” Colonel Brandon, who in the end marries Marianne, has spent years in the colonial exploitation of India; Captain Wentworth, the hero of Persuasion, who marries Anne Elliot, played a highly lucrative role during the Napoleonic blockade; much of the income of Sir Thomas, who provides Fanny Price with a home in Mansfield Park, comes from slave plantations in Antigua. Still, Jane Austen was not in the first place a social critic. She was a novelist, who pictured characters and situations she met in her world. She wrote with amusement rather than malice. Her satire was primarily intended not to improve society, but rather to poke fun at the puffed-

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up, lazy, or sly characters she created, such as the formidable Catherine de Bourgh, the bombastic Reverend Collins, the slippery Lucy Steele, and the unholy alliance of Vicar Elton and his wife. She did so with the compassion that a serene mind feels for the odd members of our species. Obviously, she was not unhappy in that world.23 Jane Austen wanted in the first place to “entertain” and, while doing so, raise the moral standards of her readers. It may seem demeaning to call her work “entertaining,” but to entertain always was the novelist’s primary task. The great ones—Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, or Conrad—have always been remarkable entertainers. E. M. Forster once quipped that the novel as a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence can have only one merit: that of “making the audience want to know what happened next.”24 Jane Austen possessed an uncommon talent for keeping the reader wondering how her heroines would meet the challenges they encountered. Her writings display a high degree of what Jean Paul regarded as typical of the modern novel, namely, a resemblance to drama. She introduces her characters with a few words that raise expectations without revealing much about their identities, and then leaves them to define themselves through their actions. Emma, for instance, is presented as a handsome, rich young woman with a happy disposition. She has no noticeable defects except a preference for having things go her way and an inclination to think too well of herself. That is all the reader needs to know as Emma starts meddling with other people’s lives and misjudging them. Yet in each case of meddling, she realizes her errors and learns from them, until at the end she stands before the reader as the accomplished person that others have always recognized her to be. The discrepancy between what the reader knows and what Emma thinks she knows makes us read the entire story through a haze of humor or gentle irony. No writer was more aware of the inevitable conflict between the will to act in accordance with one’s noblest insights and the pitiful effects that may result. Romantic irony resolves that conflict through the protagonist’s own awareness of his or her trying and failing. Each generation has dispensed new eulogies on Austen’s talent for gentle irony. Her irony succeeds because of her marvelous control of language. George Steiner

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has described her language as defining the arena of her heroine’s action: “The world of an Austen novel is radically linguistic: all reality is ‘encoded’ in a distinctive idiom.”25 The fact that language codetermines the content of narrative prose is, I think, the reason why we regard Jane Austen, as well as her great followers, George Eliot and Henry James, as classics of literature.

Autobiography as Romantic Narrative: Moritz’s ANTON REISER and Chateaubriand’s MÉMOIRES

To some extent all Romantic novels are autobiographical. Their authors, in analyzing the inner life of their protagonists, draw heavily upon intimate, personal experience. Many even portray themselves under a different name, as did Karl Philipp Moritz in his Anton Reiser and Stendhal in his unfinished Henri Brulard. In today’s literature and film the autobiographical tendency has grown shamelessly strong, although without always being explicit. Novelists write about other novelists; film directors make films about other directors or actors. Too often, this imitation is a substitute for inventiveness. Most writers of Romantic autobiographies, however, were direct. Their explicit goal was to describe themselves in such a way that others would be able to recognize them. We usually regard Rousseau’s Confessions (1781) as the first Romantic autobiography. His initial declaration of total originality has provoked a great deal of hilarity among his readers. “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitation. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature and the man I shall portray is myself.”26 In a more fundamental way than he intended, his words were, of course, justified. Any genuine revelation of oneself is unique, and the way in which Rousseau attempted to portray himself was indeed new, if not very reliable. Another autobiography, bearing the same title, had preceded his in late antiquity. Yet Rousseau’s work substantially differs from that of his great predecessor. Augustine presented his Confessions as an inner dialogue with God, omitting all that did not directly refer to that relation. We learn little about his personal development or about the strange re-

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lation with his father, but everything about his inner conversion. Rousseau, in contrast, defined himself through his mostly hostile relations to others. Montaigne also had written about himself within a social context. But Montaigne’s Essais, far from being restricted to its author’s life, discussed objectively and often in depth any subject that struck his curious mind. Rather than justifying the choice of his topics and thereby more directly revealing himself, Montaigne left it to the reader to figure out why he wrote about cannibals, prayer, Roman grandeur, the battle of Dreux, and the arguments for the existence of God, rather than about a hundred other possible topics. Rousseau did the opposite. The outside world and other people interested him only to the extent that they played a role in his private feelings. His autobiography was in the first place an act of introspection. And so were the Romantic ones that followed him in France: Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, Stendhal’s Henri Brulard, and Ernest Renan’s Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse. Some Romantic autobiographies begin in a Romantic vein but then continue doing what autobiographies have always done, namely, attempt to justify their authors in the eyes of contemporaries and posterity. Such was clearly the goal of the later parts of Chateaubriand’s voluminous work and also of the sixteen volumes of Restif de la Bretonne’s odd monument to himself in Monsieur Nicolas. Here I shall consider, as representatives of the genre, K. P. Moritz’s Anton Reiser and Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe. Karl Philipp Moritz’s novel Anton Reiser may well be the best autobiography of the Romantic period. As a novel it equals Wilhelm Meister. The life it describes is that of a young poet living at the end of the eighteenth century (1756– 93) in the Sturm und Drang era. The overly sensitive, melancholy young Reiser, at home only in open nature and forever living by the motto of Schiller’s hero in Die Räuber (The Robbers), “Und das Dort ist niemals Hier” (And the There is never Here), is by temperament a typically Romantic man. The subtitle of this autobiography—A Psychological Novel—should not mislead the reader into considering it a work of fiction. It consisted of four parts (published separately in 1785, 1786, and 1790). The introduction to the second part cautions the reader that his book is pure biography, “as true and faithful a description of a human life, even in its smallest nuances, as it is possible to present.”

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Moritz was born in a poor, religiously divided family in Hameln, Germany. After the death of his wife, his father had sought comfort in the work of Mme Guyon, the Catholic Quietist leader and writer. This newly embraced theology had led to endless disputes with his second wife, who had no patience with a doctrine so strongly at odds with ordinary Lutheranism. Young Karl Philipp, anxious to escape the domestic controversy, nevertheless was influenced by his father’s searching mind and anxiously waited for an opportunity to study at the Gymnasium of nearby Hannover. The family, however, could not afford the tuition. While waiting for a favorable break, he became fascinated with the sermons delivered by famous preachers in the local churches. Theology was obviously his destination. In reflecting on what he liked more, the content or the delivery of the sermon, he realized that success in the latter might more easily lie within his reach if he first became an actor. Finally, a stipend granted by the local prince allowed him to attend school in Hannover. Unfortunately, the woman in charge of disbursing the grant decided that most of it ought to be saved “for later” and that charity should take care of the present. She therefore arranged for him to share a meal once a week with each of seven families, whom she had lined up for that purpose. His clothes she confected from remnants of discarded clothes patched together. The young student spent the night at the house of the school’s co-rector, who used him for errands and other services. All of this made Moritz so different from his fellow students that they excluded him from their company. In the end, the shy adolescent no longer dared to associate with his classmates. In the first two books of the novel, his autobiographical Anton Reiser describes in excruciating details the tortures to which their cruelty subjected him. He loses his trust in others and, following the example of his attackers, even more in himself. From sheer despair, Anton begins keeping a diary of all that occurred to him day by day. Gradually he limits the entries to events of his inner life—how he reacts to the world around him. He thereby acquires a great facility in writing and begins experimenting with poetry. He even succeeds in having a poem published in a local paper. The contempt of his fellow students changes into reluctant respect. His ideal in poetry is similar to that of the young Goethe: to present the particular in such a way that its uni-

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versal significance appears. As a result of his small success in poetry, however, he becomes involved with the theater club of the school and addicted to acting and to writing versified introductions for plays. His old passion for the theater revives, at the cost of his studies. Finally he graduates, burdened by debt, and with one ducat in his pocket he walks the more than one hundred miles from Hannover to Gotha, surviving on raw roots and hoping to secure a contract as an actor or at least admission as a student actor in the famous Eckhoff ’s Theater Company. When the director refuses to accept him, he returns to Erfurt to realize his second choice of career, that is, theology. Yet soon the theater calls again. In the final scene we find Anton, the eternal Reiser (traveler), walking from Erfurt to Leipzig, where a small theater company, too poor to pay transportation for its actors, might finally fulfill his impossible dream. Upon arrival he finds out that the director of the group has sold the theater’s entire wardrobe and has absconded with the money. Typical in all his failures is his way of introverting them, as if they stemmed from a basic flaw in his own personality. He has come to see himself as a burden on others. The conviction that he is merely tolerated by all those with whom he lives or on whom he depends has grown so deep that it leaves him neither rest nor peace. While waiting to hear the final verdict on his application for a position, he notices a group of workers who are transporting stones in wheelbarrows to a nearby construction site. Feeling thoroughly humiliated already, he is tempted to join them and henceforth to lead a simple life, attending church on Sundays and raising a family. Yet he realizes that in so doing, he would merely regress to his pre-adolescent habits, and he refuses to give in to the temptation. In these critical reflections upon himself lies much of the story’s merit and attractiveness. Its intelligent author never stops scrutinizing the hidden element in human conduct, the unconscious motivation of his acts. He succeeds in expressing these explorations of the dark parts of the mind in the clear, harmonious prose of the Enlightenment. Most educated persons today have heard of Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme, and some have even read one of his short novels, René, Atala, or Le dernier Abencérage. But few have turned the thirtyfive hundred pages (in forty-four books) of his Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (Memories from beyond the Grave). Chateaubriand began writing his

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memoirs in his early forties (1811) and completed them when he had passed the age of eighty (1848). They include even earlier autobiographical fragments, as well as much that he had, in different ways, recycled in other books. The final version of the Mémoires includes the story of his life, personal views on contemporary figures and events, reports on political friends and enemies, and travel journals. Yet the Mémoires also contain a three-hundred-page biography of Napoleon and a detailed analysis of the revolution of 1830. In an “Editor’s Note” (probably written by himself ) he alerts the reader that his work consists not merely of personal memories but also of “essays in the style of Montaigne,” observations on public events, philosophical and literary analyses, and reports on his explorations. The Mémoires certainly deserve a place of pride among autobiographies of the Romantic epoch: it encompasses the entire period from beginning to end. When Chateaubriand began writing it, Romanticism in France had barely started: some historians of French literature even refer to him as “pre-Romantic.” By the time he completed it, the Romantic epoch was over. Why did he sacrifice years of his life to the act of reporting it? At the beginning of the first book he states his purpose in a manner reminiscent of the exordium of J. J. Rousseau’s Confessions: “I write mainly to give an account of myself to myself.” That means, he explains, that the Mémoires are more a history of his ideas and feelings than a report on his activities. Unlike Rousseau, however, Chateaubriand had no intention of revealing everything about himself. In a letter to his friend, the philosopher Joseph Joubert, he writes: “We should not present to the world but what is beautiful. It is no lie to God to uncover of one’s life only what may bring noble and generous thoughts to our equals.”27 Indeed, the author is very reticent about some aspects of his life, particularly about his multiple love affairs with well-known women. The image emerging from the Mémoires is that of the Romantic loner, always in exile, never fully attached to another person. Such was the impression the author wanted to convey. Shortly after his birth, his mother entrusted him to a wet nurse in a distant village. He views this separation from his mother as symbolic of a permanent exclusion. “Coming from my mother’s womb, I suffered my first exile” (I, 3; 1:136). Circumstances continuously forced him out of the country. During the French Revolution he left for America (in 1791). After his

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return he joined the Prussian-Austrian anti-revolutionary army. Seven years of poverty and social ostracism in England followed. His appointments as a foreign officer both by Napoleon and by Louis XVIII all ended in resignation or failure. Yet he persistently regarded himself as a man of destiny standing above political parties and charged with a mission to return France to its ancient grandeur. For a while, he regarded Napoleon as a biblical King Cyrus, who would restore France’s glory. Yet once he became aware of the dictator’s ruthlessness he turned his hopes to the old monarchy, only to discover that Louis XVIII and Charles X were too weak and too cynical to save the country. Even what he regarded as his greatest accomplishment, the Mémoires d’OutreTombe, ended up causing him bitter disappointments. Being still in financial straits at an advanced age, he sold the rights of publication. Yet the publisher allowed a French newspaper to serialize the text before his death. The excerpts ran for nearly two years, so that when the book finally appeared, the novelty was gone, and negative opinions about the author’s interpretations had had time to build up. Reviewers questioned not only the author’s political views but also his sincerity. Was this the progressive writer of the radical Essai sur les Révolutions? They severely criticized his exaggerated sense of his own historical significance, and not without reason. Chateaubriand had a talent for drawing attention to himself by needless grand gestures. Repeatedly, he provoked some incident that would draw heavy criticism, which he later transformed into a proof of his self-sacrificing patriotism. An example was his resignation from the French Embassy in Rome, allegedly because two legitimist ministers had been dismissed from the government. (In fact, Chateaubriand had lost interest in his embassy position.) Another was his solemn withdrawal from the Chambre des Pairs when Louis-Philippe became king. He ambitiously coveted meeting the rulers of his time and receiving their encomiums as a man of uncommon merit: Pope Leo XII, Napoleon, Louis XVIII and Charles X, George IV of England, George Washington, Mme de Staël. He was naïvely vain, yet he persistently proclaimed that public recognition meant nothing to him. Born in Saint-Malo as the youngest child of an impoverished aristocratic family, François de Chateaubriand was obsessed with genealogies: ancestors formed an essential part of his identity. Persons who had

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no aristocratic de before their names deserved no more than a casual acquaintance. In spite of his increasingly democratic pretenses, the Mémoires exhibit a rarely interrupted parade of old French aristocracy, the men and women by whom he felt he had to measure himself. Yet his start in life had been anything but impressive. His parents had concentrated their care on their oldest son and on the marriages of their three older daughters. The parental efforts had paid off. Each of the sisters succeeded in marrying a count. Once they were married, François ceases to refer to them by their first names: they now appear as Mme de Farcy, Mme de Caud, and so on. In fact, François and another sister, both neglected by their parents, had spent their childhood with some of the most uncouth children of Saint-Malo. François learned from his father that he was intended to join the French Royal Navy, as was customary for the second son of a noble Breton family. His mother, hoping that he would become a priest, succeeded in stalling this plan until he completed his studies at the nearby collèges of Dol and Rennes. François still ended up at the port of Brest to enlist in the navy, but after days of waiting for the necessary papers, he returned home. The early Mémoires famously describe this unoccupied period in the gloomy family castle at Combourg, where the young man was trying to make up his mind about the future. On winter evenings he and his sister Lucile, sitting in silence near the fireplace in the large hall, watched their father silently walking up and down the hall, invisible as he moved away from the light of a single candle and reemerging as a ghost when he slowly reentered the light. Whenever he heard the youngsters whispering while he was in the dark, he asked them on his return: “De quoi parlez-vous?” Terrified, they were unable to answer, and he silently resumed his walk. This well-known scene is indeed Romantic. Yet what follows is even more so. Young Lucile had become very dejected. François, although two years younger, had assumed the role of her comforter and protector. She grew into a beautiful woman and a gifted writer, but she never overcame her feeling of being worthless. She married an old count, who died after one year. The only love in her life remained her brother. She wrote him tender letters and, in the last one before her death, expressed her great affection for him. This delicate relation inspired Chateaubriand’s short novel René.

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While François was idling his time away in the castle, one morning his father came down from the tower that he inhabited and addressed him: “Monsieur le Chevalier, j’ai decidé de votre sort” (I have decided on your future). A coach was waiting at the gate to transport him to the regiment of Navarre, in which his brother had bought him a charge as lieutenant. His active military service did not last long, however, for shortly after joining his regiment he obtained an open-ended furlough. He went to live in Paris and later moved back to Brittany, but far from the drafty ruin of Combourg. In 1789, at the start of the Revolution, he rejoined his regiment. After an insurrection broke out among the soldiers, he simply walked away from it and sailed to America, where he intended to find the Northwest passage in the Arctic regions of Canada. He traveled to Philadelphia and managed to have dinner with President George Washington. The president, as many others had done, informed him that this youthful plan was not feasible. He therefore abandoned it and walked through the wilderness to Niagara Falls. The beauty of these virginal lands made an indelible impression on him, much of which he preserved in his novella Atala. From the falls he pursued his way alone to the point where the Ohio River merges with the Mississippi. When he learned that the King of France had attempted to flee and had been returned to Paris, Chateaubriand hastened to sail back to Europe. On seeing the political turmoil of France in 1792, he decided to join the Allied Forces in their war against the revolutionary government. But before his departure his sister Lucile persuaded him to marry her friend, in order to solve his persistent financial problems. Shortly thereafter, he left for the war zone, was wounded, and, with a wound infected by gangrene, nevertheless succeeded in reaching Ostend and being transported by ferry to England. In London, Chateaubriand immediately set to work on his multivolume Essai sur les Révolutions and, as his money ran out, moved to Suffolk to teach the French language. While living in the home of an Anglican minister, he taught his young daughter, Charlotte. Teacher and pupil fell in love with one another, but when Charlotte’s mother finally informed him that her parents would be happy to have him as a son-in-law, François, terrified, fell at her feet exclaiming “Je suis marié” and ran out of the house. Years later, during the

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Restoration, when he had become ambassador of France in London and a famous author, one Mrs. Sutton requested an interview. It was Charlotte, asking him to recommend her son to accompany Minister Canning to Bombay. This emotional story, told with delicate sensitivity, is one of the most authentic parts of the Mémoires. After he had left the house of his benefactors, remorse drove him to reflect on his selfish conduct. What made him behave with a secrecy that resulted in such painful consequences? Through this self-examination he gained some insight into his nature, though not enough to change his conduct. He attributed his bad habits to an extreme reserve and lack of openness (XI, 1; 1:581). Yet justifications immediately follow these self-accusations. He viewed himself as born at the end of a long line of men distinguished by their courage and moral commitment, and as destined to return France to its ancient glory. A man with such a vocation ought to remain at a distance from others, he claimed. Others, however, attributed his reserve to a calculating nature. Soon after the first volume of his Essai sur les Révolutions had appeared and become known in France, he received a letter from his sister announcing the death of his mother. She had deeply regretted the antireligious trend that his thought had taken. In the preface to Génie du Christianisme (1802), he describes his reaction: “J’ai pleuré et j’ai cru” (I wept and I believed), thereby giving the impression that his book was the result of a sudden conversion. This interpretation considerably oversimplifies the case. As soon as Napoleon had come to power, Chateaubriand’s friend and fellow émigré, the poet Fontanes, had returned to France and wrote to him that the cultural climate had changed. A book on moral revival would find an eager market now that religion had been restored. Chateaubriand, who was unable to return immediately because he had borne arms against France, badly needed some income and wanted to prepare for his future return by a book that would reconcile him with the new government. Therefore, he wrote about the cultural benefits of Christianity. Génie du Christianisme was not the book of a convert but, as Pierre Moreau quipped, the book that converted him! To the anti-religious philosophies of Diderot and Voltaire, which had inspired the French Revolution, Chateaubriand opposed the beauty of the Bible. The stories of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Abel, of Joseph and his brothers, had acquired a fresh attractiveness to a generation .

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that had lived in a religious vacuum. Chateaubriand argued that the literature inspired by the Christian mysteries, such as Dante’s Divina Commedia, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, were by no means inferior to Homer’s or Virgil’s epics. Shakespeare’s and Racine’s tragedies equaled those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Génie du Christianisme was a thoroughly Romantic book that pleased more by what it suggested than by what it proved. Napoleon, who had just concluded a Concordat with Rome, welcomed a book that strongly supported his political policy. He offered the writer, as soon as he had landed in France, a position as first secretary at the Roman Embassy, to work under the First Consul’s uncle, Cardinal Fesch. But Chateaubriand soon became bored with the work and was reassigned as chargé d’affaires at the Republic of Valais. Two months later Napoleon had the Duke of Enghien executed. Chateaubriand resigned in protest and set out on what he called a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, planning to return via Spain. In the Mémoires he discreetly raises the question: “Did I say all in L’Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem?” (1811). “Did I go to visit the tomb of Christ in a spirit of repentance?” Indeed not; he was to conclude his “pilgrimage” in the Alhambra with a rendezvous with Mme de Noailles, his promised mistress. As Napoleon’s empire began to crumble after his campaign in Russia, Chateaubriand, foreseeing the end, prepared himself for a new political career by writing a brochure with the title “De Buonaparte et des Bourbons,” which was to be issued as soon as the emperor had fallen. In the Mémoires he devotes five books (books 19 – 23) to the ascent and decline of Napoleon. This history presents a unique mixture of subjective memories with objective reports based on official documents. Chateaubriand’s attitude toward Napoleon had always been ambiguous: he was favorable to him as First Consul but critical of him as Emperor. In his brochure he defended the Bourbon dynasty. King Louis XVIII after his restoration told the author that it had benefited his case more than one hundred thousand soldiers could have done. Still, Chateaubriand did not defend the absolute monarchy of the past, but rather the monarchy as it had been defined by the Constitution of 1791. Before the new Bourbon king was properly installed, Napoleon escaped from Elba and regained control over much of the army. The king fled to Ghent and appointed Chateaubriand, who had followed

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him, as interim Minister of the Interior. After the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was exiled to the desolate island of Saint Helena in the southern Atlantic. In his biography of Napoleon, Chateaubriand largely accepts Napoleon’s own interpretation of his mistakes in his Mémorial de Sainte Hélène and concludes by praising Napoleon for restoring order, reintroducing religion, and silencing the demagogues of the Revolution. He admires Napoleon’s genius in making thirty-six million subjects blindly obey him (XXIV, 8; 2:680). His biography of the ruler as a flawed hero is typically Romantic, particularly toward the end. It compassionately describes Napoleon’s final years on the lonely island, where soldiers watched his every move. In his account of the former emperor’s death as pious and dignified, the author reveals his respect for a man whom he had strongly opposed during much of his life. The third volume of the Mémoires marks a distinct decline in literary quality. The author ended up feeling betrayed by a king who undermined the constitutional protection against despotism. In much of his diary during the period 1815 – 30, Chateaubriand does what many politicians do in their retirement: they attempt to obtain from history the appreciation that was denied them during their time in office. Although the volume contains noteworthy passages, most of the reports from the embassies in London and Rome are impersonal and tedious. Chateaubriand complains that he is living in a politically insignificant time (la nulleté de ce temps) with people who believe in nothing. The more personal parts primarily turn around his ambiguous relations with the two Bourbon kings. Chateaubriand as an old man has clearly ceased to be a Romantic. Was I justified in placing so many different ways of writing under the common theme Romantic views of the self ? No doubt, all are reflections on selfhood. But this is not an exclusive quality of Romantic writing. What is uniquely Romantic is that the person has become a question to himself. Earlier ages took the self for granted, even though they asked plenty of practical questions about its destiny and the most appropriate ways of reaching it. The Romantic faces a more arduous task. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister still had to build an integrated selfhood through a number of risky decisions of which he could not foresee the outcome. The hero of Jean Paul’s Titan found himself in an even more precarious position. Who was he? Even his identity had become a mystery to

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himself. Likewise, Hölderlin’s Hyperion only knew who he was after all his projects and ideals had collapsed. Nor do Romantic autobiographies warrant that the author knew himself at least at the time of writing. The most honest ones describe merely the struggle for self-knowledge. Rousseau, one of the most unpredictable men of his century, in his Confessions, never reached the end of a search constantly interrupted by ever changing emotions. Chateaubriand’s Mémoires raise even greater questions. Was he even trying to tell the reader who he was? His habit of omitting parts in reporting his life and of blowing up others, for the purpose of appearing more significant than he had ever been, suggests that he was not even willing to admit the reader to what he knew. Both were great writers, but their autobiographies reveal less about themselves than their novels. Other writers were more trustworthy: they changed the names of their heroes and made no promises of being sincere about themselves in their masked stories of their lives. What, then, was their purpose? In Anton Reiser, the heavily romanticized tale about his youth, Karl Philipp Moritz has rearranged the aimless wanderings of a poor adolescent into a pattern of harmony, a harmony he never found in his real life. He thus uses the meaningless fragments of a miserable youth to create a work of beauty. In so doing, he followed Goethe’s model in Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), in which the poet, while telling the story of his disorderly early years, succeeds in integrating even the smallest successes and failures into the coherent picture of an integrated poetic existence. The poetry promised in the title of this prosaic narrative results entirely from the simplicity of the author’s telling. Good and evil, piety and profanity, although never absent, cease to be decisive categories in a life in which all parts complement one another into a mosaic of aesthetic harmony—a song about himself. In the course of this meticulous description of insignificant events, the reader becomes aware that the subject of this book surpasses the information about a particular individual in a vision that unites all fragments of his life into a picture of aesthetic harmony. Others have attained a similar vision of aesthetic transcendence by describing their life story as a succession of mistakes and losses. One such autobiographical novelist was Nerval. Romantic writing is never about a static self; it is always a striving for what lies beyond.

chapter 7

Romantic Ethics

No text influenced early Romantic thinkers and poets in Germany more than Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. In that work the philosopher had given a real content to the self, which had been missing in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason the self had appeared as no more than the “unity of apperception,” that is, the synthesizing function that unifies the data presented by sense intuitions and imagination, while in the second half the idea of the self appears as a regulative concept, the real content of which must remain unknown, since the human mind possesses no intellectual intuitions. In the Critique of Practical Reason, however, Kant claimed that in the voice of conscience, the human mind does have an intuitive knowledge of the moral obligation to follow the commands of reason. The individual thereby attains the spiritual level of personhood as free, responsible being. An ethical quality, then, belongs to the very essence of the person.1 When reading the second Critique, the young Schelling had exclaimed: “From Kant’s practical philosophy I expect an intellectual revolution in Germany!” The idea of freedom became the manifesto of a new humanism. It inspired Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Fichte concluded from it that a person’s moral attitude, conceived as the degree of his awareness of freedom, defined his way of thinking and being. The starting point of Fichte’s theory of knowledge is that even to one who had never meditated on his own moral vocation—even for him, his sensuous world and his belief in its reality arise in no other manner than from his ideas of a moral world. 192

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Th e M o r a l I d e a l s o f E a r l y G e r m a n R o m a n t i c s

Schiller had been and always remained a fervent supporter of the political principles of the French Revolution. Yet after the human abuses that had accompanied it, he realized that political freedom required a moral education. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters he denounced the moral immaturity of the revolutionaries. “Man has roused himself from his long indolence and self-deception and, by an impressive majority, is demanding restitution of his inalienable rights. . . . There seems to be a physical possibility of setting law upon the throne, of honoring man at last as an end in himself, and making true freedom the basis of political association. Vain hope! The moral possibility is lacking, and a moment so prodigal of opportunity finds a generation unprepared to receive it” (V, 2).2 He attributes the failure to the mistake of regarding the principles of abstract reason as the shortest way to human emancipation. “That Enlightenment of the mind, which is the not altogether groundless boast of our refined classes, has had on the whole so little of an ennobling influence on feeling and character that it has tended rather to bolster up depravity by providing it with the support of precepts.” Instead, he argues that a cultivation of the aesthetic sense would be a more effective preparation for moral and civic virtue. Even Kant’s noble philosophy of freedom had failed by neglecting to take our sensuous nature into account. Freedom, Schiller argues, requires the cooperation of the two main drives that move a human being: the sensuous and the spiritual. The instinct of self-preservation inspires the sensuous one. The spiritual drive impels humans to seek eternal truths and permanent values. Rationalist morality sacrifices the sensuous drive to the law of reason. The morally noble person succeeds in holding the two in balance. In the central Letters X–XV, Schiller holds that nothing can teach this balance as effectively as a developed aesthetic sense. Nor, he claims, is that sense difficult to develop. The mind spontaneously attains a momentary balance between the two drives each time it moves from sense perception to intellectual conceptualization or from sensuous desire to rational decision. “The transition from a passive state of feeling to an active one of thinking and willing cannot take place except via a middle state of aesthetic freedom” (XXIII, 2). If the mind

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lingers in this middle state for the sake of experiencing the balance between sense and reason, it remains in the aesthetic sphere, an essential passage to the ethical. In the final Letters XXVI–XXVII, Schiller returns to the question he had raised in the beginning: Why are the sensuous and intellectual drives no longer in harmony? The ideal of Greek paideia had consisted in reaching an equilibrium between the two. As education became more one-sidedly intellectual, it began to neglect man’s sensuous needs. Schiller does not regard this modern situation as one of complete loss. We have become more self-conscious than the Greeks. Still, a greater openness to the beauty of nature and art would restore a more balanced state of mind. The aesthetic attitude requires a temporary suspension of our concern with objective reality and leads the mind to concentrate on the appearance, or the semblance (Schein), of things. The mind achieves this neither in abstract thought nor in blind desire but in feeling, the fundamental state of mind, which precedes the mind’s split into sensuous and intellectual, appetitive and cognitive, functions.3 Fichte, in his early writings on ethics, preserved a Kantian austerity and never mentioned a need for the kind of aesthetic preparation that Schiller considered indispensable. Nevertheless, he admitted that the moral impulse first becomes manifest in the form of feeling, the least specific mode of consciousness. He referred to the awakening of a yet undetermined desire of freedom as sehnen (longing)—a term eagerly adopted by the German Romantics. It urges the self to move beyond its natural drives yet without presenting it with any specific goal. A person has no control over this primary feeling. “Although I am a free being, I am not the ground of my [primary] impulse, nor of the feeling that accompanies it. It does not depend on my freedom how I feel.”4 In his System der Sittenlehre nach den Principien der Wissenschaftslehre (System of Moral Doctrine according to the Principles of the Theory of Knowledge) (1798), Fichte further conceded that a passive element continues to be present even in the actual practice of freedom. Before being able to assert my freedom, I find myself to be placed in an environment and provided with natural powers over which I had no control. This idea inspired Jean-Paul Sartre to define the self as establishing itself through free choice, even though the conditions of my choosing are predeter-

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mined by a given situation. Freedom demands that I include and freely accept this natural givenness within my choice. Any moral theory must come to terms with evil, the negative counterpart of the moral good. Fichte’s attempt to do so is more consistent than Kant’s. According to the Jena philosopher, as humans develop, their moral consciousness ought to grow. If they continue to follow their natural impulses, that growth becomes arrested at an early stage. If they do so deliberately, their conduct must be considered evil. However, a great deal of moral ambiguity surrounds the moral condition of the immature or uncritical person. His external actions may hardly seem to differ from those of the morally committed one. They may even have been performed in response to what the person felt to be a moral urge. Yet such actions lack a proper moral motivation. Feelings of human sympathy may have induced the person to act with kindness, while unwittingly he may have been trying to make others dependent on him. The morally immature person may even be prepared to make sacrifices for a moral cause, without realizing that he is doing so to assert an imagined moral superiority. What motivates many warriors, conquerors, or political leaders more than a desire to surpass others? Even those who act out of a genuine sense of duty often allow their moral attention to slip, or they come to regard the demands of duty as “ideals” rather than obligations. Everywhere in their attitude a mauvaise foi (in Sartre’s vocabulary) prevails. Only in the final chapter of the Sittenlehre does Fichte discuss the concrete rules of moral action. To the disappointment of the reader, the ideal of freedom, the guiding principle of Fichte’s ethics, is here reduced to the conventional code of conduct of the German middle class. The code corresponds to a society dominated by civil servants, teachers, and religious ministers, and ruled by the ultimate authority of the Gelehrten (scholars). There is not one word about the need to bring a society that is stagnating in a tradition of inherited privilege into accordance with the social principles of freedom, as Fichte was so strongly to affirm in The Vocation of Man.5 In that popular work, written only two years after the Sittenlehre, Fichte presented an inspiring, prophetic vision of a better world. He proclaimed that drastic changes in the social order were an “absolute demand.” Society, as he knew it, still condemned the larger

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part of humanity to severe toil in order to serve and nourish the idle part. Fichte hoped that scientific progress, by a wise exploitation of nature, would eventually put an end to inhumane labor. Still, he did not think that science alone would solve social problems. The most intractable ones are caused not by nature but by human abuse. “Man is the cruelest enemy of man” (Werke, 2:269; Vocation, 104). Fichte predicted that in the not too distant future a social revolution would eliminate the gulf between rich and poor. “At last oppression shall reach its limit and become wholly unsupportable, and despair [will] give back to the oppressed that power, which their courage, extinguished by centuries of tyranny, could not procure for them” (Werke, 2:273; Vocation, 108). These words may have inspired Marx’s Communist Manifesto. In the 1812 edition of the Sittenlehre we notice a further change in Fichte’s moral ideal. The emphasis shifts from acts that promote the self ’s independence to attitudes whereby the moral person increasingly becomes obedient to a transcendent ideal. The purpose of moral striving here no longer consists in building a highly individualized personality, but rather in acquiring an attitude of service to the common good. In a stunning reversal of his early ideal, Fichte now writes that the moral person must have no self (Werke, 11:86). The new rules of morality must be derived from the highest ideals of humanity: universal love, total truth, and steadfast simplicity (Werke, 11:92 – 101). This final shift in Fichte’s moral doctrine may have been due to the religious metaphysics of his later years. Fichte’s system of moral philosophy, however, both the early and the later versions, remained subjectivist. Although he was the great social prophet who assisted Germany in shedding its political lethargy and becoming a leading European nation in the nineteenth century, his appeals always aimed at a reform of the individual conscience. Even social ethics, for him, remained primarily a matter of changing the moral dispositions of the community’s members. This was the issue on which Hegel, his greatest admirer, fundamentally disagreed with him. Already in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and more strongly in his later works, Hegel distinguished objective ethics from subjective morality. The former depended on laws and institutions promoting equitable relations in marriage, in business, and in all that pertains to an orderly society. Institutions con-

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stantly need correction, and this requires more than a change in moral attitudes. Although the objective social order ultimately aims at establishing some sort of spiritual community, it may come into conflict with the inner laws of conscience, as Sophocles had shown in the tragedy of Antigone. Should the state’s laws be obeyed when they offend the inner law of conscience, which the individual holds most sacred? The section that Hegel devotes to Kant’s and Fichte’s concepts of morality in his Phenomenology of Spirit consists almost entirely of a critique of their Romantic subjectivism. He rejects Kant’s theory of the moral intention as well as Fichte’s ideal of moral attitudes. The attempts of early Romantics to restore a concrete content to the moral act, Hegel argues, had actually become stranded in a morality of pure intention. What Kant had introduced to save the seriousness of morality, the Romantics had reduced to a total subjectivism, thereby creating a worse problem than the one they had tried to solve. The Romantic concept of freedom merely replaced a rational ideal of freedom with one that was bound neither by reason nor by law. What emerged was an emotional, sentimental drift, such as we find in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde—a work scandalous more by its moral hypocrisy than by the proclaimed “immorality” of its subject. Hegel primarily criticizes the principles that lead to this hypocrisy. The early Romantic attempts to restore the firmness of Kant’s moral imperative by giving it a concrete context in the mind’s real life had in fact resulted in an effect opposite of the one intended. The Romantics had been right in claiming that a principle of duty expressed in an abstract moral imperative fails to take account of the concrete experience of the natural or social world where that duty is to be fulfilled, thereby creating a divorce between the inner world of obligation and the external one in which the obligation is to be realized. Yet the way in which Romantic interpretations attempted to overcome this conflict was through the sleight of hand of the self-proclaimed innocence of the “beautiful soul.” The intellectual deceit here consists in pretending that the obscurity of the world does not affect the purity of the moral soul. The moral agent simply raises the moral ideal beyond realization and assumes that only that ideal morally matters, whereas the multiple demands of the real world belong to a lesser, flexible moral realm. J. B. Baillie, the translator of the first English version of the Phenomenology,

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translates Hegel’s term Verstellung (replacement) as dissemblance, a term that appropriately suggests the deceitful nature of this attempt to conceal the real world.6 Another Romantic illusion exposed by Hegel is not due to a separation between a noble yet empty ideal and an always imperfect reality, but rather to an optimistic interpretation of the actual experience of conscience. In conscience, at least, the argument goes, the mind is “sure of itself ” (as the term Gewissen implies), and the moral agent feels safe to rely on this inner certainty. The conscientious person knows that what the inner voice tells him or her is right. In this certainty the moral act appears to acquire a solid foothold. The moral law ceases to be an abstraction: it has become a concrete imperative within the self. However, Hegel points out, a merely subjective certainty of conscience hides the complexity of the act. To the agent, it suffices that the action appears moral. “Spirit certain of itself is at rest within itself in the form of conscience, and its real universality, its duty, lies in its pure conviction concerning duty” (Phänomenologie, 452 – 53; Baillie trans., 653; cf. Miller trans., 643). Upon reflection, however, it should be evident that this immediate moral certainty may actually be no more than an illusion. By uncritically trusting the certainty of conscience, the subjective mind has, in fact, emptied the notion of moral duty of all objective content. As spirit certain of itself, conscience claims to possess the moral truth within itself. It blindly trusts its moral feelings and fails to consider the possibility of objective arguments conflicting with this trust. “Conscience, then, in its majestic sublimity above any specific law and every content of duty, puts whatever content it pleases into its knowledge and willing. It is the moral genius which knows the inner voice of its immediate knowledge to be a voice divine” (Phänomenologie, 460; Baillie trans., 663; cf. Miller trans., 655). Others, and eventually the agent himself, will question what the objective content is of a “duty” that rests on the subjective certainty of conscience alone. That had been the problem of the beautiful soul, a concept floating through much early Romantic literature ever since Rousseau’s Julie and his Confessions. Goethe’s captivating portrayal of it almost seemed to justify the attitude. Yet, as Hegel cautions us, the divine voice that speaks to the beautiful soul may be none other than the soul’s own.

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A very different voice in the German discussion of Romantic morality was that of Arthur Schopenhauer. He derived all reality from a primeval, blind will, which rules all living beings through an irresistible desire to live. The will to live (Spinoza’s conatus essendi) persists, even though we know that we soon will die and that this short life is full of suffering. Since human desires exceed their actual needs, they surpass those of all other animals and make us the most unhappy beings of creation. We compete with one another in a never-ending struggle for what we do not need. Frustrated in our pursuit of ever postponed satisfactions and exhausted by the persistent struggle to obtain them, Schopenhauer claims, we take refuge in imaginary superstitions. Only those who are educated may find some temporary relief in the contemplation of beauty. In the end, Schopenhauer’s moral theory may owe more to Plato, the Upanishads, or Buddhism than to German Idealism. His primary moral question was, as it had been for the Buddha: How can I avoid the suffering caused by desire, disappointment, and the fear of death? If I attempt to satisfy my desires, my satisfaction can never be more than shortlived and occasional. If I attain a state of indifference, happiness will last longer, yet require a lifetime of virtue and abstinence. Neither attitude will permanently deliver me from suffering. The principle of individuation, the main obstacle to happiness, resists any kind of competition. “Just as a sailor sits in a boat trusting to his frail bark in a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with the howling mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual man sits quietly, supported by and trusting to the principle of individuation.”7 For Schopenhauer, the first step in overcoming unhappiness consists in ignoring the dictates of that malicious principle. Being good means, in concrete terms, being generous to others, being ready to sacrifice personal interests to common benefit. The most consistent abdication of selfishness is that of the ascetic, who voluntarily embraces poverty and celibacy and, as much as possible, abandons any self-will (§66; Parker trans., 274). Beauty alone may be pursued without restriction, as the only source of satisfaction that leaves no disappointment. Schopenhauer’s moral views met with little acceptance in his lifetime but became quite influential after his death. Nietzsche in his formative years became an ardent follower of his principles. He shared Schopenhauer’s pessimism but rejected his Eastern pantheism. In her well-known

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work on the sovereignty of the good, Iris Murdoch, like Schopenhauer and ultimately like Plato, considered the contemplation of beauty the most effective means for overcoming the selfishness of human nature.8 It compels us to move beyond the narrow restrictiveness of our individual existence and to enlarge the capacity of our senses and imagination. Few Romantics chose to follow Schopenhauer on the austere road of resignation. They attempted to bridge the gap between our high ideals and our mediocre achievements in a more comfortable way, namely, by means of irony. According to tradition, it was Socrates who taught us this art of reconciling our ideals with the reality of life. In Plato’s Apology, after he is sentenced to death, Socrates continues to banter with his judges about the prize he deserves for his patriotic conduct. In this highstake game, his inner confidence in a rationally uncertain immortality prevails over the fear of a certain death. In his Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard observes: “What we see in Socrates is the infinitely exuberant freedom of subjectivity.”9 Socrates’ irony, according to Kierkegaard, is grounded in an existential religious trust. Romantic writers, however, practiced a different, purely self-reflective kind of irony, which Kierkegaard calls “a subjectivity of subjectivity, corresponding to a reflection on reflection” (Concept of Irony, 260), an interpretation that had first appeared in Hegel’s critique of Romantic irony in the Lectures on Aesthetics. Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck had correctly seen that subjectivity is void of content and therefore that trusting it completely undermines all objectivity of thought and value. Several Romantics adopted an ironical attitude even toward their own writings, as did Heinrich Heine, who liked to destroy through irony in the final verses of his poems the very effects that had moved the reader to admire the earlier verses. In some, the spiritual emptiness that followed resulted in a Sehnsucht for a more substantial reality. Several ironists, among them Friedrich Schlegel, Brentano, and Heine, later converted to religion. Others continued to nourish the desire for its own sake.10 Romantic irony basically replaced an ethical attitude by an aesthetic one. Schlegel’s Lucinde, a novel considered “obscene” at the time, might serve as a test case. Those who defended it, including the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, claimed that the author’s intention had been moral. In fact, it was neither immoral nor moral, but rather amoral,

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aesthetic. The novel presents Julius, a young man who has completely withdrawn from studies, work, and social obligations and who experiences life as a succession of fragments in a story of which he ignores the plot. Fallen into despair, he meets Lucinde. She also has broken all attachments to ordinary life but has found a new balance in a purely sensuous existence. She draws Julius into her own world. His irony had consisted in dissembling one part of his vacuous life through the other part: his outward life was no more than a projection of his inner life, yet that inner life lacked any moral content. Kierkegaard in his Diary of a Seducer modeled his own seducer after Julius, whose life he described as arrested at an aesthetic stage of existence.11 The refusal to lead a structured life based on binding decisions, Kierkegaard argues, inevitably leads to despair, which the aesthete hides in ironic wit. To survive spiritually, he has no choice but to accept his own despair. By doing so, however, he moves out of the aesthetic into an ethical stage of life. The young Schlegel and other early Romantics, by refusing to accept the limits of nature, reduce life to a hypothetical existence.12 Existence becomes authentically human only, Kierkegaard argues in Either-Or, by committing one’s life to a finite task. True irony, then, is for Kierkegaard only the Socratic one, which smiles at all finite achievements yet fulfills its finite obligations within an infinite perspective. Kierkegaard admits that if one defines the self in purely finite, ethical terms, one ignores the infinite subjectivity of the spirit. In an “Ultimatum” added to Either-Or, he states that directing one’s life only by ethical standards fails to satisfy the spirit’s innate desire for the Absolute. In a concluding discourse entitled “The Edification Implied in the Thought that against God We Are Always in the Wrong,” he argues that even the most perfect ethical life falls short of expressing the mind’s internal relation to the Absolute. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard therefore concludes that ethics must be intrinsically related to an Absolute that surpasses it, meaning that it must contain a confession of insufficiency. This fundamentally transforms the nature of the ethical choice. Hence, an act of obedience to this transcendent may even conflict with moral rules, as it does in the biblical story where God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Kierkegaard recognizes the danger of a religious attitude that either surpasses or fully transcends the ethical

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stage, in order to establish a direct relation to the Absolute: it risks ending up with the delusory infinite of the mind’s own subjectivity.

B r i t a i n ’ s M o ra l P r o p h e t : C a r ly l e

I had never thought of ranking Samuel Taylor Coleridge among Britain’s moral prophets. Yet after reading Thomas Pfau’s analysis of Coleridge’s moral theory as it appears in the poet’s unpublished papers, especially in the unfinished Opus Maximum, I had to change my mind. It was too late to incorporate here the conclusions of Pfau’s study Minding the Modern. But it may be necessary to take them into account for a balanced view of the Romantic moral consciouness. Conscience, the awareness of a person’s moral position, is not a contingent byproduct of self-consciousness: it is an antecedent condition of self-consciousness. Nor does it, in contrast to Kant’s theory, consist of an intuitive knowledge of certain abstract principles that are inherent in the nature of a rational being. It includes a concrete awareness of social relations, which alone make a human being into a person. Personhood, then, is not a value-neutral concept that may be defined in unchanging, universal terms. It depends on being recognized by others, and it imposes on me the obligation to acknowledge in others what I recognize in myself. Without acknowledging the dignity that all persons possess through their rational nature, the individual has not fully actualized the potentiality of his or her personhood. In addition, conscience reveals the presence of a transcendent authority within the self, a sign of its vertical dependence on an absolute power. Only in and through conscience does the person become aware of the self ’s essential “participation in a normative realm.” Person, then, is a moral concept both insofar as it ontologically relates to the absolute Good, and insofar as it stands under an obligation to strive for the realization of a moral ideal. The strongest voices to challenge the utilitarian morality of nineteenth-century Britain were those of Samuel Coleridge and of Thomas Carlyle (1795 –1881). The young Carlyle never succeeded in selecting a suitable field of studies while attending the University of Edinburgh. He taught mathematics for a while and then returned to Edinburgh to

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study law. More important than his professional education, however, was the extensive literary and philosophical education he acquired by reading German Romantics and idealist philosophers. He translated Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1824) and wrote a Life of Friedrich Schiller (1828). From the ideas of Kant, Fichte, and Goethe, he built an eclectic philosophy, which he integrated with a sturdy yet undogmatic Calvinism. As a writer of considerable power and originality, Carlyle, like a biblical prophet, inveighed against the hedonism of his age. As Johann Georg Hamann had done with the German language and Kierkegaard with Danish, he reshaped English into a tool for a unique kind of personal communication. He offered Sartor Resartus, a romanticized story of his religious conversion, to a number of publishing houses in Scotland and England. Most editors felt little attraction for this apocalyptic account written in a religious-burlesque language. They did what editors in our time would have done: they turned it down. When the author finally succeeded in having it published, it aroused an outcry of indignation in Britain. Only Americans were able to stomach its rough message. In his later, historical works Carlyle softened his irony but not his moral principles. His remarkably well-informed, three-volume French Revolution (1837) reads like a moral tale of crime and punishment. His six-volume History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858 – 65) mixes the account of a cultural transformation achieved by surpassing personal and military power with caustic reports on the low schemes and moral vulgarity of the Prussian Court. Sartor Resartus (A Tailor Retailored) pretends to be a history of clothing conceived by one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a professor in the science of everything, who is the subject as well as the narrator of much of the story.13 Counselor (Hofrath) Heuschrecke (Grasshopper), the Boswell of this Prussian Johnson, collects every word uttered by his master. The book, presented as an unconventional commentary on a verse of Psalm 102, “As vesture shall you change them,” parallels its apocalyptic theme with a mystical-symbolic one: God’s garment is humanity. Fantasy and the power of speech enable a person to reach the invisible through the visible and to view not only himself but the entire universe as God’s living garment. The task of prophets is to teach us the language of symbols. To Carlyle, each poet is a prophet. Novalis had written,

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“There is but one temple in the world, and that temple is the body of man” (quoted by Carlyle, III, 6, 190). But Carlyle added, the person could be an emblem of God only if “no devilish passion any longer lodges in him.” Since this never occurs in the present life, the author of Sartor thought it more appropriate to look for the image of God in man’s empty clothes. “What still dignity dwells in a suit of cast clothes! How meekly it bears its honors! No haughty looks, no scornful gestures: silent and serene it fronts the world, neither demanding worship nor afraid to miss it” (III, 6, 192). In Book II, Heuschrecke takes over the role of narrator, starting with a biography of Teufelsdröckh. The story of his birth and early education is inspired by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Jean Paul’s Titan. It turns somewhat more serious when the professor’s beloved, Blumine, leaves him for another young man. The disappointed lover wanders the world, first visiting cities and later withdrawing into a wilderness. After he has lost all hope and has shouted “question after question into the sibyl-cave of destiny,” he suddenly asks himself: “What art thou afraid of ?” With these self-challenging words he enters the land of Everlasting No, the dark birthplace of wars, duels, and other absurdities of modern life. “To me also, entangled in the enchanted forests, demon-peopled, doleful of sight and sound, it was given after weariest wanderings to work out my way into the higher sunlit slopes—of that mountain which has no summit” (II, 9, 147). Having realized the insignificance of the cause of his unhappiness, Teufelsdröckh is ready to enter the land of Everlasting Yea, resting on acceptance and belief. He learns renunciation and abandons the deceitful principle that happiness is the purpose of life, which, in its utilitarian form, reduces the person to “a dead iron-balance for weighing pains and pleasures on” (III, 3, 176). Instead, he proposes a “natural supernaturalism” (III, 8, 202). He calls it “natural” because he is unwilling to replace Kant’s moral autonomy with a dogmatic theology of divine law. But he believes that nature has a supernatural destination. The modern historical critique of the Bible has not affected the transcendent dimension of existence, he argues. Voltaire’s irony and biblical critique were necessary, but they are limited, and now their task is done. Carlyle’s critique goes well beyond the absence of private morality. He attacks the power of an unregulated economy over social life and

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condemns a society in which “the poor [are] perishing of hunger and overwork; the rich still more wretchedly, of idleness, satiety and overgrowth” (III, 5, 185 – 86). Young Teufelsdröckh, on being invited to compose a Latin epitaph for the funeral monument of the local squire, sardonically mentions that the squire’s most memorable achievement in life consisted in shooting some five thousand partridges. Carlyle hated turmoil and innovation, yet he firmly opposed a political conservatism aimed at the continued exploitation of the poor by the rich. “There is a noble conservatism as well as an ignoble. Would to heaven, for the sake of conservatism itself, the noble alone were left, and the ignoble . . . were ruthlessly lopped away.”14 In 1842 a number of social rebellions broke out in Manchester, Wales, and Scotland. They were directed primarily against the English Corn Laws, which, by imposing a stiff tariff on imported grain, had caused bread prices to rise to unprecedented heights. In Past and Present (1843), Carlyle sharply criticizes the landed aristocracy, which profited from the inflated grain prices. But he was equally severe about the rising industrial class, which made workers slave for long hours in the inhumane conditions prevailing in mines and factories. A year later, Friedrich Engels confirmed Carlyle’s report in his study On the Condition of the Working Class in England (1844). Carlyle considered overproduction a moral issue before being an economic one: the employer ought to secure continued employment for his workers. Of course, he knew that economic crises could not be remedied by moral slogans. They required a drastic overhaul of the entire economic system, which early capitalism was incapable of providing without abandoning the system itself. The transition from a pastoral, agrarian, and manufacturing economy to an industrial one had abruptly changed the meaning of exchange, money, and banking. Logically, the system seemed infallible, humanly it was horrible. Elementary social protections were left to the inventiveness and goodwill of the industrialist. A few of them succeeded in installing some restrictions. Robert Owen, notably, excluded children from his factories and opened schools for them. One of the most intractable problems concerned the rights of rent-payers versus owners of property. Years after Carlyle’s criticism, David Ricardo and Karl Marx were still struggling with this problem. Carlyle attempted to balance the ancient right of landed property with the rights of those who worked the

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land. Landowners appealed to their titles of property. But, he argued, an earlier right preceded them. “Who made the land of England? You did not make the land of England, and by the possession of it, you are bound to furnish guidance and governance to England! That is the law of your position on this God’s earth” (III, 8, 176). Carlyle reminded his readers of what had happened in France, where landowners continued to collect the high rent of their properties until the day of reckoning. “Yes, my rosy fox-hunting brothers, a terrible Hippocratic look [the shrunken face at the imminence of death] reveals itself through those fresh buxom countenances of yours” (III, 8, 178). The introduction of political rights does not suffice for solving the social crisis. “Liberty when it becomes the ‘liberty to die by starvation’ is not so great” (III, 13, 212). Furthermore, how could democracy, the rule of an ignorant mass, remedy a situation that requires intelligent, strong leaders? “Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented[ly] putting up with the want of them” (III, 13, 215). Past and Present leads to the conclusion that no adequate solution can be found for the current social ills within the existing system. Carlyle calls for applying moral restrictions to laissez-faire capitalism. “If the convulsive struggles of the last half-century have taught poor struggling convulsed Europe any truth, it may perhaps be this as the essence of innumerable others: that Europe requires a real aristocracy, a real priesthood, or it cannot continue to exist” (IV, 1, 241). By a “real” aristocracy, Carlyle obviously understands not the do-nothing class he has criticized throughout his text, but rather a new one that through heroism and virtue has shown itself fit to govern others. Carlyle’s moral models all belong to the small elite he praises in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Only a moral nobility will lead a country out of its economic oppression and return its people to a sober work ethic. To him, true work is the highest form of religious worship, as it still is, he claims, in monasteries. All of this appears to be far off the mark that the author had set himself at the beginning of his book: to present an alternative to the social conditions of the economic society of his day. It might seem as if his alternative consisted in abandoning the present form of production altogether and returning to an earlier one. This, however, is not the case. He was fully aware

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that the industrial society was here to stay. Without “Manchester cotton trades, Birmingham iron trades, American commonwealths, Indian empires, steam mechanisms, and Shakespeare dramas” (IV, 1, 249), Western society would have looked like a Tibetan monastery. The epic of our time, he thought, ought to be entitled Tools and the Man. In Carlyle, we encounter an aspect of Romantic ethics that substantially differs from the theoretical speculations of the German idealists as well as from the moral feelings of a number of Romantic poets (Victor Hugo being a major exception). The strong social concern expressed in his works introduces a new dimension into the political struggle for freedom and emancipation. It was to lead to the new science of sociology inaugurated by Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, and other French socialists. German communists radicalized it. But they no longer belong to the Romantic epoch, either in time—Marx’s Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848—or in spirit. Communist writings claimed to be scientific and ridiculed Romanticism as an escapist dream.

ROMANS

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MOEURS in France

France has a long tradition of communicating moral ideas in aphoristic writings. The term moraliste may apply to one who observes and analyzes the mores of his time, as did seventeenth-century aphorists such as La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld, or it may refer to one who proposes theories about good and evil. By the end of the eighteenth century the moralist literature in France had been enlarged by novels: romans de moeurs and romans philosophiques. Stendhal and Balzac were masters in the former class. In a long chapter of Mimesis, his classic study on the representation of reality in Western literature, Erich Auerbach has shown that Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir reflects the social and political circumstances of the period in which the story takes place. The author himself draws attention to the critical character of his novel by giving it the subtitle Chronique de 1830. The atmosphere in France around 1830 was filled with fear of a return to the horrors of 1793– 94. Caution, hypocrisy, and pragmatism prevailed. Stendhal’s story itself closely follows the report of

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a strange incident in the Journal des Tribunaux. According to the newspaper account, an ex-seminarian in Rennes, who was serving as a teacher in a private home, had become the lover of his employer’s wife. He eventually returned to the seminary, but his superiors did not allow him to continue his studies. Having taken another position, as preceptor with a noble family, he was then dismissed for seducing their daughter. He returned to his former lover, whom he suspected of having betrayed him to his new employers, and shot her. Stendhal borrowed the plot of his Le Rouge et le Noir almost entirely from this report yet recreated it into a work of art. The hero of the novel, the low-born Julien Sorel, embodies the type of social climber who is ready to trample over anyone standing in his way, and who had become typical of the period. Respect for the red military uniforms in France had ended with the fall of Napoleon, while a career in a black cassock, now that the Catholic Church had been restored to many of her privileges, seemed to offer the best chances for social success. Consequently, Julien decides to become a priest, although everything makes him unfit for this vocation, not least his total lack of faith. Despite his cynicism, the young Sorel distinguishes himself so well in his seminary studies that his superiors soon allow him to accept a temporary position as secretary to a successful businessman. He considers it part of his upward-bound career to gain the favors of his employer’s young wife, in which he succeeds beyond expectation. Yet her love is an obstacle to his career in the Church. Remembering that he is born to greater things, he leaves his lover to enter a major seminary, where he is to complete advanced theological studies. His standing with the president again becomes rewarded with a secretarial position, this time in an aristocratic family. He instantly becomes aware of the danger but also the challenge lurking in the daughter’s beautiful eyes. The rustic but intelligent secretary fascinates Mathilde, and they become lovers. Yet no sooner have they spent a night together than she begins to despise herself for having allowed such intimacy with a person far below her social class. Although deeply humiliated, Julien still manages to work himself back into her bedroom, and the cycle of ecstasy and contempt recommences. Eventually, Mathilde becomes pregnant and confronts her unhappy father with the decision to marry her improper suitor.

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When inquiring about Julien’s conduct at his earlier place of employment, the father receives a devastating report written by Julien’s former lover. Informed of its content, Julien travels back to her town and shoots her while she is attending Mass. In prison he learns that she has not died. She even sufficiently recovers to visit him in prison. She confesses that, having become very pious after his departure, she allowed a young priest to dictate the fatal letter to Mathilde’s father. A hostile jury sentences Julien to death, and Mathilde urges him to appeal the politically inspired verdict. Yet now that he has understood the basic fallacy on which he has built his life and ruined the lives of those who loved him, Julien no longer wishes to live. He realizes that, in spite of his relentless striving, he has remained the same vulgar person he was at the start. Stendhal intended his story to be a mirror of the moral cynicism of his time. In this respect it greatly differs from the psychological La Chartreuse de Parme. No French novelist has more deservedly been called a moraliste in both meanings of the term than Balzac. He prominently painted the urban society of his age as well as the kind of persons it produced. Yet he also set up typically Romantic standards of moral value. Histories of French literature tend to classify him as a “realist,” a forerunner of Flaubert, the brothers de Goncourt, and Émile Zola. He certainly influenced all of them, but his novels, especially the earlier ones, were as Romantic as Hugo’s and more so than de Vigny’s. No other novelist wrote with more Romantic excess and Rabelaisian exuberance of names and objects than Balzac. Everything in his stories is overstated, overcolored, and overdescribed. Next to these Baroque qualities, he also possessed an uncanny sense of the strange, the mysterious, even the supernatural. In Séraphita we recognize the ideas of Swedenborg, while his Louis Lambert shows the influence of the illuminist Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin.15 His work evokes the presence of evil, of crime, and of passion, but also of generous charity and heroic self-sacrifice. He was the poet of Romantic love in all its varieties: sensuous, erotic, compassionate, and religious. In his personal life, as in the lives of his heroes and heroines, generosity dominated. I limit the following observations to the period before 1840, when he published his most Romantic novels.

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Balzac learned his trade while writing for a factory of pulp novels. His stories appeared either anonymously or under a pseudonym. They tend to focus on the evil that hides in respectable society. One valuable remnant of that period was a “code” book on marriage, which he later revamped into La physiologie du marriage (1829). Unlike what its prurient title suggests, it was a book of anecdotal recipes for not losing one’s wife in the frivolous world of Paris. Les Chouans (1829), the first novel Balzac published under his own name, was a dramatic love story between two leaders of opposite camps during the Vendée rebellion. It was his one fully historical novel. Yet Balzac conceived many of his later works as essentially related to a particular period of history. Thus, during the Restoration and the subsequent reign of Louis-Philippe, when most of his stories take place, the events reflect the commercial freedom and intense financial activity typical of that period. A collection of short stories under the title Scènes de la vie privée, also published in 1829, stresses the social setting of his writings. In each of them a difference in class causes a marital drama. In “Une double vie” a Parisian magistrate marries a woman who is to inherit a large fortune. After the wedding, she turns out to be a Jansenist femme dévote, unfit to fulfill the social obligations of her position. The unhappy husband sets up a second household with a young woman whose home he passes on his way to work. The arrangement causes a disaster for both parties. The author’s intention is not to expose the adulterer’s punishment but to show the restrictions of a society that creates such problems. In “La maison du chat qui pelote” (published in English as “At the Sign of the Cat and Racquet”), a mésalliance leads to a similar tragic ending. A young aristocrat marries the daughter of a well-to-do mercer. Because she is slow in adopting the manners of her new social class, he exiles her to the kitchen. Yet the young woman, Augustine, although unable to imitate her husband’s style and language, is a woman of natural sensitivity. She stoically accepts her fate and tries to find some consolation at the home of her parents and that of her sister, who married an ordinary man of her own class. But she realizes that she has become estranged from her former home as well as from her current one. For all her loneliness, she feels unable to return to her past. Although these stories were well told, Balzac aimed at more substantial targets. With his first full-length moral parable of 1831, La peau

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de chagrin (English title: The Shagreen Skin), he scored a critical as well as a popular success. Everything in this tale symbolizes a world clearly divided between good and evil. This Manichean dualism became typical of Balzac’s later works. Moreover, the evil, which seems supernatural in origin, is surrounded by an ominous aura of mystery. In this story an unidentified young man, obviously in dire financial straits, enters a gambling den in what appears to be a final effort to restore his fortune. The den exudes the sullen solemnity of a place where people, after a ritualized attempt to lose their possessions, prepare for suicide. Like a Masonic temple, it is full of symbols. An evil-looking old attendant takes the patrons’ hats: “a pale shadow, crouching behind his barricade as though lying in wait for victims, a Cerberus-like watchdog of the nether regions.”16 Having gambled away his last funds, the young man crosses the Seine and prepares to plunge into the water. But a charwoman at Les Halles warns him that it is awfully dirty and cold. Postponing his suicidal plans, he enters an antique shop full of strange objects. A sinister old sales clerk sells him an untreated donkey skin, which, he claims, will grant him his wishes. Yet after each wish, it will shrink, and when it is finally consumed, he will die. Only now the author reveals the identity of the central figure: Raphael de Valentin, who moved to Paris in order to become rich but has become destitute. Two recent acquaintances take him to a gigantic banquet given by a nouveau riche acquaintance. The banquet includes all forms of excess: over-indulgence, debauchery, waste, and destruction. The author is obviously fascinated by whatever exceeds measure and reason. Balzac in his novels, like Hugo in his tragedies, aims at absolutes, whether negative or positive. The attempts of his characters to attain these extremes always end in failure. This fateful tendency here first appears in Valentin’s pursuit of the ideal woman: each time she turns out to be an insensitive femme sans coeur. Only after he has seen the auspices of his imminent death in the donkey skin’s shrinkage, and its warning has become confirmed by the blood he has been coughing, does Valentin come to his senses. Accepting his condition, he moves in with a humble family in the Auvergne Mountains and belatedly finds the happiness he has wasted his life in seeking. What makes this moral fable powerful is the haunting presence of mysterious, supernatural

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forces of good and evil striving for absolute control. Psychology plays almost no role in this struggle among superhuman powers. Balzac later incorporated La peau de chagrin among his Études philosophiques, tales that interpret what occurs in the romans de moeurs. Amazingly, a year after the complex and obscure La peau de chagrin, Balzac published the marvelously simple short novel Le curé de Tours (1832). Originally he had entitled it Célibataires, a title that suggests the moral of the story. Two priests live at a pension kept by an elderly woman near the cathedral of Tours, in which both officiate. The quiet Abbé Birotteau inhabits the comfortable apartment of his deceased predecessor, whose magnificent library and furniture he has inherited. Abbé Troubert, a more severe type with a whiff of Jansenism, resides in a humid, dark apartment below the ground floor. Both seem satisfied with their quarters. Troubert faithfully participates in the Sunday whist evenings set up by Mlle Gamard, the landlady; Birotteau does not. Mlle Gamard does not appreciate this neglect and in a number of petty ways begins to make the quiet priest’s life unpleasant. Hoping that a short absence will make her anger subside, he decides to leave the house for a time. While he is on vacation, however, a lawyer presents him with a document for his signature, in which he declares that he will not return to the apartment. Preferring peace of mind to physical comfort, Birotteau signs. When he returns to retrieve his possessions, he finds Troubert firmly installed in his apartment. In addition, Mlle Gamard informs him that his furniture has become her property to compensate for the low rent he paid. Juridically and psychologically, the story is hardly credible. The characters are drawn too small, but they suffice for a moral tale. Balzac explains their meaning in the course of the novel: “The Church is no longer a political power capable of absorbing the potential of solitary men. Celibacy, then, accomplishes nothing more than that it induces the capital vice of converging the celibate person’s qualities on a single passion, namely, egoism. It renders celibates harmful and useless, whereas in the past it freed them to be more generous for the common good.” Most celibates today, in Balzac’s opinion, possess neither the vision nor the will to use their freedom for a noble purpose. Instead they spend their time and energy fretting and plotting small schemes. The two

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abbés, as well as Mlle Gamard, probably started their lives inspired by some high ideal, but a succession of insignificant events soon converted their sacrifice of celibacy into bitterness and resentment. In a later novel, La recherche de l’absolu (1834), the search for the absolute consists in a pursuit of the alchemist dream. Balthasar Claes, a rich immigrant from Flanders, ruins his family fortune in years of fruitless efforts to produce gold. Similarly, in the story “Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu” (The Unknown Masterpiece) (1831), Frenhofer, an excellent painter, becomes obsessed by the ambition to paint an absolute masterpiece. It takes him years to execute his project, and when he finally unveils his work, nothing but a canvas filled with wild colors emerges. Peter Brooks pertinently describes this outcome as a defeat in “the fight to redo the creation in a secular way, and a sacrilegious imitatio dei, which entails the destruction of the very sign-system, in which he must embody his dream.”17 Balzac had barely completed these early writings when he started writing yet another étude philosophique, his Louis Lambert (1832 – 34), in which a gifted young man, while attempting to attain consummate knowledge through mental concentration, loses his mind. In no other novel did Balzac invest more of his fascination with a borderland between the mind and a mysterious goal that it relentlessly pursues, yet ultimately misses. This strange novel, on which he worked longer than on any previous one, mixes scientism, spiritism, and psychology. Swedenborg’s thought holds it all together. According to the letters the young Lambert writes to his uncle, the Swedish sage “includes all religions, or rather, he presents the religion of humanity.” In a dream the young Louis Lambert actually sees the castle that his school is going to visit the next day. From this inner experience he concludes that he is able to attain any knowledge by intensely concentrating on the object. After he and the narrator, a schoolmate, complete their studies, they lose contact with one another. Some years later, the schoolmate meets his friend’s uncle and learns that Louis had fallen in love with a rich heiress but had lapsed into insanity the day before the wedding. His fiancée has remained faithful to him, nursing him in her castle and insisting that his mind is sound but absorbed in deep meditation. Has Louis descended into an abyss as profound as the summit he had once reached? Balzac surmises that at the root of consciousness is a

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desire of the infinite that remains untranslatable into words. Some appear to reach this core of knowledge by utter detachment from space and time. Balzac himself is wary of such strivings for the absolute as Louis Lambert, Balthasar Claes, and the painter Frenhofer practised. All of them paid for their ambition with a total loss of talent and possessions. Still, he remains fascinated by them. In Louis Lambert he appears to caution himself to be prudent in attempting to reach his own goal, which consisted in comprehending all aspects of the society of his time. Much of the attraction of Balzac’s novels is due to his talent in making the environment of his stories actively contribute to the turn of the plot and the moods of the characters. In Le curé de Tours, the cathedral confines the entire existence of the two priests: they live in its shadow, spend most of their time inside, and project all their aspirations onto their rank in its small hierarchy. Physical surroundings always play a major role in Balzac’s novels. Thus, Ferragus (1884), the mysterious tale of a former convict, begins with a report on the moral physiognomy of the streets of Paris: “In Paris certain streets are as dishonored as a person guilty of an infamy would be. There are also noble streets, and streets that are merely respectable. On the morality of more recent ones, the public has not yet formed an opinion. . . . Some are always clean and others always dirty. In short, the streets of Paris possess human qualities, and their physiognomy forces upon us certain impressions against which we remain defenseless.” The decay of Balthasar Claes’s beautiful house becomes a symbol of the family’s decline in La recherche de l’absolu. The novel Eugénie Grandet (1833) also conveys an intense feeling of connaturality between its young heroine and the place she occupies: the bench in the window of the dark house and the little seat near the crumbling wall in the yard, where both she and her mother spend a large part of their melancholy lives. The environment symbolizes the moral tone of Balzac’s stories. The writer does with time what he did with space. He sketches, often at great length, the moral climate of the period in which the events take place. Usually it consists of a historical or social description, which becomes slowly charged with mystery. The reader senses that tragic events are about to take place, even before knowing the hero or the victim who is to act or to suffer. Thus, in La fille aux yeux d’or (The Girl

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with the Golden Eyes) (1834 – 35), the first fifteen pages evoke the chaos of conflicts, desires, ambitions, and cruelties that live and thrive in the heads of the nameless masses of Paris. “Who dominates this place without morality, without faith, and without feeling, yet from which all feelings, all morality, and all faith come and to which they return? Gold and pleasure.” Balzac’s descriptions of time and place set the stage for future events. They suggest the good or evil present in the hearts of those who live in them and somehow justify the events that follow. Similarly, before introducing the heroine of La Duchesse de Langeais (1834), Balzac devotes many pages to the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the young duchess grew up, and which is “ni un quartier, ni un secte, ni une institution, ni rien qui se puisse nettement exprimer” (neither neighborhood, nor sect, nor institution, nor anything that can be properly expressed). Balzac was rarely successful when writing about an exclusively “moral” subject, as he did in Le médecin de campagne (The Country Doctor) (1833), the story of a physician who dedicates his life to the care of the poor inhabitants of a mountainous region. An army captain who visits the area and spends some days with him wonders what the secret is of this man’s devotion. After some two hundred pages of unimaginative prose, we finally read Dr. Benassis’s “confession.” As a young man he had seduced a girl and abandoned her. Before her death she begged him to adopt the child of their love. He consents, but the child dies. When he begins to court another woman, her parents reject him because of his dubious past. He then decides to become a country doctor in one of the poorest areas of France as an act of atonement. This simple story of sin, repentance, and charity was meant to serve as a moral example, but, poorly motivated as it is, it turned out to be Balzac’s least satisfactory work. Nonetheless, the author expected that it would convert his political losses at the elections of Angoulême and Chinon (where he stood as a political candidate) into a literary triumph. He took excessive pride in having presented his moral ideal of service. “Upon my soul, I think I can die in peace; I think I have done a great thing for my country. To my mind, this book is worth more than laws and victorious battles. It is the gospels in action!”18 But morality and politics by themselves do not make great literature. Beset by defeats and

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trouble, enormous debts, fights with his two publishers, health problems caused by overwork and critical disapproval of what he claimed to be his masterpiece, he dropped everything and traveled to Neufchatel to meet l’étrangère, his “unknown, female admirer,” the Polish countess, Eveline Hanska. Balzac took with him his resentment over a recent amorous defeat. Some months earlier, the Marquise de Castries, who admired his work, had invited him to visit her, and even to accompany her on a journey to Italy. She encouraged his affection but kept him at arm’s distance and granted him “only those favors which were tolerated in her own circle where they wanted everything of love except that which certified love.”19 Now stationed in a Geneva hotel near his new love, the woman he was to marry sixteen years later, Balzac began writing a melodramatic novel of revenge, La Duchesse de Langeais (1834). In the story, a French officer, after a heroic expedition to Africa, returns to Paris covered with glory. A beautiful duchess, estranged from her aged husband, falls in love with him. Yet once he begins to return her love, she coyly assumes an air of innocence. Humiliated by her behavior, the officer withdraws, and when the Duchess tries to make him return, he no longer responds. Finally, she informs him that if he does not receive her, she will disappear from the world. Through an accident he misses the appointment and finds that she is gone. Years later, during a military operation in Spain, he discovers that she lives in a convent on an island near the Andalusian coast. Pretending to be her brother, he succeeds in entering the cloister and, speaking through a grilled window, invites her to leave the convent with him. When she refuses to break her vows, the officer decides to take her away by force. With a few soldiers, he invades the walled garden, but just as they enter the building, a tolling bell announces her death. Balzac later read the novel to the Marquise de Castries. She liked it but never understood the hint. This story concluded Balzac’s early period. It was followed by a series of masterpieces. Eugénie Grandet (1833) had already appeared while he was still working on La Duchesse de Langeais. This relatively short comédie de moeurs ranks among the greatest prose works of the Romantic period. Once again, the novel starts with an elaborate portrait of French society during the early years of the Restoration. The aristocracy, even

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the more recent Napoleonic aristocracy, is vanishing both as a class and as a paragon of society. Finance rules all facets of social life. Grandet, a miserly old cooper, has made a fortune by buying up aristocratic and ecclesiastical possessions soon after they were nationalized during the Revolution. His greed has created an emotional vacuum around him, symbolized by the bare, sunless house, where his long-suffering wife and his lonely daughter Eugénie live their lives of gray monotony. Two families in Saumur vie with each other for the privilege of attaching the future heiress of Grandet’s wealth to their clan. To Eugénie, their prospects come to a halt with the visit of her cousin Charles. A quiet idyll develops between the two. After Charles learns that his father has committed suicide following his bankruptcy (caused by his greedy brother), he decides to emigrate to America and, after making a fortune, to marry Eugénie. She helps him to pay for the journey with the gold coins that her father had given her on her birthdays. She keeps waiting for his return, while her youth passes by. At last, after her father’s death, Charles returns, intending to marry another woman, one with both a title and some wealth. Yet the wedding falls through when the family of the bride learns that his father died in bankruptcy. Eugénie, however, pays all of her uncle’s debts in order to make Charles’s marriage possible. At the advice of a priest, who is related to one of her persistent suitors, she then consents to marry an unlovely local boy on the condition that she will never have anything to do with him. Her life resumes its tedious, downcast course in the old family house. This novel displays the distinctive qualities of its Romantic author to their greatest advantage: a capacious imagination, and a refined sensitivity. Seldom has a moral lesson been made with more elegance than in this story. Which reader could ever forget that greed is destructive? No sooner had Balzac finished the novel than his debts forced him to start another one. Slaving away at the same relentless pace, he completed it in forty days in order to meet the deadline agreed on with the Revue de Paris. This book, Le Père Goriot (1834), became his most famous one. It stands out for its complexity, since it contains three interrelated moral dramas. The principal one occurs between old Goriot and his daughters. The generous old man has ruined himself for the benefit of his two daughters, who are now famously married but constantly in debt.

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They visit their father only when they need money. The second drama centers around the ambitious Rastignac, a young man recently arrived in Paris and in a hurry to become rich and famous. Will he follow the model of the ex-convict Vautrin or of the generous Goriot? The evil progress of Vautrin is the center of the third moral drama, which never reaches its conclusion, because Balzac needed him and Rastignac to reappear in later novels. All three are lodged in the modest pension of Mme Vauquer. With these and a few other characters, Balzac lays the foundation for the virtual world of the Comédie Humaine, in which the same persons occasionally reappear. Le Père Goriot is not a psychological drama; we learn little about its characters’ motives or feelings. Barely identified as individuals, they are moral types of Parisian society, who represent universal virtues and vices. In a letter to Mme Hanska, Balzac explains that in his Études de moeurs, only individualités typifiées appeared, whereas the Études philosophiques presented types individualisés. To the latter class belong Raphael Valentin in La peau de chagrin, Balthasar Claes in La recherche de l’absolu, and Louis Lambert in the novel that bears his name. Balzac’s moral typology differs from Stendhal’s psychological one. In Le Rouge et le Noir Stendhal also had presented a young arriviste, Julien Sorel, who claws his way to the top of a society that produces such types. But, unlike Balzac, he analyzes the psychic stages of his character’s moral degradation, while Balzac was more concerned with eternal forces of good and evil that hover over this world like spectral realities. Still, Balzac’s moral types are never abstract. Albert Béguin in his Balzac Visionnaire (1946) praises “the eternal victory of his imagination” over the abstractness of common moral types, whether individualized or not. Nowhere does the trans-psychological character of Balzac’s novels appear more obvious than in the small masterpiece, Le Colonel Chabert (1832). If any of his novels ever turn around psychic problems, certainly this one does. Yet the author, who hardly discusses them, immediately raises the story to a universally moral level. A poorly dressed old man walks into a lawyer’s office and asks to see Mr. Derville. One of the clerks, while writing down his name, mockingly inquires whether he is perhaps the great colonel Chabert, the hero of the battle of Eylau (who was assumed to have been killed in the attack). The poor man responds, “I am

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indeed the self-same, Monsieur.” The lawyer, in spite of this surprising statement, agrees to meet with Chabert, who reports that a wound to the head destroyed his memory. He has spent most of the years after the battle in an asylum. In the meantime, his wife has remarried. After a thorough investigation, the lawyer finds that the facts confirm the old man’s story. He summons Chabert’s wife to court, confronts her with her husband, and notices that she recognizes him, although she denies it. Poor Chabert, moved by his remaining love for her, gives up the idea of legal proceedings and promises that he will not disturb her any further. Some years later, Derville finds Chabert in an almshouse, where he is spending his final days, lapsed “into a second childhood” and begging a coin for buying tobacco. Samuel Rogers, in his excellent study of Balzac, concludes: “In a way Le Colonel Chabert is a psychological story, for its center is what goes on in Chabert’s mind. Yet the manner of telling is not psychological. . . . It is as if Balzac cast a needle of light across Chabert’s consciousness, like the beam of a lighthouse that picks out wave or cliff from the surrounding blackness, and then leaves the reader free to create most of what is there from his own imagination.”20 Balzac’s avoidance of psychological interpretations is more than a naturalistic style procedure. Rather than attempting to render the story psychologically credible, the author tries to remove it from the plane of ordinary human behavior and instead to highlight the presence of superhuman forces, such as the one that induces Chabert not to pursue his quest for recognition because of his love for the woman she once was. A similar, but negative, force drives his wife to prefer a comfortable social position to fidelity to a husband who is willing to sacrifice his identity to her ease. Again, Balzac confronts us with the transcendent struggle between good and evil. Balzac the moralist neither preaches nor proves. He merely shows the oppositions between the powers of good and evil as they affect us. In a preface to the collection Scènes de la vie privée, he claims that his entire work had been “dedicated to morality.” Yet his morality had nothing in common with the rationalist ethic of the eighteenth century or with the utilitarian one of the nineteenth. Nor did his ideal coincide with that of personal or social freedom, as it does in other Romantics. It centers on the successes or failures of people in measuring up to moral absolutes. Some of his characters do measure up, such as

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Dr. Benassis, Eugénie Grandet, and Père Goriot. Others, like Seraphita or Louis Lambert, stand out by their keen awareness of the mysterious presence of an unknown absolute. Perhaps the initial ideals of Balthasar Claes or of the painter Frenhofer should also be seen in that light. Even the excess and debauchery of the banquet attended by Raphael de Valentin and Vautrin’s mysterious pursuit of evil for evil’s sake are negative ways of seeking the absolute. Whether in describing an ascent to a higher or a descent to a lower moral state, Balzac always surpasses the limits of the ordinary. “Once we have entered La Comédie Humaine . . . we are aware of a continual struggle between good and evil, a struggle which often seems to involve powers greater and more mysterious than the consciences of the protagonists.”21

chapter 8

Political Theories after the French Revolution

Political theories before the French Revolution were considered part of social ethics. Their conclusions on the art of governing seldom rested on empirical observation. Some, such as Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1592), Johannes Althusius’s Politica (1610), and even Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), originated as conclusions of philosophical or theological theories. In that philosophical tradition also belongs Rousseau’s Contrat Social (1762), which, derived from the principle of natural right, became the supporting theory of the French Revolution. Originally, that principle remained relatively independent of the special interests of the state or the nation. As a result, nationalism played no role during the early years of the Revolution, which was dominated by the universal principle of human rights. Even foreigners, such as the English Thomas Paine and the German Anacharsis Clootz, were allowed to participate in the deliberations of the National Convention that governed France in the critical years. The strident nationalism for which the Revolution is now remembered outside France emerged only when hostile armies surrounded France, and the country started carrying war beyond its borders. The post-revolutionary period was marked by a constant struggle between universalist and nationalist ideologies.1 Their relative weight in the later years remains a topic of political discussion in France. Ernst-Robert Curtius, in his Essai sur la France, called it the arena where the spirits fought the fiercest battle. Nearly every nineteenthcentury French historian either wrote a history of the Revolution or 221

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took a new position on its significance for the nation and for the world. The most informed, those of Jules Michelet and Joseph de Maistre, may also have been the most biased.

F r e n c h R e fl e c t i o n s o n t h e R e v o l u t i o n

Count Joseph de Maistre (1753 –1821) persistently maintained an internationalist interpretation of the Revolution. Yet he derived his universalist principles not from the Enlightenment, which he held responsible for all the chaos, but from an older, classical tradition. He had been sympathetic to some of the political reforms achieved during the early years of the Revolution. But when the revolutionary army invaded Savoy in 1792 and removed its king, whom his family had served for generations, he went into exile in Switzerland. In 1796, while still in Lausanne, he wrote his first reflection on the events in France, entitled Considérations sur la France.2 To de Maistre, the Revolution was a prodigious event, “as miraculous as a tree bearing fruit in January,” yet those who had initiated it had gradually lost control over it. Once it began, nothing could have halted this “flood of iniquity” before it had run its full course and destroyed everything in its path. The destruction carried a moral meaning: God allows evil to punish itself. The Revolution was simultaneously a crime and a punishment. “Never is Providence more palpable than when a higher action replaces the human one and works alone. That is what we see at this moment” (Oeuvres, 1:4; Lively trans., 48, slightly changed). Mediocre men, aided by circumstances, rose to become absolute despots, only to be swept away by the same forces that had elevated them. De Maistre’s political theory is an enormous theodicy, a justification of God’s ways in history. “Nothing happens by chance,” he wrote in a letter to Baron Vignet (October 1794), “everything has its rule and all is predetermined by a power that rarely reveals its secret. The political world is as much regulated as the physical one, but since human freedom plays a role in it, we end up thinking that it does everything.”3 An entire nation had been punished for the attacks on legitimate authority launched by the philosophes. The sovereignty of the people that they had promised turned

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out to be a deception. The few electors who had chosen the members of the National Convention in no way represented the people. Moreover, the dominance of the government in Paris was anything but democratic (Oeuvres, 1:47; Lively trans., 67). Had Rousseau himself not written that the general will cannot be delegated? Unfortunately, he had failed to explain how that will can be universally implemented. During his tenure in St. Petersburg as minister plenipotentiary of Victor Emmanuel, the king of Sardinia, the Count wrote his Soirées de Saint Pétersbourg, posthumously published in 1821, for which he justly became famous.4 In these conversations with a Russian senator and a further unidentified chevalier (knight), de Maistre attempts to justify the theological assumptions underlying his critique of the French Enlightenment, which had been intellectually responsible for the Revolution. The discussion turns mainly around the relation between Providence and free will, as the subtitle of the Soirées suggests: Entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la Providence (Conversations on the Temporal Rule of Providence). Divine Providence, for de Maistre, controls all events in this world, the punishment of evil as well as the suffering of the innocents. His theological theory of politics rests on two principles. First, the parts must conform to the whole; hence the innocents will suffer with the guilty ones. But second, what applies to the whole may not apply to each part. It is by no means clear how these two principles can be simultaneously valid, nor does the author apply them consistently. When discussing the invariable order of nature, he relies on the former. Yet once a universal application of his argument would too obviously conflict with his idea of how God takes special care of each individual, he falls back upon the latter. To protect these diverging positions against charges of contradiction, he sets up an amazing third principle: Once a proposition has been proven, no objection, not even an unanswerable one, should be entertained (Oeuvres, 4:214; Lively trans., 215). Despite his questionable logic, the author received great praise from French critics. Sainte-Beuve, who held very different views on politics as well as on religion, admired “la hauteur de ses vues, la perspicacité de ses craintes, la sagesse de quelques-uns de ses regrets” (the nobility of his views, the perspicacity of his fears, the wisdom of some of his regrets).5 Indeed, de Maistre’s ideas are beautifully expressed. The following

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critique of war, quite exceptional at the time, may convey an idea of his eloquence. “By what magic is [man] ever ready, at the first beat of the drum, to cast off his divine character in order to set out without resistance, often even with a certain gladness . . . to hack to pieces on the battlefield a brother who has never offended him and who, on his side, comes to inflict the selfsame wounds if he can?” (Oeuvres, 5:3 – 4; Lively trans., 245 – 46). Why, de Maistre asks, is the soldier honored by those who despise the executioner? Why have nations remained in the primitive state of nature with respect to each other? Only animals of prey kill some other animals. Yet man at the top of the animal species kills all animals, including his fellow humans. “He kills to eat, he kills for clothing, he kills for adornment, he kills for the sake of killing” (Oeuvres, 5:23; Lively trans., 252). War is the law of the world, and precisely because of its mysterious cruelty it is surrounded by glory. De Maistre calls it “divine” because its outcome remains humanly unpredictable. In equally paradoxical terms, de Maistre defends hereditary monarchy as the safest form of political succession. He admits that no form of government might seem less appropriate than one that depends on biological succession. Yet experience teaches that no other is more peaceful and orderly than that of a hereditary monarchy. The king never dies. The moment an incumbent dies, his legitimate heir automatically succeeds him. Much in the Soirées is an odd combination of sharp insights and dubious assumptions presented as intuitively evident. Contrary to Rousseau’s myth of the noble savage, de Maistre firmly denies that savages, any more than civilized humans, are born innocent. The savage is no more than a branch prematurely broken off from a tree (Oeuvres, 4:71; Lively trans., 200). Crucial in de Maistre’s thesis is the unproven assumption that the idea of law inheres in the mind. A denial of its innateness “has produced the monster that has devastated Europe” (Oeuvres, 4:372; Lively trans., 244). In addition, de Maistre’s tendency to interpret history in an apocalyptic sense, without properly analyzing the facts of history, weakened his conclusions. Obviously, a France still suffering from the effects of the Revolution was not ready for a mature assessment of political alternatives. This came later, with thinkers such as SaintSimon, Proudhon, and Comte. The quality of the Soirées lies not in the power of its philosophical argument but in the beauty of its expression and in the nobility of the author’s spiritual views.

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The only political thinker after the French Revolution who had been directly involved in it was the Swiss-born Benjamin Constant. His aristocratic Protestant family had been exiled from France by Louis XIV’s retraction of the 1598 Edict of Nantes granting liberties to French Protestants. His mother died eight days after his birth, and his father, an officer in a Swiss regiment of the Dutch army, entrusted the boy to a succession of rather peculiar tutors, one of whom lived in a bordello, while another visited places of similar repute in the company of his ward. Benjamin himself had already gone through a number of love affairs when, in 1793, he met the much older Germaine de Staël, the daughter of Louis XVI’s Swiss finance minister Jacques Necker. She had long been committed to political reform in France. In Switzerland Benjamin collaborated with her on Reflections on Peace, an appeal to France’s enemies not to attack the young Republic. Shortly after the execution of Robespierre, both left for Paris to take an active part in the political reconstruction. However strong his reservations about the Revolution had been, once the violence had ended Constant chose to support the new government, hoping that France’s enemies would eventually make peace with it. The subject invited him to reflect on political freedom in general during the remaining years of his life. Its first fruit, Des réactions politiques (1797), was an attack on political arbitrariness, “the great enemy of freedom and the corrupting element of all institutions.”6 Arbitrariness prevails, Constant argues, not only in despotic governments but also in democratic ones that apply sound principles to the wrong situation. Thus, one of the most harmful mistakes made during the Revolution was Danton’s proposal to abandon traditional rules of representation and to allow all citizens directly to participate in the legislative Convention. The principle of unmediated representation may be safely applied in a small society, such as Rousseau’s ideal state, which counted no more than ten thousand citizens. In today’s large states it leads only to demagogy. Constant’s aversion to a direct exercise of political power laid the ground for his subsequent distinction between the classical (ancient Athenian or republican Roman) type of freedom, which concerns only civil society, and the modern type of freedom, in which individual rights have become the primary goal. For Constant, true freedom includes both types. By granting the individual the right to make his own decisions

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as long as they do not interfere with the rights of others, the modern, individual type of freedom restricts the sovereign power of the state. The revolutionary ideal of freedom, which had been modeled after the principles of the Roman Republic, had given unqualified priority to political rights. In 1789 the Convention had proclaimed the famous Rights of Man. Yet Robespierre and his followers tyrannically drove the government toward an absolute primacy of state right, according to Rousseau’s interpretation of the ancient Roman Republic. During the Restoration a reaction against political despotism had followed, and the idea that the the modern state should primarily serve private interests regained power. Constant opposed the theory according to which the principal task of civil society consists in creating social conditions that favor economic growth. He still shared the view of the French Physiocrats that the economy must remain subordinate to the state’s primary goal of realizing a communal ideal of moral freedom.7 After Napoleon’s military expeditions had spread havoc and destruction across Europe, Constant published a short treatise that still merits reading today: De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilisation européenne (On the Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation as Related to European Civilization) (1814).8 An age of commerce, he argues, is poorly served by the violence that accompanies military conquest. War disturbs the peace needed for a nation’s development. The glory of conquest has now ceased to attract us. The kind of military expansion so long pursued by French rulers had become highly undesirable at a time when people are longing for peace and domestic order. In an extensively reworked version of his 1806 Principes de politique, published in 1815 only three weeks before the battle of Waterloo, Constant’s tone has completely changed. During the hundred days after Napoleon’s return from exile, the emperor had commissioned Constant to draft a project for a new French Constitution. In the 1815 Principes, he argues that political freedom can coexist with a monarchy, provided that the ruler does not have absolute power. The form of government matters less than the authority it possesses. Even Rousseau had feared the unlimited power that his social contract granted to the people. According to Constant, no political body should have more than a strictly

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constitutional power. France was clearly still seeking her way out of chaos. Yet the country, he urged, was prepared neither to return to its pre-revolutionary state nor to relapse into the radical populism of the revolutionary years.

Germany Awakens

The German historian Golo Mann once wrote, “European politics in the nineteenth century lived on the French Revolution.” In no country outside France was this more true than in Germany. The outbreak of the Revolution had the effect of a thunderclap in the somnolent political atmosphere of the German states. Because of its division into a great number of small principalities, free cities, and the like, Germany had remained a politically backward country. Just for that reason the impact of the Revolution on it was greater than anywhere else outside France. It seemed as if suddenly everything had become possible. Germany’s political tabula rasa explains why Germans produced the most influential political philosophies of the early modern age. Other European nations watched the Revolution and its aftermath from a distance. But German political thinkers began to work on the task of meeting the social objectives that the Revolution had failed to achieve. Today we remember Fichte and Hegel as the political philosophers of the period. Yet without Kant’s and Schiller’s prior reactions to the Revolution, their work would not have been possible. Kant was so elated by the French Revolution that he regarded it as the only historical proof that humanity, despite all its backsliding, was making progress.9 The first philosophical essay on the French Revolution to appear in Germany was Fichte’s Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urtheile über die französische Revolution (Contribution to a Correction of the Judgments on the French Revolution) (1793).10 The philosopher unqualifiedly praised the Revolution, even though at the time of his writing it was already turning exceedingly ugly. To him, only the principle mattered: each nation possesses an inalienable right to change its political constitution. Breaking an existing social contract in order to install a different one is morally justified, he argued, even if not all citizens consent. It

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suffices that a considerable number of people disagree with the established political order. Yet, he admitted, the revolutionaries have no right to impose the new order on those who prefer to remain in the old one. By this strange restriction, which implies that different classes of citizens could have different political rights, Fichte attempted to avoid the violence that usually accompanies a revolution. He justified this odd arrangement by referring to the different rights already possessed by different social classes—clergy, aristocracy, the third estate—in the existing civil society, thereby ignoring the point that these class differences were exactly what the Revolution intended to abolish. This immature work, published during the French Terreur, damaged its author’s reputation, and only a succession of later publications gradually restored it. Shortly thereafter, Fichte contradicted Rousseau and the principles of the Revolution by declaring that the rights of the state were restricted to political issues. Neither private rights nor cultural affairs fall under the state’s jurisdiction: they belong to the natural rights of the citizens. He therefore ranks the state below civil society. With Locke, he asserts that the state has no other purpose than to protect the individual and the inter-individual rights of its citizens, particularly those that enable them to acquire and preserve property.11 Nor should the state interfere with the economic or cultural lives of its citizens, although it must protect both. In Der geschlossene Handelsstaat (The Closed Commercial State) (1800), however, Fichte drastically changed his position from political liberalism to state socialism. He continues to argue that the primary task of the state consists in protecting the right of property. But he restricts the right of owning property by the use the citizen makes of it. Any abuse of property deprives others of part of their right to possess property. Hence the abuser forfeits his own right. Only the state has authority to establish a fair division of labor and, on that basis, to define the limits of each person’s right. The state should entertain no commercial relations with other states. Fichte’s curious idea of an economic autarky might have had some merit in a premodern manufacturing society, but the industrial revolution had made this solution outdated before he formulated it. In the Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation), lectures delivered during the French occupation of Berlin in the winter

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of 1807– 8, Fichte’s nationalist tone, audible in The Closed Commercial State, became even more pronounced. Fichte argued that German culture was destined to play a leading role in the future of Europe. Yet the realization of its destiny required the political power of a strong state. He held that his ideal of a closed national economy was vindicated by the sad condition to which the Napoleonic wars had reduced the Continental European economy. The main causes of war are competing economic interests. A closed commercial state does not compete with its neighbors and hence can afford to remain friendly with all. To overcome its backward political situation, Germany also ought to support universal education. “The state as highest administrator of human concerns and as guardian of those who have no voice is responsible only to God and conscience. It has the full right to compel these voiceless citizens to their salvation.”12 For Hölderlin and his two Tübingen schoolmates, Schelling and Hegel, the French Revolution was a clarion call for political emancipation. Fichte’s nationalism inspired them, but soon they came to regard the philosopher’s concept of freedom as too narrow. As long as the state dominates social life, they argued, the principle of its overriding power continues to hold sway, and the citizens’ political condition remains one of submission. Hölderlin argued that freedom could originate only within a vision of primordial equality, not of subordination. At the same time, Schelling criticized Fichte’s conception of a commercial state as fostering only inter-individual relations. The state thereby plays a merely instrumental role, whereas its fundamental task ought to consist in connecting individuals with the whole.13 In Hegel’s philosophy, the tentative ideas of the early Romantics gradually coalesced into a coherent political system. Originally, Hegel shared the nostalgia of his Tubingen roommates, Hölderlin and Schelling, for the political ideal of the Greek city-state. Soon, however, he realized that the Greek ideal of harmony between individual and society was no longer possible in the modern world. What could possibly replace it? The decisive awakening from his Hellenic dream came with his study of ancient religion. A universal religion, such as Christianity, would not be able to fulfill the function that Greek folk religion had once performed. Therefore, Hegel turned his attention to the social conditions

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of his own time. His conclusions were equally disappointing: no German state possessed an adequate juridical basis for establishing a free society. In Die Verfassung Deutschlands (1799 –1802), a historical study of the German Constitution, he observed that no country had “a more miserable Constitution than the German Empire.”14 It dated from a time when the nation (Volk), not the state, was the central political unit. Germans, loosely held together by language, customs, and religion (either Catholic or Protestant), possessed no system of rights, only a collection of decrees issued without underlying principles or coherence. A desire for political independence had in the past divided Germans. Hegel hoped that the present move toward a national liberation would unite them. Hegel formulated his idea of a new order of right in an article on the scientific treatments of the natural law (“Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts”) (1802). In this essay he praised Rousseau for having developed an intrinsically social concept of human nature in his “general will,” as opposed to the merely historical and ultimately still inter-individualist concept of a social contract. Yet even Rousseau, he pointed out, had relapsed into a notion of social contract when arguing that the general will forces individuals to give up certain rights in order to receive social protection for the remaining ones. Rousseau thereby forgot that most of the alleged rights become real rights only after being sanctioned by the political community. While lecturing as Privatdozent at the University of Jena, Hegel began to develop a comprehensive social theory in which political and private rights would be adequately distinguished and yet fully integrated with one another. In his System der Sittlichkeit (System of Ethics) (1802), he concluded that the entire social order, including the cultural realm, had to culminate in and depend on the supreme political structure of the state. The state was to control the highest spiritual achievements of art, religion, and philosophy. We recognize in this position a memory of the idealized ancient Greek polis and the Roman republic. In the Realphilosophie (1805 – 6), Hegel again changed his position, now to a less inclusive concept of the state. He realized that the attempt by the French Revolution to return to the all-encompassing ideal of the Roman republic had been responsible for its worst political abuses. In modern culture, religion, art, and philosophy exceed the authority of

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the state. They are part of an independent, spiritual realm: the later Absolute Spirit. In addition, Hegel added a sphere intermediate between political and private rights, which is reserved for corporate rights. This relatively autonomous “civil society” (bürgerliche Gemeinschaft) has its own laws, although they remain subject to control by the state. Without state supervision, the corporate bodies of civil society might disastrously affect the common good: the rich would become ever richer and the poor ever poorer. Corporate interests must be integrated with the common ones in and through the state. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, published a year later, Hegel still adheres to the political position of the Realphilosophie. He continues to hold that the equating of individual and social rights, patterned after the Roman republic, was responsible for the failure of the Revolution. The individual had identified himself with the general will, not by an overriding concern for the common good, as Rousseau had intended, but by bending the universal will toward the satisfaction of private desires.15 Hegel attempted to avoid this abuse by separating the spheres of private right and state right, and then mediating them by the semi-private sphere of civil society. Through civic corporations, he argues, citizens would feel that the state, in which these intermediate bodies are to be legally incorporated, also has their group interests at heart. Civil society, although pursuing private interests, would possess a universal character.16 As we know, in his later Philosophy of Right (1821), the state dominates all social life. Hegel altogether abandons his earlier, Romantic view of politics and replaces it by a justification of the existing Prussian state. It is only fair to keep in mind, however, that in 1821 the Prussian state had not yet become the bulwark of political conservatism that it was in the 1830s.17

Britain Reacts: Burke’s and Coleridge’s Critique of the Revolution

Edmund Burke’s prophetic Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was the first critical reaction to the Revolution outside France. Burke, a Whig, who had advocated the emancipation of Ireland and who supported the American Revolution as well as the revolt in India against the British East Indian Company, unpleasantly surprised his liberal party by

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a thoroughly negative assessment of the events in France. He predicted the demise of the French monarchy and the coming of a military dictatorship. In his Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris, he questioned the right of the people to rebel against the very authorities that had granted them their rights. Addressing those Englishmen who sympathized with the Revolution, he asserts: “It has been the uniform policy of our Constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right.”18 The problem with such an analogy between England and France was that France at that time had no constitution. Burke’s argument, however, rests on a broader principle. We cannot completely overturn a political system that has become ingrained in the life of the people, in the property they possess, and in the traditions from which they derive meaning. Burke had approved of England’s Glorious Revolution against James II because the king himself had broken the very compact on which his throne was established. The king of France, however, had committed no such crime. The French Revolution had pitted the authority of the “enlightened” against the legitimacy of tradition. “Jacobinism is the attempt . . . to eradicate prejudice out of the minds of men, for the purpose of putting all power and authority into the hands of persons capable of enlightening the minds of the people.”19 Reactions to Burke’s Reflections were swift and sharp, and none more so than The Rights of Man, written by Thomas Paine, Burke’s former friend and fellow activist in the struggle for American independence. At the time of its writing, Paine was collaborating with the French revolutionaries and, despite his British citizenship, on his way to becoming a representative of the northwestern district of Pas de Calais in the French National Convention. He challenged Burke’s contention that a political agreement can bind posterity forever. No law is immortal, he declared, and no authority is permanent. The source of rights, he wrote apropos of the American Revolution, lies not in historical tradition but in the very nature of man, as “he came from the hand of his Maker.”20 All humans are equal, and certain

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rights are inherent in their nature. “Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual” (306). As for the British Constitution, which Burke takes to be the source of rights, it consists not in an act of divine governance but in the people who form a government. It had emerged from a variety of decrees issued by a succession of invaders. “William the Conqueror and his descendants parceled out the country in this manner, and bribed one part of it by what they called charters, to hold the other parts of it better subjected to their will” (311). What was so venerable or even natural, the author asks, about a legislature in which districts of nearly a million souls are represented by two members of Parliament, while the town of Old Sarum, “which contains not three houses,” is represented by the same number? Finally, Paine argues, England with her established Church compares poorly with the United States, which recognizes all Christian denominations but supports none. How could the British Constitution be sanctified forever by a Church that owes its origin to the personal disagreement of a dissolute Renaissance king with the central authority of Western Christianity? Paine’s critique is hard to refute. Yet it loses much of its strength because of his individualist conception of the state, whose only purpose, he claims, is to give people a means of acquiring property, a protection against losing it, and a right to enjoy it. “When these things are accomplished, all the objects for which government ought to be established are answered” (434). Paine thereby reduces the state to an economic function. Wordsworth, in his Prelude, tells us of his deep support for the principles of the Revolution in France. Yet over the years the poet had shed, one after another, the democratic principles of his youth. He became a conservative Tory who, in the name of freedom, advocated removing all political restraints from capitalism. Coleridge, in contrast, remained more politically consistent than his friend. After his death, his daughter collected some of Coleridge’s articles that had appeared in The Watchman, The Morning Post, and The Courier for republication under the title Essays on His Own Times (1850). Compared to his poetry, some of those journalistic writings are surprisingly blunt. In an early address entitled “On the Present War” (1795), Coleridge defends the attempt during the Revolution to abolish “superstition,” which he regarded as a means

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by which the clergy acquire worldly authority and honors.21 He disagrees with the Jacobins only with respect to the exclusive stress that they place on rights. Unless rights are paralleled by duties, Coleridge argues, no democratic community will ever emerge. He severely criticizes Prime Minister Pitt for seeking a war with France, as if the Revolution caused an imminent danger to England. In reality, Pitt, he claims, unchained a counterrevolution, in the sense that events in France served as an excuse for stalling any efforts to correct England’s abominable social conditions. These conditions continued even after Robespierre’s death, and matters did not improve until the Reform Act of 1832. In 1798, the year when many British feared an invasion by Napoleon’s army, Coleridge published a poem, “Fears in Solitude,” in The Morning Post. Rhetorical rather than poetic, it is as much an attack on Pitt’s policy as a warning of the danger threatening from abroad. While the author calls his countrymen to “stand forth! be men! repel an impious foe!”, he also argues that the strongest defense against a foreign invasion consists in raising a generation of free men, who are thus able to resist the enemy at home: Pitt’s government, as much as the one coming from the Continent.22 Nevertheless, toward the end of his life Coleridge also turned into a pillar of the status quo and dismissed Rousseau’s idea of a social contract as a fiction “at once false and foolish.” Even if it had ever existed, argued Coleridge, such a contract would derive its legal power exclusively from a moral obligation to support the common good. Its authority must rest on a permanent idea, not on a one-time historical event. This moral idea takes precedence over historical agreements and must be the criterion by which all forms of government ought to be judged.

Vi s i o n s o f t h e F u t u r e : Saint-Simon and Proudhon

All the theories described up to now were reactions to the French Revolution. After 1815, a few French thinkers began to develop a broad theory of society. The question was no longer how to justify or deny the legitimacy of that historical event, but more fundamental ones: What is

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essential in the nature of a just society? What ought to be avoided and what to be encouraged? It was no coincidence that this discussion began in France, where years of political turmoil had left a profound social and political vacuum. Count Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1750 –1825) became the most influential social thinker in France during the Romantic period. This scion of a side branch of the family of the famous Duc de Saint-Simon had served in the American army during the War of Independence, but he later joined the French in their struggle with the United States. He had enthusiastically supported the French Revolution, resigned his title and aristocratic privileges, and stood ready to serve a new, democratic society. With the loss of the family fortune during the Revolution, SaintSimon attempted to restore it by buying nationalized properties and later selling them at an enormous profit. Fascinated with science, he took courses in physics and medicine at the École Polytechnique, and he supported promising young men whom he thought capable of reforming society through science. His generosity and lavish style of living reduced him again to poverty until his former servant Diard took him in. After Diard died, Saint-Simon’s family granted him a modest pension. Augustin Thierry, the later historian and politician, and Auguste Comte, the father of social Positivism, served for a while as his secretaries and collaborators when he was developing his ideas of social reform. Their later work was deeply influenced by his thought, although they seldom recognized their debt to him. In 1815 the former count published a Mémoire sur la science de l’homme,23 in which he laid out a plan for a new system of morality, religion, and politics on the basis of science. Philosophy, which organizes and unifies all sciences, stands at the top of the hierarchy of knowledge. “From there he [the philosopher] envisages what the world was and what it ought to be.” Yet philosophy itself is the outcome of what Saint-Simon calls “social physiology” and Comte calls “sociology.” To the end, Saint-Simon maintained a naïve belief that science would solve all social problems. The most innovative part of Science de l’homme is the author’s outline of the anticipated development of the human race. Inspired by Condorcet, Saint-Simon strongly believed in progress, yet he disagreed with the Enlightenment philosopher on the significance

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of medieval culture, which he considered the beginning of Europe’s scientific epoch. Through the Crusades, he claims, Europeans became acquainted with the sciences, which the Arabs had transmitted from Aristotle and his followers. In the West, Roger Bacon introduced original methods for the practice of the physical sciences. “If historians had analyzed and seriously studied the Middle Ages, they would have recorded the gradual preparation of all the great events which later emerged.”24 Saint-Simon also differed from Enlightenment theorists on the importance of religion in the development of culture. In the past, he argued, religion gathered the sciences in a sacred synthesis, on the basis of which people could build a society. Today, philosophy, which once had been theology’s handmaid, has taken over this function. During the early modern epoch, differences among theological interpretations caused wars. Yet at the time of his writing, the author considered Western civilization to be sufficiently developed for maintaining a peaceful harmony among nations. For a while, he had hoped that Napoleon might be the one to seal this peace. Yet he soon concluded that the emperor had betrayed his vocation through personal ambition and meaningless wars. In the eighteenth century, several thinkers, including Kant, had written about the possibility of a universal, lasting peace in Europe. But before Saint-Simon’s De la réorganisation de la société européenne (1814), no one had studied how the idea of an integrated Europe could be realized politically and economically. The policy of the Congress of Vienna was based on the principle that each nation would keep what it had conquered by war and allow its history to resume where the Revolution had interrupted it. Saint-Simon and Thierry, however, argued that the very institutions of Continental Europe should be fundamentally transformed. The British Constitution would serve as the model. In the industrial society of Saint-Simon’s time, economics determined all social relations. Yet how could relations based on competing interests ever strengthen social cohesion? Saint-Simon was vaguely familiar with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but he did not fully realize its social implications until he studied Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité d’economie politique (1803), which mainly followed Smith’s ideas. Since the appearance of his book, Say himself had drawn attention to the enormous sacrifices that a recently industrialized economy imposes on its work-

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ers. The Swiss Simonde de Sismondi also had initially supported Adam Smith’s principle of unrestricted economic freedom, but later grew aware of the disastrous social crises caused by overproduction and underconsumption. Saint-Simon concluded that the state must regulate the economy. In his four-volume L’Industrie, a history of industrial development (1817–18), and in its two sequels, Le Politique and L’Organisateur, Saint-Simon attempted to correct the problems resulting from a laissezfaire policy by defending the state’s right to interfere. He summarized his position in the Cathéchisme des industriels (1823). In his judgment, the industrial class, which produces the material means for satisfying the needs of society, ought to occupy the highest rank in society. “Today, the bourgeois, who made the Revolution in their own interest and abrogated the exclusive privileges of the aristocrats to exploit the public treasure, have been admitted to the ruling class.”25 This class of lawyers, physicians, and property owners, however, has proved incapable of ruling an industrial society. The only means to prevent social turmoil consists in charging the industrial class with the administration of public finances. Karl Marx, in The Class Struggles in France (1850) and in The XVIII Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), confirmed SaintSimon’s judgment on the French Revolution: it had been a single class revolution serving the bourgeoisie yet supported by shopkeepers and workers, whose social condition it had failed to improve. Saint-Simon, however, introduces a new social distinction. The conflict for him was no longer between poor and rich, between “proletarians” and capitalists, or between aristocrats and commoners, but between those who supported society through their work and those who profited from that work either as inactive owners (rentiers) or as professionals performing prestigious tasks that contribute little to the common good. The industrial class includes all social layers, both rich and poor. Reform, Saint-Simon argued, requires that the industrial class put up a united front against the nonindustrial class of rentiers, jurists (légistes), and military officers. Originally, the legal profession had served the aristocracy, but gradually it had developed into a semi-aristocratic body, a noblesse de robe. Its delegates dominated the National Convention, and after the Revolution its members continued to rule the financial world. Saint-Simon refers to them as bourgeois, that is, members of

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the nonindustrial class. He traces the origin of the two opposing classes to the two civilizations that at one time had dominated France: the older Gallic and the later Frankish. The French reformer pointed to England for an example of how the industrial class could come to power. The British Constitution had incorporated industrial principles within its modified feudal framework. As such, it presented a usable model for the transition to a fully industrial society. France, he argues, should proceed through her own monarchical tradition, rather than through a combination of king and “pairs” (the Pairs de France, the highest aristocracy). In a petition to Louis XVIII, Saint-Simon claims that, since the reign of Louis XIV, France had slowly been moving toward an industrial monarchy. At Waterloo the military had altogether lost their hold on the country. Yet the current constitutional monarchy still left too much power to the légistes. In the final part of the Cathéchisme, Saint-Simon raises a question that he answers in his Nouveau Christianisme (1825): How does his new, social concept of morality relate to religion? Only with the support of a divine authority, he claims in the Nouveau Christianisme, can moral principles be implemented. Socrates had understood this. But after his death his followers split into two schools: the Platonists, who stressed the spiritual aspect of morality, dominated the first twelve centuries; during the next twelve, the more empirically oriented Aristotelians took over. Needless to say, Saint-Simon’s argument strongly simplifies European intellectual history. Yet the weight of his theory lies elsewhere. The increasingly religious direction of Saint-Simon’s final years, as expressed in Nouveau Christianisme, caused a split with Comte, his latest secretary and collaborator. The term Christianisme in the title refers to Christ’s moral teaching, while the word Nouveau confirmed the author’s break with the Catholic Church. His moral religion in Nouveau Christianisme consists of only one principle: humans must conduct themselves as brothers and sisters toward one another. The Church’s task should therefore consist in improving the lot of the poor. The pope and the bishops have betrayed Christ’s teaching. Saint-Simon praises the Reformation for its intention to correct the failings of the Catholic Church, but he blames it for restricting the principle of love by introducing new, national Churches. Protestants have thereby weakened the princi-

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pal achievement of Catholic medieval society, namely, the separation between religion and military power. In the Roman Empire, he argues, religious institutions had supported the state, yet they depended on its military leaders, who held the real authority. In resisting this subordination, medieval Christianity had made possible an unrestricted critique of the existing society. Protestantism, however, had relinked religion to the state. Moreover, it had grounded Christianity on the Bible, a book that has long been surpassed by the moral code of modern society. In short: “Luther a bien critiqué et mal doctriné.” Saint-Simon was equally opposed to religious traditionalism, which at that time was the dominant trend in the French Catholic Church. In his view, religion ought to be a synthesis of the sciences and philosophies of the age. Saint-Simon’s social project generated the new science of sociology. Its founder never received the credit he deserved for it, due in part to the chaotic way in which he presented his theories. Émile Durkheim, a later admirer, describes his written output as a series of loose papers, innumerable brochures, plans, and lists of articles forever outlined but never written, and dealing with the most diverse subjects, from astronomy and chemistry to psychology and politics, in endless repetitions and digressions.26 In the nineteenth century, sociology developed in a direction opposite to the intention of its founder. Instead of becoming a science of sciences, it lost the broad normative basis of Saint-Simon’s conception. A somewhat younger, typically Romantic social reformer was the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 – 65). Born into a poor family of Besançon, he attended the excellent collège of his city on a scholarship. Since his parents were unable to support further studies, he went to work in a printer’s shop. There he learned to read Latin, Greek, and even some Hebrew while correcting proofs of the Bible and works of the Church Fathers. He acquired a taste for the Latin classics and a lifelong interest in theology. At the same time, he also became acquainted with the ideas of a fellow citizen of Besançon, the socialist Charles Fourier. As a means of remedying the poverty of workers in recently industrialized cities, Fourier promoted the idea of a network of productive associations, called phalanges, which would be responsible for the welfare of their members. The idea never went very far, although it was tried out in the

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utopian community of Brook Farm in the United States. Yet it drew Proudhon’s attention to the misery of the working class. In 1840 he published his provocative Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (What Is Property?). Today most people remember only his short answer to that question: “La propriété c’est le vol” (Property is theft). Far from advocating the suppression of all private property, however, the author defended the right of the farmer to his land and of the artisan to his shop and tools. But he opposed private possession of the means of production, that is, property that might be used for the exploitation of others. Marx predicted that the social revolution would result from a conflict of economic forces. Proudhon continued to believe that it would occur through the force of ideas. For that reason, the Communist Manifesto (1848) dismissed Proudhon, together with Saint-Simon and Fourier, as “utopian socialists.” In his early days Marx had admired the French socialist. In The Holy Family (1845) he defended Proudhon’s book on property against the critical comments of its German translator, and he praised the socialist for being the first to question the institution that economists considered the “natural” foundation of their science, namely, property. Proudhon probably influenced Marx’s concept of surplus value (although it had also appeared in Ricardo), defined as the value that the worker produces and for which he is not compensated. The employer may pay for the worker’s sustenance day by day. Yet he does not compensate him for the enormous accumulation of value that over time the worker, not to mention the totality of workers, realizes. In the Communist Manifesto Marx emphasized that capital is a collective product, the result of the combined efforts of all members of a society. This idea first appeared in Proudhon’s work on property. After some encounters with Proudhon in Paris (1844), Marx was expelled from France, and Proudhon began meeting with Karl Grün, another German expatriate, who introduced him to Feuerbach’s critique of religion. For the German philosopher, the misery of the lower classes was primarily the result not of injustice or of a clash of economic forces, but of the fact that humankind projected its own qualities on an imaginary divine image of itself. By the time of his meetings with Proudhon, Marx, who had been influenced by Feuerbach’s theory of religious alienation, had begun to regard this theory as an ideological dis-

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traction. He tried to detach the French thinker from Grün’s influence and urged Proudhon to become the Parisian mouthpiece of his own economic theory. When this project failed, their relations cooled. After the publication of Proudhon’s Système des contradictions économiques, ou, Philosophie de la misère (System of Economic Contradictions, or, Philosophy of Poverty) (1846) and Marx’s reply to it in Misère de la philosophie (1847), they changed to open hostility. Proudhon attempted to support his “scientific discovery” with the principles formulated by Jean-Baptiste Say and other economists of the day. However, his knowledge of economics was very limited. Moreover, he presented his ideas as a version of what he thought was Hegel’s dialectic, of which his understanding was even poorer. The little that Proudhon knew about Hegel, Marx had taught him. The German revolutionary later remembered these indoctrination sessions: “In the course of lengthy debates often lasting all night, I infected him to his great injury with Hegelianism, which, owing to his lack of German, he could not study properly.” The Système des contradictions économiques was the result of Marx’s and Grün’s secondhand philosophical instruction. Still, not all that Proudhon writes about dialectic must be dismissed. He differed from Hegel on a substantial point, one of which he was well aware. Unlike the German idealist, he does not conclude that all contradictions may be resolved into harmonious syntheses. For Proudhon, the contradictions never cease to exist. He believed in the need for a continuing (but peaceful) revolution, and on this point he also disagreed with Marx. According to Proudhon, the dialectic of social life included temporary reconciliations, but the basic antinomies never permanently disappear. For that reason he aimed at establishing an increasing balance between persistent social opposites.27 What disturbed Marx even more than Proudhon’s interpretation of Hegel was his treatment of economic categories as eternal ideas, rather than as historical relations of production and consumption. Economy thereby becomes part of an ideal realm ruled by immutable laws. Proudhon was particularly confused on the subject of economic conflicts. He simply identified supply with use value, and demand with exchange value. With equal simplicity, he equated fair price with the labor time that is required to produce an object. We need enter no further into this question, the heart of Marx’s critique, since

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it is not related to the subject of this study.28 In his view of the future, however, Proudhon’s predictions turned out to be more accurate than those of his major critic. The social-democratic movement was to result not in communism but in social reform. The French socialist claimed to have discovered a new, “serial” dialectic, which enabled him to link unrelated concepts to one another. He presented this discovery as an extension of Hegel’s method as applied by Feuerbach, who had linked social reform to a philosophical critique of religion. Yet Proudhon’s critique of religion substantially differed from that of Feuerbach. He agreed with the German philosopher that humanity could not hope to become fully free before ridding itself of its dependence on God. Humans therefore have a moral duty, he claims, to oppose the idea of God as principle of universal dependence. Yet Proudhon’s concern was not with the existence or nonexistence of God, as Feuerbach’s speculative atheism had been, but with the negative effect that faith in a divine providence had on human efforts to abolish social injustice. The propertied classes consistently attempt to legitimate their hold on society through religious arguments based on God’s will and providence. At the same time, Proudhon maintained that his contemporaries should acquaint themselves thoroughly and respectfully with the idea of God. This most comprehensive concept alone would enable them to find the right order of society. Thus the anti-theist Proudhon became a paradoxical apologist of the Catholic faith and even a competent theologian. The mere negation of God creates a moral vacuum. Belief in God’s existence may be superstitious, but the idea of God is socially indispensable, he argued, and an acknowledgment of that necessity needs to be strongly affirmed. Six months after the publication of his anti-religious Système des contradictions économiques, Proudhon wrote in a personal carnet: “First, even the origin of a human being is supernatural: not surprisingly, then, his end will also be so.” And elsewhere: “There is a contradiction in the idea that a material atom, a kind of inorganic nothing would be indestructible and infinite, whereas man would not be.”29 He also expresses the possibility that in a future life he may be reconciled with the God whom he had fought in the present life. In the process of his strange dialectic, the author has converted the idea of God into an ideal reality.30

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Proudhon remained a Romantic all his life. He cultivated an ideal of social harmony without being fully aware of the hard measures its realization would require. He hoped to accomplish this ideal through persuasion rather than through violence. His tactics lacked substance, his theories were chaotic, but his words exuded a warm humanity, which made people listen to him. Marx, for all his flaws, was a better philosopher and a more seasoned economist. He expected that the social crisis caused by early capitalism would be resolved through the economic contradictions of the system. Humans would effectively intervene only when, in the final economic collapse, necessity drove them to revolt. The alleged necessity of Marx’s theory discloses a state of mind very different from Proudhon’s, one that lies outside Romanticism’s idea of liberation: it belongs to the scientism of the later epoch.

part iii

Syntheses of Romantic Thought

chapter 9

The Romantic Idea of History

Europe has always been “a civilization extremely attentive to its past,” wrote the French historian Marc Bloch. Their entire heritage has moved Europeans in a historical direction: “Our first masters, the Greeks and the Romans, were history-writing peoples. Christianity is a religion of historians.”1 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this Western characteristic manifested itself in the widespread belief that, at least now in the modern age, European civilization was following a progressive course. Yet even these modern believers seldom agreed on the nature of “progress.” Does it consist in economic improvement? If so, the optimists might be right, if one extends the comparison with the past over a sufficiently long period. Or is it cultural? The ground for this belief remained shaky, as shown by the disputes, discussed in earlier chapters, about the superiority of the moderns versus the ancients. Or are we perhaps making moral progress? Kant and Voltaire firmly denied it. Still, at least most Europeans believed that the trend of civilization was generally moving upward. As the nineteenth-century French historian François Guizot declared in his lectures at the Sorbonne, the very term civilization implies that its members attempt to improve their position with respect to self-chosen goals. Paradoxically, it was the very idea of progress, with its connotation of gradual development, that led to the Revolution, which very abruptly changed the history of Europe and the European concept of history. The French Revolution was neither gradual nor continuous. Whereas the idea of progress treated the future as the natural outcome of history, the Revolution abruptly broke into history as if it were its eschatological 247

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end.2 The present, formerly viewed as the conclusion of the past, came to be regarded as the beginning of a different future. Europeans who lived through the Revolution experienced a growing sense of discontinuity between past and future, as a rapid succession of new social structures, scientific theories, and technical inventions made it evident that their descendants would live in a very different world. With the impact of a sudden revelation, this sense of a secular eschatology raised unprecedently high, although undefined, expectations, as if humanity was finally about to reach its destiny. The Romantic assumes that history is moving toward a future that exceeds the limits of any previous finite goals. During the intense later phases of the French Revolution, few of those actively involved in it would have been able to mention any specific aim that they hoped to attain. All reports suggest that the Revolution itself had become the objective of their struggles and desires. Whatever particular reforms the revolutionaries may have had in mind at the beginning had become absorbed by a desire raised to an absolute level. We might say, with Paul Ricoeur, that the desire is no longer of beings, but of absolute Being. “From the very roots of my [finite] situation I aspire to be bound by [infinite] Being. The search is itself torn between the ‘finitude’ of my questioning and the [infinite] ‘openness’ of Being.”3 The imagination thereby seeks for symbolic images of the absolute.4 To many in France and initially also in Germany, Napoleon’s victorious campaigns intimated the beginning of a world empire of justice and peace. The entire period revived the apocalyptic hopes and fears of earlier ages. Of course, soon came the sobering reversal of the Restoration and, with it, a return to the rational and the predictable. Historians again cautioned that expectations of the future had to be measured by historical precedents. History had not come to an end. By the time the revolution of 1848 ended, the older, gradual idea of progress had once again become the dominant ideology. Still, the transcendent aura of the term revolution had not entirely vanished. The socialist movements of the 1840s and 1850s often packed their programs in apocalyptic wrappings. Not everyone was happy with the constant changes and upheavals that began with the French Revolution. Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian, denounced this “age of evolution,” as he called the nineteenth

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century, for rupturing our spiritual continuity with the past. Early in the twentieth century, Paul Valéry wrote: “There have been too many surprises, too many things created and destroyed, and too many great and sudden developments have brutally interrupted the intellectual tradition.”5 Nonetheless, after Napoleon’s empire had fallen, many continued to consider themselves bound by some of its results, such as a common code of law and similar institutions. At the same time, the resistance against the Napoleonic occupation had awakened a strong sense of national identity in each of the occupied countries. Both of these trends—universal identity and national particularity—appear in Romantic historiography. In his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind) (1784 – 91), Herder had attempted to balance the universal ideal of humanity with the irreducible particularity of each nation. Together, they constitute a common humanity, to which each contributes a unique segment. That balance was never reached during the century that followed.

H i s t o r y : Th e Fa c t s a n d t h e S t o r y

The science of history differs from other empirical sciences in that its subject matter is never wholly available for verifying or falsifying the historian’s later presentation of it. The original is gone forever, and so are, in most cases, the direct witnesses. In assessing a historian’s reliability, it is not sufficient to ascertain that he or she has made all necessary efforts to have the “facts straight,” for in history there are no isolated facts. The facts form part of events, which are always complex. What, for instance, were the facts of the French Revolution? There are indeed political, economic, social, and religious facts to be found in the archives and in a number of monuments. Yet the histories of the Revolution written by reliable historians such as Adolphe Thiers, Thomas Carlyle, Jules Michelet, François-Alphonse Aulard, or Georges Lefebvre contain a variety of interpretations of the events, although their authors were acquainted with much the same facts. Historians of the Romantic period had become keenly aware of the subjective element present in all historiography. No

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study of sources, however diligent, can reconstruct the events in their full complexity. All sources are filtered through different symbolic sieves. “What the historian does is to interpret symbolic findings in symbolic terms.”6 Because of their greater subjective awareness, several Romantic historians felt the need to redefine the historian’s task. Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of the University of Berlin, in a lecture given at the Prussian Academy in 1821, argued that the historian is forced to omit much of what he finds reported in his sources. Yet, in addition to subtracting, he must add an essential element that the reported events do not provide, namely, a form that holds the events together.7 The writing of history thereby resembles the composition of a work of art. In both cases the imagination transforms the given material. Unlike the artist, however, the historian deals with a preexisting reality. This limits his choice and forces him to search for the true nexus of events. Logic is indispensable for justifying the link between causes and effects. Yet the historian is writing about free human beings, whose actions are always unpredictable and often irrational. Nor does logic provide much assistance in assessing the significance of those events. After the historian has investigated all facts and circumstances, Humboldt claimed, his final judgment will depend on a comprehensive intuition of the subject matter. Humboldt therefore repeats Aristotle’s claim that history resembles poetry. Its interpretation can never be final, yet it possesses a truth of its own. The idea of narrative form assumed a major importance among Romantic historians. In 1828, Thomas Babington Macaulay published a long essay on history in the Edinburgh Review, a shorter version of which later appeared under the title “The Task of the Modern Historian.” It strongly confirms Humboldt’s thesis of the proximity of art and history. The historian formalizes what had already become a common feature of eighteenth-century English history, namely, that it had become a major part of literature, as shown in the works of Hume, Gibbon, and Robert Southey. According to Macaulay, the aesthetic qualities of the historical narrative are essential to the content. He complains of the dullness of much contemporary history: “While our historians are practicing all the arts of controversy, they miserably neglect the art of narration, the art of interesting the affections and presenting pictures to the imagination.”8

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The requirement of writing a readable and continuous narrative casts some doubt on the method of those who select only “great accomplishments” by famous politicians or generals. “What do we mean, when we say that one past event is important? No past event has any intrinsic importance. The knowledge of it is valuable only as it leads us to form just calculations with respect to the future.”9 This statement both stresses the role of the interpreter and, in a typically Romantic way, views history as pointing toward the future. Macaulay also draws attention to circumstances commonly bypassed by the historian of “important events,” such as changes in manners and morals, transitions from poverty to wealth, and the like, which in the past tended to be left to writers of historical fiction. The kind of attention he gave to the more “mundane” matters of everyday life has recently been revived by historians such as Fernand Braudel and the authors of the Annales d’Histoire. Unfortunately, they have not always heeded Macaulay’s first requirement, namely, to write a good narrative, as he did in his History of England. Romantic historians, with more urgency than their predecessors, raise the question whether there is a meaningful coherence in world history. Early historians assumed a world governed by a divine being. They expected history to vindicate the reasonableness and goodness of the Creator. In so doing, they allowed themselves to be guided by the example of biblical narratives rather than by empirical methods. Yet in the end they had to confront the question of the factual accuracy of biblical history. Should we read the Bible in the same way that we read modern historical documents? Sharon Turner, an early English Romantic historian, argued that because of scriptural “inerrancy,” biblical history should be placed on a par with secular history. Few of his colleagues followed this approach, so obviously at odds with the critical methods of the great eighteenth-century historians Hume, Voltaire, and Gibbon. They gave little credence to biblical narratives and admitted no direct divine intervention in the course of human events. Robert Southey, a younger contemporary of Turner, turned a far more critical eye to biblical history, yet still maintained a vaguely providential view. In his major History of Brazil, divine influence is limited to the fact that Providence allows good to triumph over evil through the actions of men endowed with a strong will power.10

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Th e H e r o i c I n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f H i s t o r y : C a r l y l e

In an essay he wrote in 1830, “On History,” Thomas Carlyle claims that history essentially expresses the “chaos of being.” He thereby implicitly rejects the interpretation that it is a manifestation of divine intentions, but also, even more decidedly, that it is the necessary result of the laws of nature. Carlyle was acquainted with at least some of Laplace’s physical theories, which he firmly refused to apply to the study of history. For him, the course of events remains unpredictable, even statistically. Statistical calculation can include only so many factors, and omitting even a single small one may invalidate the entire forecast.11 This, of course, raises the problem of what the historian is to do. Does chaos produce order over a sufficiently long period, as chaos theorists in physics claim? The question is beyond my competence. Yet the role Carlyle attributes to the historian is based on a somewhat similar thesis. The historian attempts to introduce some order into a chaos of passions, desires, and impulses, all of which are in conflict with one another. Against all odds, he sometimes succeeds. Yet chaos persists and is continually revived by humanity in revolutions, bad systems of government, and periodic declines of virtue. Carlyle’s own French Revolution (1837) illustrates both the turn to chaos and the return to order. Carlyle and Jules Michelet both wrote Romantic histories of the French Revolution. For both, the events surpassed the meanings and intentions of those who were actively involved in it. Michelet called the events “supernatural,” Carlyle “transcendent.” Michelet’s history consists of a narrative that, piling events upon events, portrays the Revolution like a raging river that irresistibly moves to the end of its course, destroying everything in its path. Carlyle’s history is a lengthy reflection on the five decisive years that changed the course of modern history, presented through the subjective impressions of its witnesses. Facts are not so much explained as presupposed, meditated upon, and viewed within the larger context of a world-historical struggle between transcendent powers of good and evil. For Carlyle, the historian must be a prophet capable of interpreting the future consequences of the past. “History,” he wrote in his essay “On History,” “is the prophetic manifest of man’s spiritual nature.” If the course of events is always chaotic, the disorder of

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the Revolution was infinitely more so. It began with twelve hundred men, representing different classes with opposite interests, who naïvely thought that their mission consisted in building society on a new foundation. Thus they deliberately tore down much of what had taken centuries to construct. How could they hope to replace it by a durable structure in only a few months? In Carlyle’s somber opinion, they produced “a violent rebellion and victory of disimprisoned anarchy against corrupt, worn-out authority,” and in the end, “rages incontrollable, immeasurable, enveloping a world.”12 This jaundiced view of the Revolution was not to remain Carlyle’s final one. Anyone who reflects on past events, Carlyle points out, views them differently than the direct witnesses or participants. From the revolutionaries’ perspective, the past stood for what they rejected and the future for what they intended to create. Yet what for the revolutionaries was still a project to be realized has become, for the historian, a memory. The historian views the events of a particular period as linked to all previous ones within the larger frame of a universal history, in which all events begin and come to an end. At the outset of his The French Revolution, Carlyle describes the perspective from which he wrote his work: “All dies and is for a time only; is a time-phantasm yet reckons itself real! The Merovingian Kings, slowly wending on their bullock carts through the streets of Paris, with their long hair flowing, have all wended slowly on,—into Eternity” (1:7). This view sub specie aeternitatis reduces the significance of any single event. It places all of them, even the horrible and immoral ones, in a softer light. “It was appointed in the decree of Providence that this same victorious anarchy, Jacobinism, Sansculottism, or whatever else mortals name it, should have its turn” (1:212). The Calvinist idea of a Deity leading all events to their divine destination is deeply ingrained in Carlyle’s thought. All comes from God and returns to God, even the criminal schemes inspired by fanatic and vengeful minds. If that had been his entire view of history, he would not have surpassed Turner’s theory of predestination. For Carlyle, however, history is entirely the result of human actions. Humans commit them, bear responsibility for them, and will have to suffer their consequences. Only later may we recognize, according to Carlyle, that a divine Providence turns the results of human error and vice into a meaningful pattern.

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The political and social situation of France at the end of the eighteenth century had made drastic changes inevitable. The financial burden of the kingdom rested entirely on common citizens, who possessed no political rights. Aristocracy and clergy paid no taxes. The treasury was empty and Paris on the brink of famine. Since the higher clergy and most of the aristocracy were unwilling to give up their privileges, and since the people had lost trust in their moral teachers, any attempt to change society could be expected to be violent. Carlyle considered it his task to make it credible that order could emerge from this chaotic situation. He may have learned much from his favorite novelists, Jean Paul and Laurence Sterne, both masters in the art of creating total confusion, yet always clearing it up: as Carlyle wrote elsewhere, “We see confusion more and more unfold itself into order, until at last, viewed from its proper center, this intellectual universe, no longer a distorted, incoherent series of air-landscapes, coalesces into a compact expansion.”13 Carlyle’s impressionist style envelops the events in such a dense cloud of rhetoric, however, that the reader continues to doubt whether, in the end, the chaos has really vanished. Before reading Carlyle’s History, one does well first to consult a straightforward history of the Revolution in order to know to what events the Romantic historian cryptically alludes without ever naming or describing them. How are we still able to understand the course of history, in Carlyle’s predestinationist universe? In his lectures collected in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), he attempts to answer that question. History for Carlyle, unlike for Macaulay and Michelet, is created by heroic individuals. In his French Revolution, he introduces figures who turn the course of events, often through a single, unreflective action. One such act had been that of deputy Tallien, who, at the height of the Terreur, stood up in the National Assembly and challenged Robespierre’s proposals. Others joined him, and on the next day, the tyrant was arrested and executed. Even Charlotte Corday, who freed Paris from Marat while knowing that she would be executed for killing him, did not comprehend the enormous consequences of her deed. The only French revolutionary who came close to knowing the results of his policy and therefore would have deserved the title of being a historical hero, in Carlyle’s eyes, was Mirabeau. Yet he, after a dissolute life, died a premature death just when he was most needed.

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Who, then, are the real heroes of history? Only in the fifth of his six lectures did Carlyle identify them: “The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine, and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, under the temporary, trivial.”14 Heroes may appear in all classes and professions. Heroism changes from one place to another and from one generation to the next. The earliest heroes acted in the strong belief that they were god-inspired and thus came to be venerated as gods themselves. Carlyle’s example is Odin, the mythical hero of the Icelandic Edda; he was originally an actual man of great strength and courage, who came to be worshipped as a god. Carlyle’s “deification” of Odin may be no more than an outdated interpretation of an ancient myth. Nevertheless, ancient heroes often did become objects of religious worship. Later religious heroes were no longer identified with gods, but they still acted as inspired prophets. The prophet Mohammed, Carlyle’s example here, converted the Arab nations to monotheism. After his religious awakening he constantly lived in the presence of God. Carlyle, in fact, felt a particular affinity with this prophetic hero, because he considered his own historical task a prophetic one. At a later age, Carlyle argues, poets assumed the part of prophets. The examples of Dante and Shakespeare show that heroes need not be perfect. “Dante does not come before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow and even sectarian mind” (CW, 1:320). Yet in his imperfections, Dante represented the time to which he belonged. His poetry concludes ten centuries of Christian culture (CW, 1:326). As heroes of the Reformation, Carlyle mentions Martin Luther and John Knox. The former profoundly influenced the religious mentality of his epoch by his insight and courage. But can the same be said of John Knox, a sincere yet intolerant individual, who converted part of Scotland to a rigid form of Calvinism? Serious questions also surround Carlyle’s fifth lecture, “The Hero as Man of Letters: Johnson, Rousseau, Burns.” The author’s praise of the man of letters appears to have originated in his reading of Fichte’s lectures entitled Über das Wesen des Gelehrten (On the Nature of the Learned). The German respect for academics (the Gelehrten) found in Fichte, however, merely reflects the situation in one country at a time when the “professor” stood at the pinnacle of his reputation. Carlyle has no good word to say about Rousseau in this lecture, but he still includes him in his gallery of heroes because his theories, although important

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(and, in Carlyle’s judgment, wrong), were not accepted during his lifetime. In contrast to Rousseau, Robert Burns receives an undeserved embrace as being “the most gifted British soul we had in all that century of his” (CW, 1:411). Nationalist pride intervenes even more strongly in the final lecture, “The Hero as King,” where Cromwell appears as the ideal leader sanctioned by divine virtue. Carlyle’s Cromwell illustrates the important part that hero-worship plays in Carlyle’s idea of a hero. What matters in Carlyle’s work On Heroes, however, is less his choice of heroes than his general thesis that a few exceptional individuals are responsible for the profound changes through which humanity has made spiritual progress. That thesis found many followers, even among German historians. But it soon yielded its place to the idea, formulated by Michelet, that people as a whole make history, not the individuals who inspire them.

History Becomes a Science: Ra n k e , M i c h e l e t, G u i z o t

Carlyle knew the work of the great German historian Leopold von Ranke, and in his own History of Frederick II he refers to the author of the six-volume Preussische Geschichte (1847– 49) with the sobriquet “dry as dust.” Lord Acton later expressed a similar view in more civil terms when he criticized Ranke’s History of England for its want of color and, in places, “an elaborate dullness.”15 Still, critics as much as admirers regarded Ranke as the titanic founder of the science of history. In spite of Carlyle’s unflattering reference to him, Ranke had much in common with his unbuttoned British critic. Both firmly believed in the primary historical significance of great men and women. They also agreed that the course of history had a transcendent destination, wherein each nation had a unique task to fulfill. Thus, according to Ranke, Prussia, and through Prussia, all of Germany, was destined to play a leading role in the political and cultural future of Europe. Ranke’s sources included myths, folktales, and even popular songs (as in the later edition of his 1828 work on the Serbian revolution). He viewed each age and each nation in its complex totality, with all its ideologies, superstitions, and prejudices.

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The historian’s task, according to Ranke, consists not in speculating, judging, or philosophizing, but in investigating wie es eigentlich gewesen (what really happened). It requires effort to unearth facts buried in manuscripts that lie forgotten in obscure libraries, yet even more to place events within the context of the doctrines, policies, and cultural climate of their time. Furthermore, the historian must grasp the complexity of events within a single intuitive synthesis. The ability to do so is the fruit of years of studying a subject and of imagining it in its cultural context, without the interference of personal feelings and preferences. In this latter respect, Ranke differed entirely from the French historian Michelet, who described the French Revolution as an event in which he remained emotionally involved. Ranke remained wary of sweeping historical generalizations. Not until his eighty-fifth year did he feel ready to begin work on a nine-volume Weltgeschichte (World History). He concluded six volumes and left sufficient notes to his students for publishing a seventh, posthumous one. Through his enormous production, but even more through his intellectual acumen and methodical discipline, Ranke towered above the historians of his time. He changed the field of history from a digest of earlier studies into a science based on original sources. What allows us to include this critical scholar among the Romantics? I mentioned above that for Ranke, as for Carlyle, history is made through the actions of great men. More important, he stresses the importance and all-inclusiveness of historical movements. “The movement follows its own course, drawing along even those who appear to lead it.” In the preface to his Geschichte Wallensteins he writes: “How much more powerful, profound, and comprehensive is the universal life that in uninterrupted movement fills the centuries, than the personal life, to which only a span of time is granted to begin—never to complete.” Yet the impact of time and environmental conditions never turned Ranke into a historical determinist. For him, men make history, even though they occupy only a moment in a movement that surpasses them. “Great men do not create their time, but neither are they created by it.”16 They intervene in battles among ideas and among cosmic powers for which they are not responsible, and yet they succeed in directing them. They summon and are summoned. The idea of the lone

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hero struggling against overwhelming powers is, of course, a typically Romantic feature, which evokes terrifying specters of future German history. Ranke’s prosaic style in fact does not weaken the Romantic quality of his work. His new concept of historiography required a more sober manner of expression than, for instance, that of Carlyle. His style became less lively as he grew older and as he more self-consciously stressed the scientific nature of historiography. Yet despite Carlyle’s and Acton’s critiques, it was neither dull nor lacking in a rhetoric appropriate to his subject.17 Ranke still considered himself part of a generation for which history was a branch of literature, even though the quality of his work was one of the reasons that history after him came to be classified as a science. Indeed, even his later writings continue to attract the general reader by their sharply drawn portrayals and character studies. His final Weltgeschichte is as fresh as the early works and more appealing to the modern reader because of the lifetime of human wisdom it contains. Unfortunately, Ranke’s habit of isolating the subject on which he was concentrating often led him to abstain from moral and cultural considerations. He even avoids making comparisons that many readers would think vital to the subject. This literary asceticism was, as Lord Acton observed, due more to a typical reformer’s zeal than to scientific necessity. It may have limited the range of the historian’s reach, but not the surpassing qualities of his work. Jules Michelet (1798–1874), France’s most famous historian, is best remembered for his Histoire de France (1833– 67) and Histoire de la Révolution Française (1847– 53). Like Schiller and, to a lesser extent, Ranke, he was both a universalist and a nationalist. In his early years he had started writing a Histoire Universelle (1831– 33), but he did not continue it beyond the classical Roman period. Here, I shall consider only his famous History of the French Revolution, in which, with rhetorical power and apocalyptic emotion, Michelet describes what he regards as the birth of the contemporary world. A reader of this lively narrative might easily forget that its author witnessed none of the events he so vividly describes, nor did he meet any of the men and women he so intimately appears to know. His goal, he claims, was to “resurrect the past.” Comparing Michelet with Ranke is nearly impossible. With the former, all is

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passion and involvement; with the latter, all is distance and objectivity. Michelet, like most French historians before 1848, was politically concerned about preserving the gains of the Revolution. In contrast to doctrinaire historians like Thierry and Guizot, Michelet was a radical, who attempted to reanimate the populist movements of the Revolution in the post-revolutionary period. Freedom, the term that runs through the multiple volumes, had received a primarily political meaning from the French philosophes. It defined the program that the Revolution attempted to realize: “Let us make man, let him be through freedom” (“Faisons l’homme, qu’il soit par la liberté”).18 Yet if the ideas of the Revolution were derived from Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, the furor with which the Revolution converted them into action was entirely Romantic. Michelet wanted to preserve not only the ideas but the passion as well. Like the revolutionaries, he transformed the universal theories of the philosophes into national imperatives. On France, he believed, had fallen the exclusive task of formulating and, through its Revolution, implementing the principles of freedom that the philosophes had conceived. In the second edition of his work (1868), he even declares: “It is the entire life of France, which had prepared this drama and which alone enables us to understand its finale. That life became luminous in the eighteenth century. Far from being chaotic, it ordered everything and wrote our modern creed, which the Revolution began to apply.” The historian sharply inveighs against the Catholic Church and its clergy, to him the main sources of resistance against what he considers the realization of political freedom. Nonetheless, he presents the events of the Revolution as driven by a “supernatural” power that, despite opposition and crimes, irresistibly furthered the political emancipation of the human race. The Revolution, then, was a religion in its own right. “[It] adopts no Church. Why? Because it is itself a Church.” Despite its radical break with the Catholic Church, the Revolution implemented “the principles of Jesus’ Gospel,” the brotherhood of all humans. Over the centuries the Church, in contrast to Christ’s preaching of the equality of its members, had developed into a religion of privilege (grace). Indeed, her very existence rested on privilege: the believer can only hope for grace, which reaches him exclusively through the gift of faith. Salvation thereby depends on conditions that remain entirely beyond the

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individual’s power: it is controlled by a few select men, bishops and priests. By the end of the eighteenth century, Michelet claims, the Church had drifted so far away from the original Christian ideal that a conflict with human freedom had become inevitable. When the Revolution attempted to liberate humanity from slavish superstition, it immediately ran into stiff opposition. “The privileged, nobles and priests, preferred to perish: so long had they identified themselves with inequity and intolerance. Rather die a hundred times than to give up injustice!” (Histoire, 1:342). The bishops suddenly remembered religion only after the people touched their possessions (2:20). The desire to restore dignity to religion became the Revolution’s principal reason for revolting against the clergy. Such were the articles of Michelet’s political creed. Still, he objected to those who attacked the Church without offering a substitute for satisfying the people’s “hunger for God.” The Revolution had closed churches but failed to build temples. He praises Robespierre for returning the churches to Catholic worship and for guaranteeing a salary for the lower clergy. Even after discounting Michelet’s overblown rhetoric, the fact remains that never in modern history had a more radical break with the past occurred than the French Revolution. It aimed not at establishing a new government but at creating a new person. Following Rousseau’s precept, the revolutionary society forced its members to be free. To be sure, few of the men who started the Revolution had such radical reforms in mind. They merely demanded that the third estate (the class of lawyers, professionals, and major manufacturers) attain the same degree of power as the combined classes of nobility and clergy. In addition, they wanted to end the arbitrary lettres de cachet, by which a person would disappear into prison for years without even a hearing. Few members of the original Constituante intended to build a society based on Rousseau’s radical principles. Yet those were the only principles that Robespierre accepted for his project of a new civil society. He gradually succeeded in imposing them, originally by persuasion, later by violence. Michelet rightly argues that the political reasons for the Revolution received their actual power, especially in large cities such as Paris, Bordeaux, and Marseilles, from the lower classes, who were revolting against poverty. In the countryside, endless taxes, corvées, and tolls imposed by

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local princes and landlords had deprived rural workers of the fruits of their labor. Long bread lines continued through the years of the Revolution. Hunger drove hundreds of poorly-clothed Parisian women in a cold rain to Versailles to force the king to return to Paris. The violence that began in August 1792 was caused by members of the extreme left party of the Cordeliers and later taken over by the Jacobins. In the end, the Jacobins, together with the most radical members of the Paris Commune, turned what had begun as a peaceful movement into a carnage. In his history, Michelet emphasizes the significance of the political clubs in Paris, many of which met in the monasteries of various religious orders, of which they adopted the names. The Jacobin party consisted mainly of lawyers and was obsessed both by legality of procedure and by orthodoxy of principles. Although in the beginning a minority party, it increasingly influenced politics by its pressure tactics until it became the real power of the Revolution. Its leader, Robespierre, a former judge appointed by the bishop of Arras, had resigned his position after he had to sentence a man to death in the Episcopal Court. Shy, conservatively dressed, and formal in manner and speech, he became known to the Assembly as l’incorruptible. He advocated peace with other nations and attempted to restore full religious freedom at home. Catholics considered him their protector after he returned the churches to the cult. In fact, Robespierre was a cold inquisitor, determined to follow Rousseau’s rule to the letter. He condemned any republican who disagreed with his policy for betraying the Revolution. In the end, this punctilious legalist and intransigent moralist proposed that the state should no longer be constrained by the Constitution, but should transfer its authority to the “people.” He thus became co-responsible for unchaining the violent Paris Commune. Two men stood in Robespierre’s way: Marat and Danton. The former, a demagogue of the worst kind, preached murder and violence as a political method. An arrogant, poorly educated man of neglected appearance, he seldom left the basement of the Cordeliers monastery, where he edited his slanderous daily L’ami du peuple. Robespierre’s other antagonist, a more humane Cordelier but a true believer in the Revolution, was Danton. Danton’s crime consisted mostly

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in neglecting to take appropriate action. As minister of justice, he had failed to halt the murder of the prisoners of Paris. Though he abhorred violence, at the end he ceased to oppose Robespierre’s policies, and settled down outside the turbulent city. It did not save him from execution by Robespierre’s henchmen during the final months of the Terreur. Having slaughtered all other leaders of the Revolution, Robespierre became the lone surviver. Yet people at last had become tired of the constant killing even of women and children. He suddenly lost the support of the Assembly, and on the ninth of the month Thermidor (July 25) of 1794 he was arrested and sentenced to be executed. Michelet’s work on the French Revolution is a highly subjective and partial text. At any time he stands ready to express his admiration, contempt, agreement, or disapproval. The degree to which his approach differs from Ranke’s is evident in his presentation of its leaders. He describes Marat as “this yellow thing dressed in green with protruding grey-yellow eyes. From what marsh has this creature emerged?” Danton in his colorful prose becomes “a half person, half bull, heavily pockmarked, with eyes almost invisible in the deep apertures of his face . . . a painfully laborious extraction from a dark, impure and violent creation, as if nature had still been undecided whether to make humans or monsters.” Robespierre appears as “the slimy, green one” who, with a sad face, sermonizes the members of the Assembly. The report of his execution is one of the most dramatic passages in a book that contains many such passages. Despite his ideological bias, Michelet remains an impressive historian. For years he studied his subject in the National Archives and reflected on the intricate dynamics of the process. He interpreted the Revolution as a coherent series of events: from the return of the king to Paris to his escape to Varennes; from the first bloody crime in the Avignon castle in 1791 to the three-day murdering binge of the Paris prisoners in 1792; from the drowning of hundreds of women and children in the Loire near Nantes in 1793 to the orgy of self-destruction in the Terreur of 1794. Michelet presents these events for what they were— a chain of horrors—yet he believes that they were a historical necessity, which divine Providence would turn into an unprecedented good for his country and the world. Many admired him, but none, even in France, imitated his subjectivist approach to history.

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In comparing Michelet’s work to François Guizot’s Histoire de la civilization en Europe et en France (1828),19 one seems to move from a battlefield to a mountaintop. Guizot (1787–1874), an older contemporary and former mentor of Michelet, delivered the lectures on which this book was based at the Sorbonne. Goethe, as well as Hegel, Sainte-Beuve, and John Stuart Mill, considered him the greatest French historian of the nineteenth century. Michelet interpreted the past through the present; Guizot understood the present through the past. The purpose of his lectures, as of his entire policy as a French statesman, was to reconcile the French still bitterly divided in their views on the Revolution, and to show the importance of reestablishing normal relations with the European nations alienated by Napoleon’s wars. Most French, in various degrees, held a generally positive view of the results of the Revolution, although many wanted to restore the institutions of the past. Guizot advocated the kind of constitutional monarchy that Louis XVIII had promised on his return from exile but never delivered. The cause of reconciliation would best be served, the historian thought, by reacquainting his contemporaries with their national past, not only with the periods of peace but also with those of war and civil discord. Knowledge of the latter, especially, would help them to accept the excesses of the Revolution as having had historical precedents. Guizot was also the first French historian to predict that the political oppositions of recent memory would eventually lead to a class struggle. The revolution of 1848 confirmed his prediction. The year 1789 had failed to satisfy the aspirations of petty bourgeois and workers, all of whom had expected social reforms. In 1848 the explosion of popular discontent at last revealed the severe class oppositions that had remained latent in 1789 and 1830. In 1821– 22, Guizot had begun an exploration of France’s place within European civilization. However, his lectures had been suspended by the conservative government because of his alleged liberalism. When he was allowed to return to the Sorbonne, he, like Novalis and Schlegel, defended the idea of Europe as a cultural unity, grown out of a common past. The idea of Europe, he held, had slowly coalesced during the feudal period (between the fifth and the twelfth centuries) around remaining Roman institutions and the Church. During this long passage of time, life gradually withdrew from the cities and moved to isolated rural areas, where the idea of a Roman oecumene gradually vanished. Guizot

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attributes the decline of the Roman empire to the municipal model on which Roman civil society had been patterned. This model, he argued, suitable for a people living within city walls, had been favorable for conquering but not for organizing the conquered territories. Rome had attempted to remedy this defect by building roads between the city and its distant provincial centers. This, however, had not sufficed for halting the barbarian invasions. After imperial institutions collapsed, Christianity, which in the West had developed from a mere faith to a legally structured institution, was forced to assume the administrative functions required by a civil society. If Christianity had remained a mere faith, the West would have been buried under the Islamic invasions, as had North Africa and the Near East. Guizot concludes: “The Christian Church saved Christianity.”20 Yet the theocratic principle that guided this ecclesiastical administration sharply separated the governing clergy from the governed laity. The invading Germanic tribes, accustomed to subjecting themselves as vassals or yeomen to a feudal lord, had initially accepted this hierarchical order of society in accordance with their law of fealty. Later it was to cause severe social tensions. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Guizot argued, a new power emerged that changed European civilization. The communes, over which neither feudal lords nor clerical hierarchy exercised direct control, consisted of various groups of people who gathered in towns for the sake of manufacturing or trading. In these towns, all citizens possessed equal basic rights, which they protected through city charters or peace treaties. In northern Europe, however, no class ever succeeded in subduing all the others to the point that social immobility would follow. Classes remained relatively independent of each other until the eighteenth century. Kings, meanwhile, had been gaining authority. Their rise had begun during the Crusades, when local lords accepted their subordination to an overlord who commanded the military troops. The authority of the local aristocracy thereby diminished, while that of the commoners grew. Moreover, the Crusaders greatly enlarged the cultural horizon of Western peoples. For the first time, Europeans were confronted with civilizations, even Christian ones (principally Byzantium), that surpassed their own. They had begun by robbing and destroying them, as they did in the Fourth Crusade. Later they came to learn from the East and

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thereby to recognize their own distinct identity. The idea of Europe as a cultural unity was thus born, according to Guizot, in the contact with non-European nations. Romantic history brought the birth of a European consciousness into full focus. Guizot, more than any other historian of the time, shed light on its foundation. Most of the historians mentioned in this chapter—Burke, Carlyle, Michelet, Guizot—wrote about the French Revolution. It was the defining event of the period, and the Romantics were right in regarding it as the beginning of a new era. Even today, more than two hundred years later, discussions about its meaning and impact continue. The passage from a justified demand for long overdue political rights to a reign of chaos and crime occurred too abruptly to be explained by a simple interpretation. Everything appeared to happen contrary to reason. Thomas Carlyle in his Romantic French Revolution rightly viewed the events as a tragic-comic mixture of the absurd and the sublime, of human lowliness and of a divine order emerging from chaos.

Th e H i s t o r i c a l N o v e l : S c o t t a n d v o n A r n i m

The essential difference between historical and nonhistorical novels is not that in the former the events occur in the past, and in the latter in the present. Most novels present their story as having occurred in the past. Yet only when the characters’ actions and sufferings are causally linked to a specific historical situation are they called historical in the proper sense of the term. Georg Lukács in his study The Historical Novel considered many of Balzac’s novels historical.21 Even if the events they describe occurred during the author’s lifetime, they were intrinsically linked to a specifically social condition of France during the Restoration and the July monarchy. I follow Lukács’s definition of the novel, yet not his equation of Romanticism with “subjectivism,” which excludes Walter Scott’s novels. Lukács, possibly influenced by Hegel’s antipathy for the Romantic School (as distinct from the Romantic Period, which in Hegel’s view covers the entire Christian era), regards Scott as a writer in the classical tradition. Scott (1771–1831), however, writes within a Romantic conception of history, in which the past is carefully investigated and the plot is shaped

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by historical events. In addition, he makes a serious effort to imagine past events through the eyes of their contemporaries.22 Scott’s interests embraced large parts of Scottish and English history. The Waverley novels are placed in the eighteenth century, during the Jacobite rebellions; The Abbot and The Monastery in the seventeenth, during the reign of Mary Stuart; others even earlier. The historical novel binds the imagination by stricter rules than any other literary fiction. Nonetheless, Scott remains entirely a novelist. His principal models were novelists: Defoe (whose works he had edited), Sterne, Fielding, and Cooper. He started writing novels only after he found that his poetry did not sell as well as he had hoped. In 1814 he published Waverley anonymously to avoid risking his reputation as a poet (and as a lawyer), in case the book failed to become a popular success. Despite sales that surpassed those of any English writer before him, Scott in 1826 went bankrupt along with the Ballantyne Publishing Company, in which he had become a full partner. Like Balzac, he was forced to write for the remainder of his life to reimburse his creditors. Carlyle severely criticized him for “manufacturing” novels instead of “creating” them. It is true that in the prefaces and introductions of his novels, especially in his “General Preface to the Waverley Novels” (in the 1829 edition of Waverley), Scott appears to take the position of a pragmatist, who is more concerned about satisfying the popular taste than about accurate historical reporting. Practically all later authors of historical novels regarded Scott as a model either to follow or to avoid, and many ended up doing both. He possessed a typically Romantic talent for evoking the “mood” of the periods he described, the hopes and disappointments of the characters, and their grandeur and limitations. “The time-conditioned places in which Scott sees his characters already constitute half their character and generally it is the more interesting half.”23 To him, atmosphere is more important than plot. One or two sentences suffice for describing the mood of a story. A well-known passage about the burial of Lord Ravenswood in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) is a good example: “It was a November morning, and the cliffs which overlooked the ocean were hung with thick and heavy mist, when the portals of the ancient and half ruinous tower, in which Lord Ravenswood had spent the last and troubled years

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of his life, opened, that his mortal remains might pass forward for an abode yet more dreary and lonely.” The wildness of some of the scenes he describes corresponds to what Kant and the Romantics called a sublime situation, one that gives the reader the thrill of contemplating a dangerous scene from a safe distance. It is mainly through the author’s uncommon dramatic talent that Scott’s novels have survived in print and popularity for nearly two centuries. In most of them, he portrays two opposing parties in some historical conflict. In Waverley, it is the British government against the Jacobite rebels; in Redgauntlet, those who continued to foster delusions of reviving the past against the political realists; in Rob Roy, the Scottish Highlands against the Lowlands. The author prepares the reader for a long struggle. Slowly, the conflicts culminate in one major confrontation. Virginia Woolf, who was well aware of Scott’s weaknesses, nevertheless admired his talent for bringing a story to its conclusion. “The crisis, that is the point where the accent falls and shapes the book under it, is right. Slouching, careless as he is, he will at the critical moment pull himself together and strike the one stroke needed, the stroke which gives the book its vividness in memory.”24 The three novels that deal with the Jacobite rebellion confirm her judgment. In Waverley (1814), the first truly historical novel of the Romantic period, the entire plot directly relates to the invasion of Scotland by Prince Charles Edward, the grandson of the deposed King James II. Waverley, a young Englishman who has postponed making plans for his future, enlists in the British-Hanoverian army. On a furlough during his military service in Scotland, he pays a visit to his father’s friend, Baron Bradwardine, and decides to extend his furlough. A case of cattle theft, for which the victims have requested Bradwardine’s legal assistance, allows Waverley to visit the Highlands, to him a completely foreign world. Here, he becomes acquainted with the fervently Jacobite head of a local tribe of Highlanders. Waverley joins him in the rebellion against the Hanover dynasty, and the Jacobites score a modest victory. Yet after the defeat at Culloden in 1746, the Pretender’s cause appears hopelessly lost. The British army seeks Waverley as a deserter and a suspected traitor; he is captured and taken to the Lowlands. Liberated by a Highland cattle thief, he then succeeds in clearing his name, marries Bradwardine’s

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daughter, and becomes master of his estate. The plot itself is weak and implausible. Scott later claimed that he gave it a certain ressemblance by inserting it within a historically documented account of the war that was supported by reports of witnesses on both sides. However, the strength of this novel and the following Waverley novels lies in their powerful evocation of the rough Highlands life and in the well-drawn main character. One reason why the novel Waverley has some historical significance is that Scott’s description of the events in which Waverley plays an active part make the reader understand why the conflicting claims of the House of Hanover and that of Stuart to the sovereignty of Scotland were coming to an end. “What principally changes is that Waverley comes to recognize that an irreversible change has occurred.”25 The success of Waverley encouraged Scott to write about other episodes of the Scottish rebellion. Red Gauntlet (1824) takes place some twenty years after the Culloden defeat. Young Darsie Latimer, living an easy but restricted life in the Lowlands, is suddenly kidnapped by Highlanders at the order of a Northern chief, Redgauntlet, who once had saved him from drowning. They need Darsie for supporting yet another uprising that they are preparing against the Hanover dynasty. Darsie’s friend attempts to liberate him, and someone directs him to a monastery, where he meets a mysterious priest who claims to be in touch with Redgauntlet. Meanwhile Darsie had managed to escape but is recaptured and taken to an inn, where the final arrangements for the coming rebellion are to be discussed. By an implausible coincidence, his friend is staying at the same inn and, to his astonishment, recognizes the priest accompanied by a woman among the conspirators. Both Darsie and his friend now learn that this priest is “the Pretender,” Prince Charles, with his mistress. The Highlanders, however, profoundly distrust her loyalty. In the midst of the discouraged meeting, a general of King George’s army suddenly enters the inn, forces the conspirators to disband, and orders Redgauntlet to lead Prince Charles to a boat that is waiting to return the Pretender to France. The novel, which is inferior to Scott’s earlier story, reports the final sputtering of a once great struggle for independence. Two weak characters, Darsie and his friend, who are linked only through the letters they write each other, oppose Redgauntlet, who alone dominates the plot. The novel fails to portray the dramatic conflict between two strong personalities that is characteristic of Scott’s

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best stories. The opposition in this case is mainly one between illusion and reality. Rob Roy (1818), the most popular of the Waverley novels, builds on an incident that occurred during the earliest and unsuccessful uprising of 1715. The author is exceptionally slow in introducing the subject of his story. After two hundred pages in which he describes the wanderings of its anti-hero, Frank Osbaldistone, Frank witnesses the defeat of an English company by a Scottish outlaw, Rob Roy MacGregor. The story differs from most of Scott’s other novels in that a lowly person—Rob Roy—here plays a historical role. Yet the plot of the novel rests entirely on external causes rather than on an internal necessity, and has lost much of its interest to our contemporaries. For that reason, Lukács considers it closer to the classical epic than to the modern novel: in the preestablished world order of the epic, events simply occur without receiving or requiring an ulterior justification. Indeed, only in an epic are stolen assets restored without explanation, or is a captured enemy released without ransom or motive, as occurs in Rob Roy. In The Heart of Midlothian (1830), Scott shows the amazing versatility of his talent. His tale is based on an actual event that occurred in the 1820s. A young woman raised in the Cameronian sect of strict Calvinism had refused to tell a lie that would have saved her sister from capital punishment. Instead she walked the entire way from Edinburgh to London to obtain the king’s pardon. Scott heard the story from an elderly woman who had known the young heroine. The heroine’s sister is sentenced to die because she had borne a child out of wedlock without notifying the authorities of its birth. Since the child had disappeared, the legal presumption at the time was that the mother had murdered it. Her sister Jeannie could have saved her by declaring, falsely, that her sister had informed her of the child’s birth. She refuses to lie but attempts to obtain grace for her sister through the intermediacy of Queen Caroline. In Scott’s story the emphasis falls entirely on the moral drama, rather than on the historical circumstances that caused it. It therefore is not a historical novel in the strict sense. But Scott proved all the more his power as a dramatist. Scott’s Romantic novels made a profound impression when they first appeared. Even Goethe, in his Conversations with Eckermann, declared that Scott’s novels showed what was possible “when the rich

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heritage of English history falls to the lot of a capable poet.” Later Goethe passed a more reserved judgment. After having read two novels by Scott, he wrote, he understood what the author was about and concluded that he could learn nothing more from him. Victor Hugo also admired Scott’s novels and imitated them in his historical dramas. Even Balzac admitted, with a touch of envy, that he owed much to the British novelist. In his Les illusions perdues he presents a young man who is anxious to become rich and thinks that the shortest way to achieve this goal is to write “a novel in the style of Scott.” The young Alessandro Manzoni told the elderly Scott, during a meeting in Milan, that he had inspired him to write his own masterpiece, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed). To this Scott gallantly responded: “If that is so, The Betrothed is my best work.” What was it that even great writers admired in Scott’s novels, despite their glaring imperfections? More than anything, I believe, it was the sweep of a powerful imagination that revived the dark history of a people that, in the midst of modern Europe, had preserved its ancient tribal traditions. France and Germany also produced Romantic historical novels, but none that possessed Walter Scott’s innovative power. Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Alfred de Vigny’s Cinq-Mars, and Balzac’s Les Chouans remain well known. Their authors have appeared earlier in these pages, and their works need no further mention. Two German Romantic novels that deserve attention, however, are Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Achim von Arnim’s Die Kronenwächter. Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810) is a novella based on events that occurred in Saxony in the sixteenth century. The subject, an ordinary man who sacrifices his life for the principle of equal justice, is a highly Romantic hero in the tradition of Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen and Karl Moor, the hero of Schiller’s Die Räuber. Yet the taut, objective style of this novella, written for the most part in indirect discourse, is more typical of classical literature and, later, of the realistic novel than of the Romantic one. It begins inauspiciously. Kohlhaas, a Brandenburg horse trader driving two splendid animals to Saxonia, is unexpectedly stopped by a local Junker (a landowner) for not having a transit pass to the adjacent principality. The Junker forces the trader to travel to Dresden, the capital of Saxony, to acquire a pass (which was not needed) and to leave his precious horses with the him. Upon the trader’s return, he finds that

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they have been abused by heavy work in the fields. Receiving no satisfaction for this injustice in court, Kohlhaas sets the man’s place on fire. Next he attempts to incinerate the cities where the Junker has taken refuge from Kohlhaas’s revenge. Finally, Kohlhaas visits Martin Luther to obtain forgiveness and advice on his next move. He surrenders to the Duke of Saxony, who promises him amnesty in view of the injustice done to him. The emperor, however, sentences him to death for the enormous damage he has caused throughout the empire. While being readied for the execution, Kohlhaas notices the duke standing among the witnesses and suddenly remembers a little paper, once given to him by a witch, that predicts the future of the House of Saxony and that ever since the duke has vainly tried to obtain from him. He swallows it and dies. A remarkable feature of this novella, on which Kleist worked for years, is the absence of authorial interventions to condemn or to justify: the author disappears behind the story. The action moves with inexorable necessity toward its tragic ending. Justice and wrath, once they have entered Kohlhaas’s soul, suffer no delay in rushing toward their horrible revenge. Despite its classical form, a strange atmosphere surrounds this story, in which a common injustice grows into a personal and national calamity. The strength of the novella lies in its historical authenticity, not only in describing sixteenth-century social conditions in Germany but also in portraying the mentality that made such a tragedy possible. Quite different and more centered in the German Romantic tradition is Achim von Arnim’s historical novel Die Kronenwächter (The Guardians of the Crown) (1817), which builds on the medieval legend that the House of Hohenstaufen would return after the execution of its last emperor, Konradin, in Naples in 1268. The work, originally planned in four volumes, was later reduced to two, of which only the first appeared during the author’s lifetime (1781– 1831). Both parts of the novel were basically written in 1812, but the second volume was posthumously published after being completed by his gifted wife Bettina. Arnim had intended it to be the great historical novel of German Romanticism. In its truncated form, the novel did not quite live up to those expectations, and the author’s continued delay in preparing the second part for publication suggests that he may have abandoned it. The work combines history with fantasy, legend with poetry. The story takes place during the Protestant Reformation (Luther appears in

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it), when the Emperor Maximilian had switched his allegiance from the Hohenstaufen’s imperial policy to the papal party. It begins in an old hunting tower in Waiblingen (hence the name Ghibelline) near Augsburg in Swabia, where Barbarossa, the last great Hohenstaufen emperor, had built his castle. Unexpectedly, the three inhabitants of the tower receive a casket from an unknown sender. It contains a child together with five gold guilders stamped with the mark of Konradin, the last Hohenstaufen emperor and duke of Swabia. The “Guardians of the Crown” have selected this child of unknown origin to restore the dynasty. After a few years, the child, christened Berthold, discovers the ruins of the Palace of Barbarossa in a deserted part of the town. Among the ruins he finds a treasure of gold. At one point Berthold, who is sickly by nature, is urged to undergo a blood transfusion. It is administered by one Dr. Faust, a devilish magician. Anton, the donor of the blood, is a young painter of extraordinary physical power. The treasure has made Berthold wealthy and respected among his fellow citizens. He marries and receives an invitation to visit the ancestral castle of Hohenstock, where the Guardians reside. The castle turns out to be an eagle’s nest on a bare rock, cold and inhospitable, which houses a few old men and a tempestuous young count. Despite the destitute condition of his adoptive ancestors’ residence, Berthold becomes increasingly attached to the prestige of the place and of his vocation as future bearer or at least Guardian of the crown. He begins to neglect his obligations to his fellow citizens in Waiblingen and soon dies, having lost the approval of the Guardians. The second book is entirely devoted to Anton, the young painter whose blood Berthold had received. Having long been in love with Berthold’s wife, he marries her after her husband’s death. All the family riches are gone, however, and Anton is forced to enlist in the army. Here he meets his father and learns that he is a direct descendant of the highest Guardian family, the reason why he was chosen to give his blood to Berthold. His adventures and travels in the military service are a surrealistic mixture of fantasy, dreams, and fights. At one point the Emperor Maximilian is so impressed by Anton’s prowess that he gives him the sword that once belonged to Charlemagne, thereby unwittingly symbolizing the future return of the Habsburg crown to the Hohenstaufen. A number of historical and legendary figures appear in the story, such

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as Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Bluebeard, and Helena of Troy. On his return home, Anton learns that his own child has accidentally killed his stepbrother, the son of Berthold, thus definitively severing Berthold’s line of succession from the crown. Whether the author would have considered this second part, completed after his death by his wife Bettina, ready to be printed is questionable. In spite of its internal inconsistencies, the novel conveys a fascinating picture of the time and mentality of Reformation Germany. The wild scenes, the sharp attacks on monks and priests, the religious exploitation, yet also the persistent belief in the intervention of celestial and infernal powers, all strongly evoke the atmosphere of religious uncertainty and anxiety that surrounded the dawn of the Reformation. Iconoclasm, once a sin, is now transformed into virtue. People wonder whether this reversal announces the end of the world. The apocalyptic mood partly eclipses the theme of the novel, namely, the strange waiting for a return of the past. Arnim began writing this novel when Napoleon’s fall was imminent, thereby reopening the question of who would govern the German Lands. The French conqueror had forced the Habsburg emperor Franz II to give up his title. Should Germany go back to its earlier tradition and elect once again an emperor who would unite all Germans? Could this be the time when the prophecy of the Hohenstaufen was to be fulfilled? The author leaves no doubt about his own aversion to the idea of such a return on the thin grounds that some descendants of the old dynasty might have survived. Legitimacy, as he shows in the failure of Berthold, must be earned through personal merit, not through biological descent. The unification of Germany is to be a new spiritual event, not a revival of an old dynastic dream. Still, Arnim found that dream worth exploring in literature. Between the murder of Konradin in the thirteenth century and Napoleon’s abolition of the sovereignty of the German Empire, a long stretch of time had elapsed. In the introduction to his novel, the author notes that his intention was to let the imagination fill the gaps left by history and so to render the time sequence continuous. The old legend supplied the dreams to fill the gap. Even if one disregarded the Hohenstaufen claim, the desire for German unity remained.

chapter 10

Philosophical Foundations of Romantic Thought

If we claim that Romanticism formally began with the French Revolution, we must add that it was not the result of that political event. It consisted in a radical transformation of modern consciousness supported by a systematic rethinking of its intellectual foundations. Modern philosophy, from Descartes to Kant, had been largely epistemological and inadequate for providing a philosophical ground to aspirations that, to a large extent, extended beyond the narrow limits of epistemology. These aspirations required different principles, capable of extricating thought from a tradition that had become sterile. Still, such an innovation implied no clear break with the Enlightenment. Kant, the undisputed master at the end of the eighteenth century, also became the principal authority of the German idealists. He had formulated their questions, even though his methodological restrictions prevented him from answering them. The young Romantic thinkers were convinced that they were able to build a new metaphysics, on the basis of the critical thought of the philosopher who had exorcised metaphysics from philosophy. They began by adopting Kant’s so-called Copernican Revolution, which reversed the traditional position that all knowledge originates in the known object to one that knowledge has its principal source in the mind. Truth is born in the thinking self. This change confirmed the Romantic search for an inner source. There was more, however. In his moral philosophy, Kant had declared that the autonomy of the moral agent was uncondi274

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tional. This principle supported the Romantic primacy of freedom. Paradoxically, then, Kant, who had drawn the veil over metaphysical speculation, in his moral theory provided the very idea on which Romantic philosophers and idealists were to erect their own systems. Yet an insoluble problem gradually drove these thinkers away from Kant’s philosophy: his epistemology never attained certainty about reality in itself. To the Romantics, Kant’s aporia implied a deep skepticism. Indeed, Stanley Cavell interprets Romanticism as primarily a working out of a crisis of knowledge caused by this skepticism.1 How does the mind find its way back to the common certainty that when we see, hear, smell, taste, or feel things, we directly relate to the things themselves and not to ideas of them? Kant had merely drawn the conclusions from a rationalist philosophy that had preceded him, but these conclusions conflicted with common sense. Moreover, they rendered the Romantic ideal impossible, namely, to lead the mind to an intuitive insight into the “unconditioned condition” of reality. Kant had left no doubt about the theoretical inaccessibility of the nature of an ultimately unconditioned at the ground of all conditioned being. He had nonetheless declared that the idea of God was indispensable for bringing the various conclusions of his philosophy together into a coherent synthesis. Yet the reality of this idea could not be proven, even though its acceptance was philosophically necessary. Romantic philosophers remained faithful to Kant’s thesis concerning the necessity of the idea of the unconditioned. Many even shared Kant’s theoretical agnosticism with respect to the existence of a personal God. Yet they remained firm in their conviction that some intuition of the nature of the unconditioned condition of the finite was necessary and possible. They concluded that Kant’s problem was the presupposition that the knowledge of objects must begin with a critical investigation of the conditions of our knowing power. But how could this presupposition be avoided? As Cavell shows, Heidegger, that late Romantic, in his essay Das Ding (The Thing), reverses this theoretical presupposition. To understand the objectifying mind, according to Heidegger, we must begin by realizing that we already live in a world of objects and people. The Romantics, however, did not pursue the matter as far as Heidegger. Convinced that some aspects of reality, especially the most important ones, are not

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accessible to theoretical reason, they simply stopped asking Kantian questions and building rational arguments. Yet such issues can and must be approached in other ways, such as through poetry, art, and religion.

R o m a n t i c Th o u g h t a n d t h e R i s e o f I d e a l i s m

The Romantics attempted to fill the gap that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century had opened between, on the one side, what the senses perceive and what common sense assumes to be the reality of nature, and, on the other side, what mathematical physics, often in conflict with common sense, proclaims to be the truth of nature. Even scientists and philosophers of our time continue to be disturbed by this gap. Alfred North Whitehead in Science and the Modern World followed the Romantics in proposing a more comprehensive concept of physical reality than the scientific one. He conceded that all beings, including organic ones, are subject to blind mechanical powers in the molecular part of their bodies. Such powers, however, are insufficient to explain the specific nature of their reality: “The molecules may blindly run in accordance with general laws [mechanical, chemical, biological], but the molecules differ in their intrinsic characters according to the general organic plans of the situation in which they find themselves.”2 Whitehead claims that we can overcome the discrepancy between nature as represented by artists, described by poets, and experienced by most of us, and, on the other side, the abstract structures of modern physics. He is not arguing, of course, against the mathematical method at the heart of the physical sciences, but rather against the dismissal of qualities typical of human perception as being merely “secondary” aspects of our knowledge of the real. In contrast to these reductionist views, Whitehead, along with the Romantics, claims that even the structure of the inorganic world is oriented toward the organic. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the study of organic being had introduced a more complex world picture than the traditional Neoplatonic one, in which the fullness of reality uninterruptedly descends from the highest level of Being. Diseases in plants, monstrosities in animals, and defective offspring in humans suggested a far less

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orderly world than the Neoplatonic one. Several Romantics conceived of the cosmos as an eruption of power from an immense chaos. That power constantly pours out life without order or even sustainability. In the words of one modern interpreter, “The Romantic world is an indeterminate field of energies gathering or emerging, lapsing or fading, or transmuting themselves, governed by variable and multiple attractions and repulsions and by sheer chance.”3 In this unceasing process, the distinctions between the inorganic and the organic, as well as between the static and the movable, remain fluid. Even the difference between the real and the ideal aspects of Being ceases to be firm. Each part of nature possesses an ideal and hence lasting significance in that it symbolically represents an ideal realm. “The universe in the fullest sense is both transient and eternal. . . . Each physical actuality is both physical and mental.”4 The Romantic reactions against mechanistic worldviews often took simplistic forms, specifically in belated attacks on Galileo and Newton, the two founders of modern physics and cosmology. With surprising shortsightedness, Romantic critics failed to recognize that serious reflection on the organic part of the universe could not even have begun before scientists had attempted to apply mechanistic theories to the living world, as even the zoologist Buffon had done in his early works. It is easier to forgive Blake’s Gnostic attack on Newton than Goethe’s pseudoscientific critique of Newton’s Opticks in his Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) (1810). Goethe was, of course, right in claiming that in a theory of vision, an analysis of perception is just as necessary as a calculation of the geometrical lines that define a projective design. Without the subjective ability to perceive certain forms of reality in a particular way, there would be no science of optics. Yet Goethe’s intemperate assault on the father of modern physics for not providing that subjective part was inappropriate. The limited purpose of Newton’s investigation had justified his concentrating exclusively on the mechanical part of optics. The one merit of Goethe’s critique was his stress on the need for a study of the subjective conditions of vision. The time for such a study, however, was not ripe, nor would it be so long as mechanistic, objective interpretations were taken to be the only scientifically valid ones, while subjective representations were treated as their imperfect reflections. Not until Edmund Husserl, in his phenomenological philosophy, showed that

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the Lebenswelt, the world as we actually experience it, is as real as the world we construe in mathematical physics, did scientific philosophy fully include the subjective element in its picture of reality. Several early Romantics in Germany shared Goethe’s insight that nature is intrinsically directed toward spirit. However, they often interpreted this insight through an assumed presence of occult, spiritual forces. One might have expected that the scientific cosmology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had successfully exorcised astrology and occultism from serious discussion. In fact, they had never entirely left the Western mind. The same purpose that spurred scientific investigation, namely, to make sense of our experience of the world, had inspired the study of occult forces long before the scientific revolution. In the modern age, particularly in the Romantic period, this study persisted as an alternative way of justifying the appearance of the world, one that hinted at its spiritual origin. Gnostic and mystical interpretations especially appealed to the Romantic mind, as appears in Novalis and LouisClaude de Saint-Martin, who both were well acquainted with the scientific theories of their time. They juxtaposed them to ideas about the occult, as complementary to each other. In his Faust, Goethe repeatedly refers to doctrines formulated by Paracelsus or his disciples. In the first scene, when a discouraged Faust regrets the poor results of his ten years of study, he decides to practice magic in order to find out “what holds this world together.” In contrast to the still largely mechanistic philosophy of nature that prevailed in the eighteenth century, Kant in his Critique of Judgment held that the assumption of some kind of inner teleology in nature was indispensable to its scientific study. In his view, the understanding could not prove the validity of this assumption, yet a nonmechanistic science of life made the assumption necessary. Even in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), written to restore the reliability of science after it was undermined by Hume’s skepticism, Kant left open the possibility of a teleological approach to the science of nature, which his critique had seemed to exclude. Yet he remained adamant in excluding any intellectual intuition, that is, any immediate, incontrovertible insight into reality as such and hence any knowledge of things in themselves. Refuting this prohibition was the principal purpose of Fichte’s philosophy.

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F i c h t e ’ s I d e a l i s t Th e o r y o f t h e S e l f

No one more radically explored the significance of Kant’s theory of a transcendental self as source of all thought and willing than Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 –1814). All of his many philosophical works reformulate or apply the principles that he first articulated in his Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (The Foundation of the Science of Knowledge) (1794), one of the most demanding texts in the Western canon of philosophy. In it, Fichte brought the philosophy of consciousness, which had dominated modern thought, to a conclusion and reopened the road to metaphysics. Amazingly, Kant had left the door open to such a development in the conclusion of his Critique of Pure Reason (A 841). Here appears the surprising statement that his analysis of reason had merely served as a propaedeutic, and that a system of reason that includes the full scope of philosophical knowledge, metaphysics in the original sense of the word, was still to be constructed. In his Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte attempted to create such a system, claiming that his thought did no more than draw the conclusions from Kant’s philosophy.5 Nothing appears to be less Kantian than Fichte’s relentless drive to reduce all sciences, all knowledge, to a single, absolute principle from which, like from Descartes’ tree of knowledge, the branches of the different sciences would sprout. Should we not conclude, then, that Spinoza, rather than Kant, was Fichte’s model in his quest for a single source of knowledge? Spinoza had indeed inspired Fichte. Nevertheless, it was primarily with Kantian principles that the idealist thinker undertook what may well be the most ambitious project of modern philosophy. Kant had shown that a system of rational knowledge requires an idea of totality, which a priori establishes the conditions that make it possible to assign to each part its place with respect to all others (Critique of Pure Reason, A 645; B 673). His idea of reason (Vernunft) functions as an “imaginary focus” within which all forms of knowledge could be ordered in an organic whole. Heidegger has called this ideal totality, within which the mind is to collect and unify all ideas, “die vorgreifende Sammlung” (the anticipatory inclusion).6 The ideas on which this comprehensive structure is built—the idea of God, the nature of personhood, the concept

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of world—seem to be derived from a metaphysical system. Yet since the limits of Kant’s method forbade him to attach a reality coefficient to these ideas, he considered them merely “directive,” heuristic we might call them. Nonetheless, the indispensable role they played even in Kant’s own philosophy persuaded Fichte, as well as Schelling and Hegel, that philosophy in its very essence had to be ontological, that is, built on principles of unquestionable reality. The crucial point on which the disciples differed from the master and which enabled them to create actual systems of philosophy was the possibility of the mind’s attaining an indubitable intellectual intuition. The idealists claimed that Kant himself had implicitly assumed the existence of such an intellectual intuition in his thesis that the unconditional moral imperative is directly known to the mind. This alleged fact of pure reason, on which Kant grounds his moral system, presupposes an intuition of the acting self. So, Fichte concludes: “The Science of Knowledge sets out from an intellectual intuition of the self ’s activity [Selbsttätigkeit]” (“Second Introduction,” in Werke, 1:471; HL, 44). This intuition is not one of a substance but of an act. According to Fichte, the primary intuition of the acting self includes an elementary awareness of freedom, in the sense that the self experiences its ability to make choices (though not necessarily to execute decisions) independently of external causes. “Only through freedom does the mind raise itself to an intuitive consciousness—and each conscious intuition refers to a concept that gives freedom its direction.”7 At the beginning of his “First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge” (1797), intended “for the unprejudiced reader,” that is, the reader innocent of previous philosophical endorsements, Fichte distinguishes his “idealist” theory from what he calls the “dogmatic” one. The dogmatic thinker begins not with a reflection on the act of thinking, but with an exploration of the most obvious and comprehensive object of thought—being or substance. For an idealist, however, self-consciousness is neither a substance nor a particular form of being, but rather an act that constitutes all forms of being. Only a person strongly aware of the creative character of the free self can fully embrace the idealist position. The nature of one’s philosophy, then, according to Fichte, depends on the degree of one’s awareness of freedom. The dogmatist concentrates

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on the object of thinking, while forgetting that the thinking self constitutes that object. He or she “brackets” the act of thinking. Fichte dismisses as dogmatists all premodern philosophers and, among the moderns, even those who influenced him most directly, namely, Spinoza and Kant. In fact, in the first part of his The Vocation of Man (1800), a work intended for the general reader, he describes the dogmatic position in Spinoza’s terms, that is, as dependent on one Nature, driven by one power, and predetermined by that power: “I myself, with all that I call mine, am a link in this chain of rigid necessity of Nature. . . . I have, then, been called into being by a power beyond myself. And by what power but the universal power of Nature, since I too am a part of Nature.”8 Fichte, once a follower of Spinoza, was fully aware of the intellectual attraction conveyed by a feeling of being united with all reality in one nature, a feeling that even dominated Romantic writers such as Novalis and the early Schelling. Even Kant, Fichte argues, having broken the deadlock of substantialist thought by explaining all phenomena of consciousness through the mind, nevertheless remained a dogmatist insofar as he still made consciousness depend on a thing-in-itself. Fichte rejects this concession to dogmatism as inconsistent with critical philosophy. Of course, Fichte knows that not all mental images are freely evoked by the mind. Some appear to be forced upon it from without. I am not free to feel or not to feel a pain. Nor am I free to see or not to see what is before my eyes. He attributes such experiences to a transcendental self, distinct yet not separated from individual self-consciousness. The empirical self regards all passive experiences as caused by factors independent of itself.9 But what it experiences as the effect of an external power, Fichte holds, is in fact caused by the internal limitation of the individual self-consciousness. If phenomenal self-consciousness is raised to a concept of the self, however, the mind recognizes all knowledge as well as all willing as initiated by the acting self. Here lies the meaning of Fichte’s controversial statement, “Some who have not yet raised themselves to full consciousness of their freedom’s absolute independence, find themselves only in the presence of things; they have only that dispersed self-consciousness which attaches to objects.” Fichte concludes: “What sort of philosophy one chooses depends, therefore, on what sort of man one is” (“Second Introduction,” in Werke, 1:433 – 34; HL, 15).

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The conceptual self, for Fichte, has no cause but itself. It is, in fact, the very act of self-positing. “The primeval self posits itself, and by virtue of this mere self-assertion, it exists” (Werke, 1:96; HL, 97). The act of unconditioned self-positing implies three principles. The unconditioned principle, on which the other two depend, consists in the self ’s identity with itself: “I am I.” Together with the other two principles, it constitutes the ground of consciousness. But what is the subject of the reflective movement? Is it the self ? If so, then we assume what we set out to prove: we call a self only a subject that reverts to itself. Or is the self the result of the reflective act? But if so, then what was the subject that performed it? In a classic study, Dieter Henrich has examined the difficulties involved in Fichte’s first principle.10 How, he wonders, if the subject is not (yet) the self, could we consider the act a self-reflection? Fichte appears to have sensed the difficulty. After 1794 he no longer speaks of an act of reflection, thereby avoiding the idea of a “subject” that precedes the positing act. “Originally the I simply posits its own being” (Werke, 1:98; HL, 99). The primeval self posits its existence as well as the consciousness of its existence. Act and reflection are simultaneous. The ground of consciousness must, from the start, be for itself as well as in itself. Or again, the primary act posits both the primordial unity of the self and the duality needed for reflection. This duality is the source of the second absolute principle: I am not non-I. As ground of consciousness, the primeval act must be both identical with itself and yet divided in order to make reflection possible. Formally, the principle of opposition is as unconditional as the principle of identity. Yet its content—the negation of the self—is derived from the principle of identity and, hence, conditioned by it. In this respect it differs from “I am I,” which is unconditioned in content as well as in form. The non-self is not a mere negation of the self. It constitutes the very ground of representation. “If I am to represent anything at all, I must oppose it to the representing self ” (Science of Knowledge, Werke, 1:104; HL, 105, slightly changed). It creates the aboriginal distinction between that which presents and that which it represents. Finally, there must be a third unconditioned principle. The non-self, being exclusive of the self, would abolish the identity of selfhood altogether, were it not for a mediating principle that limits the powers of self

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and non-self. This third principle, then, must also be unconditioned with respect to content, although formally it depends on the two other principles. Together, those three principles constitute the ground of conscious selfhood. They formulate the a priori conditions of knowledge and of being. They may seem to be no more than the basic categories of formal logic—identity, contradiction, limitation. In fact, the categories of logic follow from them. As categories, they remain purely hypothetical. “A = A” means that if A exists, it coincides with A. But “I am I” is by no means hypothetical. It formulates the ground of the self ’s being. Of the three principles, it is, of course, the second, the generation of the non-self from the self, that reveals the full extent of Fichte’s Idealism. We experience the world, the non-self, as essentially given and in no way derived from the self. For this reason Kant continued to postulate a thing-in-itself. Fichte responds that the demand of a non-self (for the self ’s essential quality to be reflective, as well as to be) forms part of the self ’s nature. Fichte became increasingly aware that the concept of an absolute I as sole source of consciousness failed to account for the self ’s passive experiences. All his attempts to reduce such experiences to the transcendental self proved ineffective. The charges of atheism, which led to his forced resignation as professor in Jena, stemmed from a failure to distinguish the way of knowing from the way of being. The self that functioned in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a mere unity of apperception becomes in Fichte’s idealist philosophy that which determines the very nature of reality. To be sure, he had distinguished the empirical self from the absolute self. The former never coincides with the latter. But in the eyes of his critics, the transition from the epistemological order to the ontological in his thought appeared to be an intrinsic necessity, excluding any genuine transcendence. In responding to this critique, Fichte, in the 1801 edition of the Science of Knowledge, introduces a passive element in the self-positing of the I, defining it as “an activity in which an eye has been placed” (“eine Tätigkeit, der ein Auge eingesetzt wird”). The passive term eingesetzt indicates that the activity of the conscious self is a given.11 In fact, Fichte had implicitly admitted the existence of this passive element at the beginning of the Sittenlehre of 1798: “I find myself as acting,” that is, I am given to myself as an acting being. The self, then, is not the ultimate ground of its self-positing.

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Fichte’s search for a single, unifying principle had weakened the significance of established distinctions, such as the one between person and nature, or between person and God. The world, to him, was a mirror of the self and a field for its action. That self was the unconditioned source of all ideally conceived reality. Chastened by the charges of atheism, however, he later qualified his Idealism in such a way that the empirical self, rather than being the ultimate unconditioned, gave access to the absolute, which surpasses the self and in which the self is grounded. Kant had respected and at one time even financially supported the young philosopher, but after Fichte was accused of atheism, Kant hastened to declare that his own philosophy had nothing in common with his admirer’s thought. In a way, he was right. Fichte’s first admission of moving toward a broadened theory of the ego appears in The Vocation of Man (1800). Although this popular work contains no metaphysical discussion, it opens a transcendent dimension in Fichte’s philosophy and prepares the way for the 1801 edition of the Science of Knowledge. In The Vocation of Man he postulated that a belief in a reality beyond the self was necessary for acting. In 1801 he raises this belief to a philosophical necessity. The vocation to personhood transforms the inclination to believe in the reality of the natural world into a logical certainty. The unconditional call to duty silences any doubts about the reality of the world in which I am called to act. “The consciousness of the actual world is derived from the necessity of action. We act not because we know, but we know because we are called upon to act” (Werke, 2:263; Vocation, 98). Not before the edition of 1801 did the Science of Knowledge turn into a full ontology. In this profound but heavily polemical work, Fichte attempted to come to terms with Schelling’s critique in the Philosophy of Nature: he now understood that his equation of the absolute with the transcendental ego had been too restrictive. Simultaneously with Fichte’s turn to metaphysics, his position on religion changed. In a controversial article, “On the Ground of Our Belief in Divine Providence”12 (the immediate cause of his dismissal from Jena), Fichte had argued that the world required no transcendent ground, because the self posits the non-self. Hence, there was no need for a transcendent “cause” of the world. Moreover, in his early theory of

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ethics Fichte had identified God with the moral order. Placing that order above the moral agent would deprive it of its moral significance. “This moral order is the divine, as we accept it. It becomes construed by righteous action. . . . This living and working moral order is itself God” (Werke, 5:185 – 86). Forced to clarify and later to change his theory, he refers in The Vocation of Man to conscience as the ultimate moral arbiter, which he now interprets as a summons of the highest Good. “I assume such a law of a spiritual world—not given by my will nor by the will of any finite being nor by the will of all finite beings taken together, but a law to which my will and the will of all finite beings is subject” (Werke, 2:295; Vocation, 131). The use of the personal pronoun Er (He) in such phrases as “He wills that” (Werke, 2:298; Vocation, 133) suggests that this will belongs to a transcendent, personal lawgiver. For a definitive statement of Fichte’s later idea of transcendence, we must turn to The Way to the Blessed Life, or the Doctrine of Religion (Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, oder auch die Religionslehre) (1806).13 This series of lectures, addressed to a general audience, must in fact have placed considerable demands on his public, as it continues to do on the contemporary reader. In the lectures Fichte describes Being (Sein) as unconditioned in all respects, eternal, and unchangeable. He contrasts it to Dasein, conscious life, in and through which Being reveals its presence. Fichte calls this a “being outside its Being” or “an image [Bild] of Being” (Werke, 5:440). (Heidegger’s distinction between Sein and Dasein, as well as that between Sein and Seiendes, appear here for the first time.) Dasein has no content other than Sein. Hence, if Being is one, existence also must be one. Despite the multiplicity of its objects of thought, the act of thinking is fundamentally one. In the unity of that act the mind becomes conscious of its participation in one divine Being. “This, then, is part of the blessed life, that in this living religion [the person] eventually becomes intensely aware of his own non-being and of his being only in and through God. It brings him to feel this link uninterruptedly, even if he does not always think and express it, as the hidden source and secret destination of all thoughts, feelings, emotions, and movements” (Werke, 5:449). God reveals Himself in the very act through which the mind knows itself. Although in its core Dasein coincides with Being, as image of

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Being it remains distinct. It possesses no immediate understanding of itself as expression of Being. Even after the mind has acknowledged its participation in Being, Being remains transcendent to it. According to Fichte, to approach it requires an attitude of loving surrender. Yet how can the mind love what coincides with the core of its being? This, of course, has been a persistent problem in mystical theology since Meister Eckhart. Fichte attempted to solve it by first referring to the opposition between subject and object, and next claiming that the mind overcomes this division in love. Only in love does the mind recognize its intrinsic union with Being. For Fichte, Being is the metaphysical name of God. Religion should not burden it with historical dogmas. “Only the metaphysical, not the historical, beatifies” (Werke, 5:485). The philosopher, then, must seek the truth underlying dogmatic religion and not be satisfied with a dogmatic faith. In the final lecture of The Way to the Blessed Life, Fichte reminds his auditors that they have attended what are only “popular” lectures. (They certainly might be forgiven for having forgotten it!) Next follows the surprising statement that religion is the philosophy of the non-philosopher: “When we set aside the purely scientific purposes, then for a mixed audience nothing of general interest and general intelligibility remains of philosophy but religion” (Werke, 5:560 – 61). Does he mean that, for the philosophically educated, philosophy takes the place of religion? Or that religion constitutes the core of philosophy? On the basis of the preceding lectures, one might be inclined to say that he was thinking of the latter. In either case, his statement confirms Fichte’s development from subjective Idealism to a metaphysics of Being.

S ch el l i n g ’ s PH I LOS OPH Y OF NATU R E an d SY S T E M O F T R A N S C E N D E N TA L I D E A L I S M

Friedrich Schelling (1775 – 1854) divides his work into three parts, modeled on the three Critiques of Kant: one devoted to theoretical philosophy, one to practical philosophy, and one to the teleology of nature and the harmony of art. Like Fichte, he begins his theoretical philosophy with a reflection on consciousness. This leads him to postulate a

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pre-conscious foundation, to which he refers as an act. The act constitutes a basic duplicity between a subjective, or reflective, aspect and an objective one on which the act reflects. Whereas the dynamic ground of consciousness is unconditioned, unlimited, and independent, consciousness, with its dichotomy between subject and object, is intrinsically limited and conditioned.14 We tend to interpret active experiences as internally induced and passive ones as derived from an external source. Yet the philosophical mind recognizes both as having their origin in the mind. Thus far, Schelling follows Fichte rather faithfully. Schelling, however, next introduces an idea that caused a complete break with Fichte. It concerns the nature of what Fichte called the nonself. According to Schelling, nature no less than consciousness, and independently of it, is an immediate manifestation of the absolute. The two are parallel and in harmony with one another. All idealists agree that the ideal and the real must at some point coincide, if knowledge is to refer to reality at all. That point of coincidence was, for Fichte, the absolute self. For Schelling, the absolute, that is, the unconditioned ultimate, includes selfhood and nature as intrinsically united. For Schelling, then, the absolute is not a simple unity but an active, complex one, which constantly overcomes the ever emerging oppositions between mind and nature. It is infinite, because finitude would set limits to it and thereby make it dependent and conditioned. This raises the question of how the finite could derive from the infinite without opposing one to the other and setting limits to the infinite. Schelling answers that the infinite must include the finite, yet not its differentiation. Much of this interpretation had previously appeared in the mystical theology of the Middle Ages, specifically in Eckhart and Nicolas of Cusa, to describe the relation between God and the creatures. To conceive of this all-inclusive infinite, the mind must deny all particular aspects of the finite. Yet such a negative philosophy does not disclose what the absolute is in itself. Here, for Schelling, the competence of theoretical philosophy ends and the practical one begins. Schelling briefly sketched his practical philosophy in Part Four of his System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800 and developed it in his short but profound Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human

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Freedom) (1809). All free action is ultimately a willing of oneself through the intermediate pursuit of concrete, limited objectives. Yet beyond those limited realizations, the human agent pursues an ideal of selfhood. Being subject to the laws of nature and history, humans are conditioned by natural inclinations of self-interest and by desires for physical well-being (Werke, 2:570). Still, they always possess the ability to choose among their desires and direct them toward an ideal of selfdetermination, which the imagination projects beyond all finite objectives. The self is restricted in selecting its goals within a world that is already determined. Each person confronts the world at a particular segment of space and time that has previously been determined by the actions of others. Despite this dependence, he or she is called to a creative freedom. In contrast to Kant’s concept of a moral imperative that requires only interior obedience, Schelling’s moral imperative demands that ethical ideals be “realized” in the objective order of society. The order of right limits each person’s individual freedom to protect the freedom of all and to guide them toward a common ideal. Positive laws issued by the community should also assist its members in reorienting their desires and prevent them from following only their natural inclinations. Such laws merely establish external conditions that support the will in its pursuit of ideal selfhood. Schelling assumes that from the harmonious actions of free individuals a rational order will emerge. He supports this optimistic assumption, so much at variance with experience, by the idea that each individual is “a constitutive part of God, that is, of the moral world order” (Werke, 2:597). The divine quality of the mind warrants the advent of such a moral order, because that order is none other than the very nature of God (as Fichte had written), in whom the moral and the natural order coincide (Werke, 2:600). At this point Schelling refers to the absolute, the ultimate principle of his philosophy, stated in more religious terms than he used in the theoretical part of the System. Still, we should not identify this unknown principle with the traditional Judeo-Christian idea of God. In his Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809), Schelling developed it into a pantheistic idea. History here appears as a drama in which a transcendent but unknown playwright mysteriously harmonizes the parts of different actors.

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If the playwright had written the plot without taking account of the actors’ freedom, they would be merely reciting lines written by another. Indeed, without freedom, neither playwright nor plot would ever exist. “We are collaborators of the whole and we ourselves have invented the particular roles we play” (Werke, 2:602). In Schelling’s philosophy of process, God never “exists,” if existence refers to a being independent of nature and history. The absolute constitutes itself in the free play of independent agents. Since freedom is by nature infinite, the self-making process of the absolute is never completed. This concept of process runs completely counter to the concept of an empty, static absolute that appeared in the theoretical part of the System. There are other problems, because this not-yet-existing absolute is from the beginning the principle that both transcends and stimulates the ever developing realms of freedom and of nature. Only at the end of history will the absolute exist. Schelling distinguishes three epochs in the realization of the absolute. During a first, tragic epoch, humanity experiences its destiny as a blind force. This condition, he argues, persisted throughout most of the ancient civilizations. In the West, it ended with the collapse of the great empires that followed the death of Alexander the Great. During a second epoch, this blind power turns into a rational system of right. Rome subjected the known world to the rule of law. At some point in the future, the forces of destiny and of law will become integrated with those of freedom. “When it will begin, we are unable to tell. But whenever it comes into existence, God also will then exist” (Werke, 2:604). In later writings Schelling identifies this third epoch with the Christian world order. After the theoretical and practical parts of the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling added a third section on the teleology of nature and the teleology of art, but both topics here remain undeveloped. To the former topic he had devoted his Philosophy of Nature (1799), published a year earlier, and to the latter his Lectures on the Philosophy of Art (1802 – 3). Of the two, the first is by far the more original and the more developed one. Whereas for Fichte, nature had been no more than a non-self, indispensable to the self for actualizing its freedom but without any substantial content of its own, for Schelling, nature must be understood on its own terms. His Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (First Sketch of a System of the Philosophy of Nature) (1799)

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was the work of a young man of twenty-four. Two ideas dominate this dense text: first, in nature all parts are fully integrated with and instrumental to the whole; and second, nature develops from a still relatively static, inorganic state into a dynamic, organic one. For several Romantics, nature, because of its all-inclusiveness, had come to be a symbol of the absolute, the ultimate unconditioned. For the young Schelling it was a constituent segment of the absolute, of which mind, the “reflection of nature” as Spinoza had called it, was the other segment. The two are intrinsically linked. The subjective ideality of mind must at some point coincide with the objective reality of nature. Only at that point of coincidence can mind and nature be called absolute, that is, unconditioned by anything else. For this union to be possible, nature must be intelligible at all levels. Yet this ideal quality of nature remains implicit until human cognition renders it explicit. For Schelling, the proper object of the philosophy of nature consists in showing how an ideal, form-giving principle is actively present in nature. Schelling therefore refers to nature as “visible spirit.” The correspondence between the forces of nature and the powers of cognition (sensation, imagination, intellect) confirms that nature is teleologically moving toward spirit. Without a corresponding presence of mind at each level of nature, from mere sensation to scientific theory, nature would not be intelligible. Obviously, this idealist view of nature as spirit stood in sharp contrast with the common theories that oppose nature to spirit. Schelling did not intend his philosophy to be a substitute for the empirical sciences, but rather a necessary foundation of the natural sciences, of which it established the legitimacy. Nor did he expect his philosophy to remain independent of the support of the empirical sciences, for they alone would fully disclose the gradual appearance of ever more complex and perfect natural formations (Gestaltungen), which philosophy interprets as manifestations of nature’s ideal character. Despite nature’s gradual ascent toward spirit via a continuity of related species, Schelling firmly denied that any species could ever develop into a different one. Each species remains fixed: it can only reproduce copies of itself. Philosophy attributes the gradual appearance of higher species to periodic surges in nature’s creativity. To make a new beginning possible, nature pauses after each production of a new species, as if she had tem-

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porarily become exhausted in its formative creativity. Schelling explains this temporal discontinuity (Hemmung) through the presence of resisting traits in the existing species, which prevent conflicting and potentially fatal variations in nature’s creative process. In principle, infinite combinations are possible at each new beginning. Yet traits of the existing species prevent the birth of totally diverging ones, since they would be unable to coexist and the process of change would come to a premature end. Schelling, possibly influenced by Goethe, conceives of nature as a single great organism, of which even the inorganic world forms an integral part. A complex mixture of combinable and non-combinable elements in each substance secures its coherence with others, while at the same time preventing it from collapsing within the substances to which it relates. A complementary principle requires that the various substances condition one another, in such a way that each substance within this organic whole is able to preserve its own identity. The presence of opposite drives in each substance, such as the receptive and repulsive drives in organic beings, prevents the integrating force from jeopardizing the substance’s identity. The fact that all forces, however diverse, cooperate in a common self-directed activity of nature presupposes that a single dynamic principle is active in all parts of nature—the inorganic no less than the organic—and coordinates them within the whole. Schelling assigns this task to the world-soul, a concept that, since Plato, has regularly fulfilled similar philosophical functions in Western cosmology. At its origin, Schelling proposed, nature must have consisted of a state of perfect balance among all elements. The actual universe was born out of a contraction of this original state, followed by a violent expansion. Schelling describes it as an explosion. This primeval event fragmented the components in such a manner that they attracted some and repelled others. As that primitive universe developed, the forces of contraction and expansion continued to play a determining role. Each body expelled by the primeval explosion became the source of further productions: a myriad of suns generated solar systems. Schelling identifies the first stage of the primeval explosion—his version of the Big Bang—with the advent of magnetism, which accounts for the regularity of motion. The next explosion produced light, which he describes

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as a chemical reaction caused by a negative condition in a receiving body, hence as electricity. This presentation amazingly anticipates some features of later theories. Schelling conceived of life as the immanent goal of the universe. A philosophy of nature must start from nature’s highest achievement rather than from its beginnings. To justify the way in which the organic is able to absorb pre-organic chemical influences, Schelling postulates that in all organic beings, any external stimulus evokes an internal reaction that converts the inorganic into the organic. At the lowest organic level, the reactive force hardly exceeds mere irritability, yet in higher animals it rules the entire reproductive system, and in human beings it even reaches artistic capacity. Each organism is born with the beginning of that capacity, but in pre-human organisms, it is determined by lust and remains incapable of change. Bees build honeycombs in regular, aesthetic shapes. But they are unable to replace their six-angled structures by any other form. The formative drive of nature surpasses the individual’s decisions. In the graceful movements of tigers, the artful constructions of beavers, the communicating dance of bees, and everywhere in nature the mind recognizes law and regularity. Even geological forms bear the signs of “the visible spirit.” In art the mind becomes aware of nature’s all-inclusive harmony. In his System of Transcendental Idealism, published a year after the Philosophy of Nature, Schelling summarizes the result of his earlier work: “The completed theory of nature would be that whereby the whole of nature was resolved into an intelligence” (Werke, 2:340 – 41). After a short period of widespread admiration for the Philosophy of Nature, Schelling had to face a nearly universal rejection of it by scientists. To start a study of nature from an idea of nature, rather than from carefully gathered empirical data, conflicted with the methods of modern science. In the philosopher’s defense, however, Schelling never meant to write a treatise on scientific method. He even warned his students not to let philosophical ideas interfere with their scientific investigations. Still, his critics insisted, he had irresponsibly used scientific data to support comprehensive theories that those data did not justify. Especially objectionable were the analogies he drew between physical phenomena, such as magnetism and electricity, and organic ones.

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Resistance to Schelling’s philosophy of nature only increased under the influence of positivist philosophy, which came to dominate scientific methods in the nineteenth century. The Neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband suggests that this resistance was not entirely due to problems in Schelling’s method: “We can understand why the mechanical explanation of nature, which had again become victorious in the nineteenth century, was wont to see in the period of the Philosophy of nature, only a fit of teleological excess, now happily overcome, which checked the quiet work of investigation.”15 At its first appearance, Schelling’s work had inspired young scientists as well as poets and artists. One prominent thinker on whom it made a lasting impression was Alexander von Humboldt, author of the multivolume Kosmos and a highly respected scientific theorist in the early nineteenth century. He congratulated Schelling for having accomplished a revolution in the sciences. Humboldt avoided mistaking Schelling’s philosophy for a work of positive science. In his letter to Schelling he clearly distinguished the fields: “Philosophy of nature can never obstruct the progress of the empirical sciences. On the contrary, it returns the results to principles, and thereby creates a new basis for discoveries.”16 Other scientists, however, completely withdrew their initial support, most famously the chemist Justus von Liebig. The early reputation of The Philosophy of Nature generally declined as the natural sciences developed in the nineteenth century. The final pages of the System contain no more than a sketch of a philosophy of art, hastily written under the pressure of a sudden insight and heavily hand-corrected on the author’s printed copy. Schelling’s fundamental view was that the absolute appears in the aesthetic intuition, because in the contemplation and creation of beauty the opposition between subject and object (the infallible sign of conditionedness) disappears. In the aesthetic experience, the contemplating subject and the contemplated object merge in a state of relative indifference. The mind may so totally lose itself in the work of art or in the beauty of nature that the distance between the observer and the observed object temporarily ceases to exist. The infinite subjectivity of the mind no longer appears to be restricted by the finite object: it includes that object in its own infinity. Intuition coincides with the intuited. Must this coincidence be

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considered the absolute itself or merely a momentary appearance of it? Hegel’s answer left no doubt. He calls it the aesthetic Schein, that is, mere appearance with a connotation of delusion. Anticipating his later Lectures on Art, Schelling calls the reflection on art the “universal organon of philosophy” (Werke, 2:345). In a corollary to the System, Schelling briefly summarizes what was to be the main theme of the Lectures, the relation between art and the absolute. In his lectures on the philosophy of art and, with increasing emphasis, in his final lectures on mythology and revelation (to which I will return in the next chapter), Schelling discusses the intimate link between the aesthetic and the religious symbolization of the absolute. At the time of writing the System, however, he was moving toward a pantheistic philosophy, and his ideas about religion were in complete turmoil. Schelling was the philosopher of Romanticism. His thought gave philosophical support to the aspirations of the Romantic Movement in Germany. The ontological significance that he ascribed to the aesthetic intuition, his symbolic interpretation of nature, and the particular emphasis he placed on freedom made his entire philosophy an integral part of the Romantic quest of the absolute. Later generations have neglected him, possibly because his thought was closely linked to Fichte’s Idealism. Yet he was the philosophical genius among the idealists and the most original Romantic thinker. Fichte, the initiator, still continued the Kantian tradition. He profoundly influenced the early Romantics, but gradually they abandoned him. Hegel, the most balanced and systematic of the three, detached himself from Romanticism but has survived as a classic of philosophy. Schelling advanced positions that Hegel corrected, adopted, and subsequently ridiculed, as he does in the preface to his Phenomenology. Our neo-Romantic age, however, appears to be rediscovering the profundity of Schelling’s thought.

H e g e l’ s P H E N O M E N O L O G Y : A Romantic Critique of Romantic Philosophy

In an early monograph entitled The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (1801), Hegel argues that the idea of the ab-

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solute, which, according to his idealist predecessors, was meant to overcome all oppositions, still contained a basic dichotomy between the absolute and the appearance of the absolute. Hegel attempted to transcend it in a theory of consciousness, wherein the mind, by dialectically surpassing one opposition after another, would finally surmount the divide between consciousness and reality within the all-encompassing unity of the Spirit. In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), he presents this process of integration and reconciliation as an internal development of the Spirit. Hegel prefers the term Spirit to the term absolute because, in his opinion, Schelling had abused that term by simply juxtaposing nature and mind, without properly integrating one with the other. The Phenomenology of Spirit may well count as the most radical attempt to lead the key theses of Romantic thought to their philosophical conclusions. Did Hegel succeed in overcoming the subjectivism of modern thought? Or was his own Spirit no more than an “absolutized subjectivity”?17 Did Hegel himself achieve a full reconciliation between the subjective and the objective facets of modern culture? Later philosophers— from Nietzsche to Heidegger and Habermas—have criticized Hegel’s persisting subjectivism. If the dialectic of the Phenomenology is indeed meant to be “a mediating process of infinite self-reference in which all finite elements have been absorbed,” then he still appears to remain entirely within the subjective realm of a philosophy of consciousness. Others have blamed him for abandoning critical philosophy altogether and, at least in his later work, for merely justifying the existing state of affairs. In this premature reconciliation of the ideal with the real, philosophy fundamentally changes from what it had been for the Romantic philosophers Fichte and Schelling. It ceases to be Romantic when it loses its critical power. Here, I merely suggest a provisional answer by briefly sketching the general course of Hegel’s argument as it directly refers to Romantic positions. Other parts of his argument have been discussed in other chapters. In Jena the young Hegel had shared the admiration of his friend Schelling for Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic program. Soon, however, he came to dislike Schlegel’s aphoristic way of writing. He also became estranged from Schelling, whose way of thinking he blamed for a lack

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of philosophical accuracy that was incompatible with his own ideal of philosophy as science (Wissenschaft).18 In the Phenomenology, Hegel analyzes the stages of human consciousness, beginning with the earliest ones of sensation and perception. Consciousness turns into self-consciousness by recognizing itself in a confrontation with other conscious beings. Self-consciousness reaches a further stage when the mind becomes aware of the fact that the laws of nature are laws of the mind. Only when the mind is able to convert the certainty of reason into truth, does it attain the level of Spirit. At that point the mind becomes “aware of itself as its own world and of the world as itself.” When reason comes to understand that the core of all reality is as ideal as the mind itself, reason becomes science. Finally, in art and religion the mind reaches a perfect harmony between its subjective aspirations and its objective representations and may be said to have reached the absolute. This occurs either in the aesthetic experience when the appearance of beauty reflects the very nature of the Spirit, or in the religious experience when all reality comes to be represented as expressing a single all-transcendent and allencompassing absolute. Philosophy differs from religion only in that it conceptually expresses what religion symbolically represents. At this level Spirit may truly be called absolute. What appears in beauty is represented in religion and is conceptually thought in philosophy. In chapter 5 I have discussed Hegel’s rejection of aesthetic subjectivism, and in chapter 7 his detailed refutation of moral subjectivism.

Maine de Biran and the Recovery of Metaphysics in France

At the turn of the nineteenth century stands a major thinker who has remained virtually unknown in British and American philosophy, and who is hardly remembered in his native France. Yet his work proved crucial not only in overcoming the narrowly rationalist or sensationalist philosophies of the eighteenth century but also in restoring metaphysics after it appeared to have received a lethal blow from Kant. He was the only French philosopher active during the Romantic period who is worthy of being compared to the German idealists. His unfinished work

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shows the difficulty French thought experienced in extricating itself from the shallow sensationalism that had come to dominate it since the middle of the eighteenth century. François-Pierre Gonthier de Biran (1766–1824), a descendant of an old line of regional administrators in the Périgord region, received the surname Maine at his twentieth year when he was knighted by the Bourbon king Louis XVIII. He wrote much but published little. His diary (1815 – 24) reveals a person with a weak constitution, constantly preoccupied by his frailties, given to self-doubt, dissatisfied with his intellectual production, and unhappy about a political career, which his family tradition forced him to pursue yet which distracted him from his real vocation—philosophy. His diaries and philosophical treatises were published posthumously years after his death. The treatises, often unfinished and mostly unpolished, were written in a dense, at times tortured, prose, whereas the diaries, composed in the pure, classic style of the eighteenth century, earned him the title of virtuose de la musique intérieure (as the twentieth-century philosopher Henri Gouhier called him). Henri Bergson, one of the first to understand the full significance of Maine de Biran’s work, considered him the greatest metaphysician France had produced since Descartes and Malebranche. Through Bergson, such common terms as fait primitif and données immédiates de la conscience, coined by Maine de Biran, entered the French philosophical vocabulary. Remarkably enough, Maine de Biran accomplished his intellectual revolution within the very kind of thought he was bringing to an end. He used the concepts and language of the French ideologues, the partly rationalist but mostly sensationalist intellectual survivors of the Revolution. Like Destutt de Tracy and Condillac, he attempted to construct a “scientific” philosophy. With those anti-metaphysicians, he stressed that philosophy had to be grounded on well-established facts rather than on hypothetical speculations. He therefore started from the theory of sensations on which Condillac, the leading French sensationalist, had built his cognitive system. To him, the term metaphysical always remained synonymous with “an uncertain hypothesis.”19 Soon, however, he realized that this system failed to account for the self-awareness that accompanies all experience. A sensation does not become a “fact” until it becomes fully conscious, and, at that point, the fact becomes an

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idea construed by the mind. The transition from sensation to idea is achieved by the mind itself and cannot be reduced to any external influence. Maine de Biran admits, of course, that the mind could not become aware of itself without being aware of “something else.” One could not exist without the other. Nonetheless, the internal sense of selfhood remains essentially different from impressions introduced from without. Locke at least had distinguished inner reflections from outwardly impressed sensations. But Condillac and his followers, although appealing to Locke’s philosophy, had neglected this distinction and traced the perception of inner states to the same source as sensations. Still, even in Locke’s presentation of consciousness, an essential element is missing. According to Maine de Biran, the primary sense of selfhood originates in an exercise of force, not in a passive experience. Only in the active resistance to otherness does the self become aware of itself. Hence it is primarily through an act of willing, not of understanding, that the mind rises to self-consciousness. I experience myself first as a power capable of causing pressure on bodies—my own and those of others. In and through the experience of its causal efficiency in the act of willing, the self becomes aware of itself. Self-awareness, then, does not originate in an intuition, as Descartes thought, but in an active encounter with otherness. Maine de Biran expressed these principles in a text to which he later refers as Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie (henceforth abridged to Essai), a first version of which he completed in 1812. He kept substantially reworking it for ten years and never published it.20 But from it he culled three prizewinning essays for the Academy of Berlin, the Academy of Copenhagen, and the Institut de France, each time giving his argument a new foundation. At the end of 1816 he notes in his Journal that he ought to get busy on a work that he considers far from finished, and, in October 1822, that he is “seriously considering the completion of a study that could soon be published.” Henri Gouhier, the eminent interpreter of his work, rightly claims: “Maine de Biran is the man of a single book, and he has never written that book.” In his conception of the mind as essentially a force, Maine de Biran came close to Leibniz, about whom he had written an article for the Biographie universelle (1812). Later, after he had become detached from the sensationalism of Condillac and the rationalism of the ideologues,

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he began reading Fichte and Kant in French translation. Their influence on this thought became dominant, particularly Fichte’s, who also had attributed the birth of self-consciousness to an act of the will.21 By thus establishing his philosophy on a relation, Maine de Biran avoids a problem inherent in Descartes’ cogito, which, by appearing as a simple, spiritual form of consciousness, does not adequately present the primary awareness of an incarnated mind. What Descartes proposes as a primary datum is in fact abstracted from a more archaic and more complex experience. “It is always the person who thinks, wills, and experiences such feelings of his existence, not the soul alone. When Descartes writes: I think, I exist, he separates from himself or from the feeling he has of his thought all that belongs to the body. Nonetheless, the body intervenes as an essential part of the person, so much so that without its organic condition, the person would not have the intimate feeling of his thought which he expresses in the words: I think.”22 This knowledge of the self, Maine de Biran repeats, is obtained not in a passive intuition but in an original act of willing: “I am an acting being: hence an order of realities proceeds from me, which have their source and principle in me. The sum of my actions and of the acts of the will that determine them, forms a system of things, of modes or facts determined by me alone.”23 Moreover, he independently reaches Kant’s objection against applying the category of substance to the self as the mind experiences it. To be sure, for Kant no less than for Descartes, the mind knows itself. Yet, being the primary condition of knowledge, the self as unity of apperception is unable to “double” itself into the kind of internal perception of the self that the French philosopher had in mind. By the time Maine de Biran had finally completed his Essai, new problems had arisen that required further investigation. In a manuscript written in 1813 on the relations between psychology and the natural sciences, he raised a question about the reality status of the phenomena he had studied in his Essai. Concern about the relation between appearance and reality led him to write another long paper, “Rapports des sciences naturelles avec la psychologie” (1813).24 In it he argues that any representation of an external phenomenon includes a belief in its real existence or, at least, in a real cause that has brought about the representation. At this point, Maine de Biran claims no more than a belief in reality,

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comparable to Kant’s belief in a thing-in-itself. Not until the “Notes sur la philosophie de Kant” (1816) did he bring his reflections on Kant’s philosophy to a conclusion. That the self was a primary fact of consciousness was confirmed by Kant’s notion of the self as “unity of apperception,” which is responsible for the objectivity of representations.25 Yet for Kant, this self has no knowable content, and the emptiness of this inner self precludes any possibility of building a metaphysical system on it. For the French philosopher, on the contrary, the primitive fact of the self is neither empty nor simple. The primary awareness of myself as acting implies a certitude and even, as he was to argue later, an initial knowledge of the content of the three objects of metaphysics that Kant had declared inaccessible to human reason: the nature of the self, the reality of the physical world, and the existence of God. Maine de Biran likewise rejected Descartes’ interpretation of the primary experience of the cogito ergo sum. The idea of thinking by no means implies that I therefore must exist as a real substance. Nor does the idea of an infinite being, inaccessible to the mind’s own power, imply that an existing infinite being must have infused it into the mind, as Descartes claims in his Méditations (Meditation III). He wrote this critique of Descartes’ “proof ” of the existence of God before reading it in Charles Villers’s La philosophie de Kant (1801). Of course, he admits that the mind possesses an immediate apprehension of its selfconsciousness. But how does Descartes justify the transition from an idea, that is, a mode of consciousness, to the reality of a substance? We may look for the origin of ideas. But Maine de Biran denies that the idea of an infinite being can only be caused by an infinite being. Nothing prevents a finite mind from conceiving of such a being. Unfortunately, Descartes treats ideas as real beings that must have a real cause. Maine de Biran rules out any chance of attaining the absolute by arguments of reason alone. Nonetheless, he remains troubled by what Georges Le Roy has called “a metaphysical unrest”—all the more remarkable because he was anti-metaphysical to the end.26 By the end of 1816, he began to incorporate some idealist theses within his own philosophy. Thus, he writes on March 3, 1817: “The recent systems of philosophy in Germany offer this advantage that they have been taken from the depths of the self ” ( Journal, 2:19). Still, he never completely accepted Idealism. In his weekly discussions with the

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physicist André-Marie Ampère and the young Victor Cousin, the question came up of whether knowledge of reality is entirely derived from the knowing subject, as the Kantian Victor Cousin held, or is also derived from a source outside the self, as Ampère thought. To the annoyance of his discussion partners, Maine de Biran was never able to make up his mind on the issue. He suspected Ampère of returning to a precritical objectivism. At the same time he hesitated to commit himself unreservedly to Kantian subjectivism. The reason for his reluctance will become clearer in his later defense of realism. Yet he unambiguously sided with Fichte and Schelling in criticizing Kant’s denial that the mind has knowledge of things-in-themselves. Does the fact that things are perceived only to the extent that the mind refers to them imply that they have no independent existence? Does it not rather mean that human knowledge never exhausts all aspects of an object and hence necessarily remains limited in its knowledge of reality, yet nevertheless attains the real in some way? To the question “What is it for a thing to be in itself?” Maine de Biran responds that, at least in the self ’s awareness of itself, being (yet not necessarily substantial being) and knowledge coincide. From this identity he concludes, as Descartes had concluded from his initial cogito, that the kind of evidence characteristic of that privileged moment may, in given conditions, be transferred to other cognitive acts. But what are the conditions that allow us to extend the self-awareness of the acting self to the effects of its acting?27 The question is not whether the mind actively contributes to the knowledge of reality, but whether the mind knows reality as it is in itself. In the end, Maine de Biran qualified his own original conclusion by calling the mind’s certainty a primeval belief ” (croyance) in the reality of the objects of knowledge. “From the fact that the natural and original constitution of our spirit forces us to believe that certain things are real or exist in themselves and by themselves, independently of us, it does not follow that those things are not as we think they are. To the contrary, by applying our reason to these necessary beliefs, we find that the subjective necessity itself is a legitimate proof of the reality of an object thought or conceived as real.”28 In his “Notes sur la philosophie de Kant,” the philosopher continues to waver between idealist certainty and Kantian belief. He is actually raising a metaphysical problem, which German idealists were trying to

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solve at the same time, namely, how human knowledge ever reaches the point in which thought and being coincide. In a Journal entry of 1818 he writes: “How can we have notions of real, absolute beings or noumena? How do we know that certain relations which we primitively perceive as existing between phenomena, also in the same way exist between beings or things-in-themselves?” (Journal, 2:154). Descartes’ problem should not have been how to establish an Archimedean point of indubitability in the thinking process. Rather, it was how the mind is able to establish a meeting of thought and being. Once that question is answered, epistemological problems become secondary. Without an answer, no epistemology will ever yield the certainty that Descartes demanded. Kant’s philosophical prohibition of metaphysics stems from his a priori exclusion of intellectual intuitions. His position implies that reality can never be immediately present to thought. For the French philosopher, the primeval self-consciousness inherent in all acting includes such an immediate presence. He avoids using the term intuition because of its connotation of passive givenness for what is essentially an act. Maine de Biran remains ambiguous about Kant, however. On the one side, he criticizes Kant for all the reasons I have mentioned: the emptiness of the original self, the impossibility of attaining reality as it is in itself, the alleged separation between theoretical and practical reason. On the other side, he recognizes that Kant is the one who showed him the way out of phenomenalism and, indirectly, the way to metaphysics. Earlier I mentioned that the primary act of consciousness induces a necessary belief in the reality of things. Gradually, Maine de Biran began to interpret this necessary belief as implying an equally necessary belief in a transcendent cause. Previously, his philosophy had remained agnostic on this issue, all the more so given that his moral theory excluded any divine intervention in the free act. Still, Maine de Biran was not an atheist. His Journal contains frequent allusions to religion. But religion, for him, had remained a matter of feeling, unrelated to philosophy: “La religion est un sentiment de l’âme plutôt qu’une croyance de l’esprit” (Journal, Jan. 21, 1815; 1:39). In his Journal (May 4 – 6, 1815; 1:76– 77) he distinguishes croyance (belief ) from foi (faith): We are forced to believe [croire] in the real existence of the invisible causes of the phenomena we see and feel, although they themselves are

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invisible and untouchable. Common sense does not force us to move beyond these causes. But if reason admits the existence of substances and causes hidden under the phenomena, one might reasonably wonder whether there are not one or several causes, forces, or substances beyond those by which we interpret the phenomenal world. There begins that faith which Cartesian philosophers have confused with a belief in the efficient causality of an external ultimate substance. Instead they should have conceived it as an immanent, mystical cause. To attribute the totality of all that exists to an efficient causality, such as the one we assume to support phenomena, becomes meaningless once we raise the metaphysical question why there is being at all.

Maine de Biran’s earlier position had never integrated belief or faith within his philosophy. In the Essai and in the “Notes sur la philosophie de Kant,” he had removed the rationalist objections to the possibility of such integration. In the Journal entries of May 1815 he explores the actual realization of a philosophical spiritualism. One major problem remained: he had built his moral system on the autonomy of the moral agent. In a series of notes written in 1818 and later collected under the title “Fragments relatifs aux fondements de la morale et de la religion,” the author reopens the question concerning the relation between morality and religion.29 He squarely confronts the difficulties created by a transcendent foundation of morality. Yet he finds support in Kant’s conclusion that at least morality postulates a belief in a transcendent foundation. At the same time, he differs from Kant in that the moral act does not merely postulate a transcendent foundation but also requires it as a logical necessity. Moral causality is entirely my own, yet it is guided by a conscience, which is of transcendent origin. Maine de Biran concludes, “Reason [thereby] finds a living cause in the intimacy of conscience. Reason does not create this idea, as it creates the notion of substance. . . . The absolute existence of this cause [conscience] is a fact, not an abstraction.”30 The distinction between cause and substance in this passage is of capital importance. The notion of substance, for Maine de Biran just as for Descartes and Spinoza, is an ultimate one among philosophical categories. It corresponds to the question: What is anterior to causality? In some respect the self is an ultimate cause, insofar as the causal act is, indeed, the only source of

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self-determination. Hence, if the self had no other awareness than that of being an acting self, it might be called substance as well as cause. We experience ourselves as causes, but “we are unable to have a consciousness or feeling of ourselves as substances” ( Journal, May 8, 1816; 1:127). Nonetheless, in the case of acting we imply the existence of an agent before the acting. “Thus we conceive of the notion of substance as anterior to all others, not in the mind or in the order of ideas, but outside the mind and in the order of independent absolute realities.” Obviously, then, in the ontological order, substance is prior. Up to this point, the Journal has not yet raised the question of an ontologically absolute substance. In his “Notes sur la philosophie de Kant” (written only a few months earlier in 1816), the issue was still whether our ideas attain things in themselves. Now, however, the issue is distinguishing the order of causal experience from the ontological order of substantial being. In the Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie (1823 – 24), Maine de Biran grants ontological primacy to the substance that is actively involved in all causal acts. Crucial, then, in his transition to a religious philosophy was the insight that moral life, however autonomous, presupposes a transcendent foundation. The passive element present in self-experience argues against calling the self a substance in the Cartesian sense of “what depends on nothing else.” The causal experience implicitly refers to an absolute order. The self has a beginning in time and, once it exists, its identity becomes frequently interrupted by sleep and periods of unconsciousness. Only an absolute cause is able to grant it a beginning and, once it exists, to preserve its selfhood from permanent loss. Consequently, the self, despite its firstness in the order of experience, can be no more than a relative cause. The change in Maine de Biran’s thinking about the source of the moral consciousness affects his way of defining moral ideals. In his earlier years he had considered the Stoic principle of self-determination the most appropriate rule for human conduct. In September 1817 he began to criticize it for implying that it renders the person insensitive to feeling and other passive experiences. “Stoic morality, sublime as it is, goes against human nature when it attempts to bring under the control of the will affections and feelings that in no way depend on it” ( Journal, Sept. 30, 1817; 2:67). Christian virtue is more realistic in as-

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suming that it is impossible not to be disturbed in mind and body. As he continues to think about the matter, he reaches the conclusion that the primary religious law to love God and your neighbor belongs to a morality that is more positive than the indispensable but negative Stoic ideal of the control of the passions (Journal, May 25, 1819; 2:228). The rules of Stoicism may be appropriate for the strong. “But what succor can they give to the poor of spirit, the weak sinners, the sick, and all those who feel themselves delivered to all the weaknesses of the soul and a sick body?” ( Journal, Oct. 21, 1819; 2:242). Increasingly in his writings, Maine de Biran links moral ideas to religious faith as their necessary foundation. He states, “As I find nothing in myself nor outside myself, in the world of ideas or of objects, nothing to satisfy me or to sustain me, I have lately become inclined to seek in the notion of an absolute, infinite, unchangeable being the stable point of support that my spirit and soul demand” ( Journal, June 1– 6, 1818; 2:126). Around the same time he begins to integrate the idea of transcendence within his anthropological synthesis. He now describes the soul as having three faces: one turned inward upon the self; a second turned outward to other selves; and a third one directed to God as the absolute truth in which the mind learns the real nature of things. His notion of the third face obviously marks a break with the idea of the self as a moral “absolute.” Similarly, he distinguishes three levels of acting. At the first level, the mind, fully engaged outside itself, is nothing in and for itself. At the second, the mind draws a firm line between itself and all that lies beyond itself. At the third, the self that functioned as if it were absolute “becomes relative with respect to a higher absolute” ( Journal, Dec. 18, 1818; 2:188). Although the author did not fully incorporate the experience of this third level (imprecisely called a “higher absolute”) within his system until shortly before his death, namely, in his Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie, we may consider his move toward a spiritual philosophy as complete by the spring of 1818. In June he notes: “The religious and moral beliefs, though not created by reason but nevertheless a base or necessary starting point for reason, now present themselves as my only refuge, and I do not find true science except where previously I, with other philosophers, saw nothing but dreams and phantoms” ( Journal,

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June 1– 6, 1818; 2:126 – 27). The older person becomes more sensitive to religion, he claims, because reason is less troubled in its exercise and less disturbed by images or affections that used to absorb it. “The mind feels the need to move to something that endures—an absolute truth.” The Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie, written in the last months of his life and interrupted by his death, was Maine de Biran’s final attempt to reinterpret his entire system in the light of this new insight. Despite the enormous problems this collection of loose fragments poses to an interpreter, with their abrupt transitions from a philosophical to a religious, indeed, explicitly Christian, language, they nevertheless demonstrate Maine de Biran’s decisive move toward a philosophical spiritualism.31 In this final project, the author returns to the three levels of the moral consciousness, which he now presents as stages in the hierarchy of life. On the lowest level, the self is mainly concerned with the preservation of the body and the propagation of the species. As social concerns join the organic ones, the influence of imagination and intellect increases, and the self moves beyond its immediate needs and interests. With the self ’s full awareness of its causal power, the true moral life begins. Although initially the self is outwardly oriented, it turns inward as self-consciousness intensifies and, beyond its activity in the world, attains a yet higher stage of life. “A person’s second life appears to have been given in order to rise above it to a third life where, freed of the yoke of affections and passions, a genius or demon directs and enlightens it as with a reflection of divinity.”32 In following these stages, the mind gradually surpasses the restrictions of individuality and places itself within reach of full philosophical truth. Maine de Biran, somewhat prematurely, describes this discovery of transcendence in religious terms: “The third [stage] is that of souls that have been illuminated by the lights of religion, the only true and immutable ones” ( Journal, June 11, 1820; 2:276). Since 1819 his thought had been moving in a Platonic direction. A Journal entry of that year begins with a long excerpt from Plato’s Phaedo. The author agrees with the Greek philosopher that all philosophical problems come down to questions about the origin of ideas. Some ideas originate from the impact of impressions upon the senses, which the mind transforms into universal ideas. Others are innate in the mind. To both, the mind brings unity and

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coherence. But ideas concerning a transcendent goal surpass the mind altogether ( Journal, Dec. 1819; 2:257– 58). Constantly hampered by physical weakness and disease, the philosopher had come to understand Plato’s words that life is an apprenticeship in dying. Reinterpreting Plato’s teaching in a biblical sense, he often identifies it with the doctrine presented in the New Testament by Paul: “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace” (Rom. 8:6), or, “If we live by the spirit, let us also be guided by the spirit” (Gal. 5:25). At other times, however, he returns to a more cautious interpretation. Thus, in a Journal entry of 1821 (written before the Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie), he wonders whether philosophy can conclude that there is anything more than a dark, transcendent power. “Is this power blind and devoid of intention? Is it intelligent and sovereign in all of nature? On both sides we encounter impenetrable mysteries, insoluble questions” ( Journal, April 1821; 2:318). In his final years, the author again compares his Christianized Platonism with the Stoicism that once had been his moral ideal. In a fragment planned for the Nouveaux essais, he claims that Stoicism restricts the mind, whereas Platonism expands it. Even the noble Marcus Aurelius does not move beyond the “second stage of (moral) life”; he ignores the higher, third stage altogether.33 Maine de Biran had been increasingly shifting toward Fénelon. In his Journal he notes: “In my present disposition I might be satisfied with Fénelon’s Quietism. He, indeed, is my most common reading outside working hours” ( Journal, Dec. 1819; 2:254). Long after his death, two twentieth-century philosophers, Henri Bergson and Maurice Blondel, rediscovered the philosophical significance of Maine de Biran’s work. From the premise that God is the immanent causal power of the self, the elderly philosopher concluded that God “dwells” in the mind. Mystics, of course, have always assumed some identity of the human with the divine spirit. Yet ever since the vehement critique of Malebranche for allegedly having confused philosophy with faith, no philosopher in France had dared to restate that thesis, until Maine de Biran grounded it on Platonic premises. In the end, his position came to resemble Malebranche’s Augustinian idea of a religiously

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enlightened reason. Yet while Malebranche, the French Oratorian, had principally engaged with Descartes, Maine de Biran’s major challenge to the end of his life was Kant’s metaphysical skepticism. The significance of Maine de Biran’s philosophy for French Romanticism consists in the fact that it broke the firm hold of the contrary forces of sensationalism and rationalism on the French mind in the eighteenth century. Maine de Biran never belonged to the Romantic Movement: at the most, he had a reading acquaintance with Lamartine and de Vigny. But his writings played a part in the birth of the French Neo-Romantic philosophies of Bergson, Blondel, and Gilson after the Second World War.

chapter 11

A New Religion?

In this final chapter I return to a subject that had been at the heart of the preceding analysis of the Romantic mind. Religion is a difficult topic, partly because the religious conditions of Europe in the early nineteenth century were unprecedentedly complex and varied from one region to another. This much, however, appears clear: the secularization that had begun with the Enlightenment and had culminated in the rabid anticlericalism of the Revolution was giving way to a religious revival. That revival, however, seldom implied a return to the past. Romantic religion differed from traditional faith. Schleiermacher, the principal Romantic theologian, appeared to have understood the situation quite well when he addressed his Discourses on Religion “to its cultured despisers.” All English, French, and German Romantic poets, with the exception of Coleridge, had moved away from any kind of dogmatic faith. Byron and Shelley had departed ostentatiously from Christianity. Goethe and Schiller severed their ties less noisily but no less decisively. In France, Lamartine, de Musset, and Hugo were believing Catholics in their youth but later left the Church. Only de Vigny died with the rites of the Catholic Church. Yet all of them were seeking an ideal that surpassed the reach of ordinary human capacities, and most framed that search in religious terms. Even those whose thinking was furthest removed from traditional monotheist faith continued to speak its language. Religion after the French Revolution

After the Republican government had suppressed all traditional forms of public worship in France, Napoleon’s Concordat with the Catholic 309

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Church, signed in 1801, was an armistice in the battle between Church and state, even though it was not the end of the war. The Catholic Church in France renounced its earlier possessions but regained control over its sanctuaries. The clergy were to receive salaries and pensions from the state, like other state functionaries. The smoldering conflict flared up again when the emperor held Pope Pius VII, who was unwilling to serve his political plans, captive in Savona. This incident, in which Napoleon overplayed his hand, caused an unexpected outpouring of sympathy for the Roman pontiff. Ultramontanism suddenly gained a strong foothold in the traditionally Gallican French Church. In 1819, Joseph de Maistre in Du pape proposed a global theocracy of European nations under the pope as the only means of halting the continuing political chaos. His appeal, so totally at odds with the principles that had guided French society for the past thirty years, received an amazingly positive response. It even initiated a new school of thought in France, which, with the conservative political thinker Louis-Gabriel de Bonald and later with L. E. Bautain, raised tradition to the level of supreme authority in matters of faith. This traditionalism would later be condemned by the pope, who was unwilling to deprive revelation of its philosophical support as well as of his own interpretation of it. An early and unusually eloquent advocate of papal supremacy was the convert Félicité de Lamennais (1782 – 1854). Before he embraced the liberal ideas for which he eventually was condemned by the Church, Lamennais defended both the pope and the ecclesiastical tradition as intransigently as Joseph de Maistre had done. In his Essai sur l’indifférence (1817) he rejected the supreme authority of abstract reason in favor of the universal wisdom of the human race, as incorporated in religion and its traditional institutions. Chateaubriand also appealed to the historical wisdom of the Catholic Church and to the beauty of the culture she had introduced in France. His Génie du Christianisme revived the sagging spirits of French Catholics after the Revolution. That event, which until recently had dominated all minds, appeared less significant if viewed from the historical perspective of many centuries. Under the two Bourbon kings, the Church in France regained much of its previous power. A number of laws practically restored Catholicism as the state religion. Yet the ideas of the Enlightenment gradually repos-

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sessed the intellectual elite, to a point where the period between 1800 and 1840 has been called l’âge des secondes lumières (the time of the second Enlightenment).1 Religiously, the Restoration was a period of little inspiration, much opportunism, and nearly universal hypocrisy. The July Revolution of 1830 ended the reactionary, clergy-ridden regime of the Bourbons. Some of the Church’s legislative successes and all of its problems survived the change in government. Yet suddenly, it seemed, many believers had become aware of those problems and began to devote a great deal of energy to trying to solve them. An intense catechization and religious education attempted to catch up with decades of neglect and massive religious ignorance. New popular devotions also began to compensate for the loss of active religious practice. An important event was the founding of a liberal Catholic newspaper, L’avenir, in 1830. Its creative, socially concerned young editors, Lamennais, Henri Lacordaire, and Charles de Montalembert, were to leave their mark on the entire century. Their liberal position rested on the surprising argument that only a complete reliance on Rome would free the French Church from the control of the Gallican bishops, “lackeys of the state,” as L’avenir called them, who were incapable of implementing the liberal principles of modern culture, such as the full recognition of freedom of conscience (obstructed by a state religion) and the opposition to economic policies that failed to guarantee workers a subsistence wage. The paradox of an Ultramontanist paper functioning as an organ of Catholic liberalism did not last long. Already in 1831 the French bishops, whose conciliar theology L’avenir rejected in favor of one based on papal authority, banned the paper from their seminaries. Lamennais appealed to the pope, whose cause he had so energetically defended. But Gregory XVI foresaw nothing but political trouble coming to his papal states from L’avenir’s brand of liberalism. Instead of granting his support, he wrote the encyclical Mirari vos (1832), condemning freedom of conscience (which he called indifferentismus) as “insanity [delirium], a most contagious error” and declaring that the principle of separation between Church and state was religiously unacceptable. The editors submitted, and the paper folded. Yet Lamennais, the leader of the group, was not resigned to the destruction of his life work. He took his case to the French people in his brilliantly simple, aphoristic

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Paroles d’un croyant (Words of a Believer) (1833). Although it contained a revolutionary message, the author advocated no violence. In fact, he preached resignation. Yet the book was about spiritual liberation. All people, he argued, including Christians, have a duty and a right to follow their conscience. “When others, even if they are mistaken in their faith, request from you that sacred right, respect it in them, even as you once asked the pagans to respect it in yourselves” (ch. 28). Though Paroles never threatens, its apocalyptic message, couched in the language of the Prophets and the Book of Revelation—“Tenez-vous prêts car les temps approchent” (Be prepared, for the time is near) (ch. 24)—announces an imminent social reversal. The author’s tendency to rewrite biblical eschatology in social terms became even more prominent in his Livre du peuple (1837), written after the Paroles had been condemned in the encyclical Singulari nos (1834) and its author had severed all ties with the Catholic Church. The religious tone persisted, but Christianity itself now came in for sharp criticism. By losing its touch with “the religion of nature,” the Christian faith, according to Lamennais, had neglected the mystery of creation. It had turned into a spiritualism “outside nature and antagonistically opposed to it” (ch. 10). The faulty concept of a “supernatural” order had placed the Christian faith in a sharp opposition to natural religion. Instead of promoting a society ruled by justice and equality, Christianity had established and continued to maintain an institution based on a monastic model. In Germany, official secularization arrived somewhat later than in France. Yet absolutist rulers such as Frederick II in Prussia and Joseph II in Austria already had curtailed the political power of the Catholic and Protestant Churches and had implemented Enlightenment principles of tolerance. Yet a full legal separation between Church and state did not go into effect in Germany until 1803. By that time, religious ideas had begun to merge with new, secular ones. Thus, the ideal of Bildung, which was religious in origin,2 had gradually turned into a secular ideal. The relation between religion and culture assumed a greater significance and a more theoretical form than in France. The transformation occurred primarily within theology and centered on the autonomy of the secular. The polemics between two leading Romantic theologians, the Protestant Ferdinand Christian Baur and the Catholic Johann Adam

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Moehler, turned around the legitimacy of the secular. In the end, these apparently esoteric theological disputes had more radical effects on the evolution of nineteenth-century culture than the overt fights between religious thinkers and defenders of la société laïque in France. The effects of these intra-religious disputes did not always turn out favorable to traditional religion, however. Indeed, it was in the theologies of David Friedrich Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Ludwig Feuerbach that the atheism of Marx and Engels found a theoretical foothold. German Romantics rejected the Enlightenment idea of religion as the conclusion of a rational argument. For them, faith and devotion were highly subjective. As we have seen, Romantic subjectivism did not necessarily remain enclosed within the self, but aimed at a goal that altogether surpassed individual self-consciousness.3 Fichte and Schelling clearly intended to transcend the individual self. Nevertheless, poets and artists came to distrust those system builders who, once again, enclosed the Absolute within a philosophical system. Many Romantic thinkers held that the religious quest need not pass through the conceptual mediations of idealist philosophy, any more than through the dogmatic formulations of Christianity. The mind itself is intrinsically linked to the Absolute, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi had written. Hence, an unmediated presence of God appeared more authentically religious than either a dogmatic theological or an idealist philosophical one. We recognize here the long-working influences of Protestant Pietism and Catholic mysticism. Still, even though the devotees of these earlier forms of piety had conceived of God as infinite, they also, for the most part, viewed God as distinct from the finite world. Many Romantics and all idealists, however, conceived of the finite as included within the infinite. It is doubtful whether early Romantics, such as Goethe, Schiller, and the young Schelling, recognized any reality surpassing the all-inclusive totality of nature. A typical passage in Goethe’s Faust both recalls the memory of his past devotion and announces his changed concept of the absolute. After a night of despair, Faust suddenly hears the Easter bells announcing the blissful tidings of the Resurrection. He is moved by a sound that had made him rejoice in his early youth, yet he now feels forced to confess: “I hear the message but I can’t believe.” The bells now seem to awaken another, more primitive feeling of joy in the revival of

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spring. A similar memory of an earlier faith transformed into a feeling of union with nature may have inspired Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey.” The ruins of the ancient monastery remind the poet of the piety of his youth, but “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no more.” Yet he converts the memory into a new, mystical awareness of nature.4 The ruins evoke an earlier poem of remembrance, loss, and regain: Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” There, too, the poet, in the midst of a melancholy memory of time past, finds new joy in an awareness of being encompassed by nature. Was the union with nature a substitute for religion, or was it a new religious experience? M. H. Abrams in his classic Natural Supernaturalism claims that the God alluded to in a number of Romantic poems is an adventitious and “nonoperative factor.” The real agents are the poet’s mind and nature itself. Abrams recalls the words of the liberal English theologian F. D. Maurice: “Wordsworth’s Prelude seems to me the dying utterance of the half century we have just passed through, the expression . . . of all that self-building process in which Byron, Goethe, Wordsworth, the Evangelicals were all engaged.”5 I think this may somewhat oversimplify the matter. Romantic religion, however vague about its object, cannot be dismissed as a mere poetic “pantheism.” Without entering into the complex issue of what constitutes religion, we may safely assert that any awareness of transcendence (though not necessarily the steep one of traditional theism), if accompanied by an attitude of devotion, deserves to be called religion. Such was also the view of the Romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Before discussing his theology, however, we ought to consider two new factors that, especially in Germany, influenced Romantic religion or at least the theoretical reflection on it. They are, first, the revival of Gnosticism, and second, the revaluation of ancient mythology as well as of the part that mythology had played in the origin of monotheist faith. Th e G n o s t i c R e v i v a l

Gnosticism openly surfaced in William Blake’s apocalyptic visions, but it was also present in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and implicit in Hugo’s later poetry, even in Lamartine’s La Chute d’un Ange. Ferdinand

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Christian Baur, who, after Schleiermacher, had become the leading theologian of the Romantic epoch, wrote an erudite study of what he considered the strongest religious opponent of Christian faith, namely, Gnosticism. In Der christliche Gnosis (1835) he argued that a modern form of ancient Gnosticism was transforming the theology of believing into a philosophy of knowing. Even the intrinsically historical character of idealist philosophy, that is, the fact that it developed along successive stages of awareness, followed a Gnostic pattern of spiritual evolution. The historical beginnings of Gnosticism remain obscure. Some forms of it appear to have originated in Judaic circles both in Palestine and in Alexandria. The Jewish philosopher Philo (20 BCE– 50 CE), no Gnostic himself, may have influenced the development of a variety of Gnostic thought in Alexandria. In an attempt to reconcile Judaism with Platonic philosophy, Philo distinguished the spirit of Scripture from its letter, and the nature of God’s inner life from its revelation in Scripture. These distinctions may have played a role in establishing or confirming the Gnostic split between faith and the more advanced religious understanding through knowledge (gnosis). It was mainly as a reflection on the source of evil that Gnosticism entered Judaism and Christianity. According to the Gnostic interpretation, the biblical story of the fall of man had shifted responsibility for evil from the Creator to the creature, thereby declaring the victim the cause of evil. Plato unwittingly contributed to the creation of the Gnostic myth by his account of the cosmos in the Timaeus. The cosmos is modeled after an ideal reality, but because it contains matter, which is the metaphysical principle of indeterminacy, it remains inferior to its ideal archetype. It bears the seeds of corruption within itself. Plato’s Demiurge, the designer of this world, is not a god, nor is his work perfect. We should keep in mind that Plato’s story in the Timaeus is not a myth of creation, a notion that appears to be absent from his thought, but an account of the metaphysical principles that constitute a world (without beginning or end). In Plotinus, the difference between Platonism and Gnosticism becomes fully obvious. In his philosophy, the world is a necessary emanation of the One and therefore cannot be evil. Following Aristotle, Plotinus defined matter as the necessary “potentiality of all things” (Ennead, II.5.5).

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Neither Judaism nor Christianity regards matter (even if conceived as a substance rather than as a metaphysical principle) as intrinsically evil, since it is created by a good God. Nor did Platonists consider matter evil. Yet in being indefinite, it was for Plotinus an “utter destitution of sense, of beauty, of ideal principle” (Enneads, II.5.4). Hence, it could be a source of corruption. The Jewish-Christian interpretation that evil had entered the world through a moral fault, however, appeared incorrect to both Neoplatonists and Gnostics. For Plato and the Neoplatonists, evil was a mere absence of good. Gnosticism offered a variety of alternatives. Many Gnostics distinguished between a creator of the physical world (the Demiurge), whom they presented as evil, and an unknown, spiritual, saving God. However, the differences among the various Gnostic systems were enormous. Baur, the Romantic theologian, assorted the principal Gnostic systems according to their relation to Christianity. Some, such as those of Valentine and Basilides, conceived of paganism and Judaism as evolutionary stages on the way to Christianity. (In Baur’s Hegelian schema, those systems “mediated” between paganism, Judaism, and Christianity.) Other systems related Judaism to Christianity either in a complementary or in an oppositional way. If we limit ourselves to Christian forms of Gnosticism, that is, forms that incorporate Christian elements or at least are sufficiently open to be adopted by Christians, we find the following common characteristics: 1.

2.

3.

The interpretation of the origin of evil is fundamentally ambiguous, but in all cases it deviates from the biblical story of the fall. Evil is the effect of an evil creator, or of a negative principle that is in God, or of a fall that coincides with creation. Often, but not always, evil is linked to matter. A clear distinction is made between ordinary believers and pneumatikoi, that is, those who have insight ( gnosis) rather than faith. The pneumatikoi are superior to the hylikoi (those who included matter among the fundamental principles of being) and even to the psychikoi (those who did not surpass the level of the human psyche). The role of Christ remains ambiguous, since he is both spiritual and corporeal. Some Gnostics adopted a docetic interpretation, as if Christ only appeared to have a body but was in fact incorporeal and never

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suffered or died. Others distinguished between the man, Jesus, and Christ, the divine being. The divine center, called pleroma (fullness), where the good God reigns, consists of a number of aeons (comparable to emanations), the lowest of which was that of Agamoth (or Sophia), who left the divine pleroma but was redeemed by Christ and allowed to reenter it. A pervasive dualism divides this divine realm from the physical world. The latter is a degraded world. This dualism notably reappears in later sects, such as the Cathari in Southern France and the Bogomils in Bulgaria.

That there was a strong revival of Gnosticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century has been confirmed by a number of contemporary scholars, among them Eric Voegelin, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Gilles Quispel, and Cyril O’Regan. Baur considered Hegelian philosophy a primary instance of the modern return of Gnosticism. In his Gnostic Return in Modernity, Cyril O’Regan has shown that Baur’s interpretation of Gnosticism is itself Gnostic.6 Baur’s genealogical reading of Romantic and idealist philosophy as essentially Gnostic must certainly be qualified. Romantic philosophy includes much that is Neoplatonic rather than Gnostic. With the possible exception of Schelling’s later writings, the Neoplatonic influence on Idealism was stronger than that of Gnosticism. Moreover, the genealogical structure of Gnostic theology is only one of its characteristics, nor is it the principal one. Far more typical, I think, is the basic dualism that runs through all Gnostic systems, ancient and modern. In Romantic literature, Gnosticism is nowhere as explicit as it is in Blake’s Prophecies. In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “America,” and “Europe,” as well as in The Book of Urizen, The Book of Los, and the long poem Jerusalem, Blake opens up a religious vision unseen since the writings of Jacob Boehme. But, unlike ancient Gnostics, he never developed his vision into a coherent system. Blake interpreted cataclysmic contemporary events, such as the French Revolution, in a Gnostic, apocalyptic sense.7 Those events, he believed, expose the illusions inherent in our ordinary beliefs and values and thereby initiate what will be fully revealed when this world ceases to exist. According to “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1790), the French Revolution achieved a total reversal of

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traditional faith. It made the moral and religious views of the Christian and Jewish traditions suddenly appear obsolete. The Revolution turned upside down the priority of good over evil, of angels over devils, even of God over Satan. The criminal actions of coarse, selfish men laid bare the real nature of things, as religion had never done. This reversal manifested the previously hidden strength of primeval forces. In his Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell (1757), Swedenborg had claimed that without contraries no progression is possible. In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” Blake agrees: “Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil.” The Revolution had inverted the once sacred subordination of evil to good. It had shown that good is merely obedience to reason, whereas evil is active energy. Blake invites his readers to a critical reading of Scripture. He regards Milton’s Messiah, “the Governor of Reason,” as identical with Satan in the Book of Job. Christian civilization had kept “the giants who formed this world” imprisoned, but in the Revolution they broke their chains. By equating the idea of God with the supreme good, Christianity has raised law and reason to a transcendent status. The Gnostic revelation exposes the traditional subordination of the principle of evil to that of good as a deception. The term evil had served as a means for constraining the forces of energy, while the word good had unduly divinized reason. Blake’s The Book of Urizen (1794) inverts the meaning of the first chapters of Genesis. Urizen refers to the Elohim of Genesis, whom Blake identifies with the deist God of the Enlightenment, as a rationalist fiction. In the colored plate that accompanies the text, the God of creation appears as a blind monster hunched over the book he is writing. The poem describes him as the great divider of his own eternity (to which the name Urizen may allude: in Greek, horizein means to limit). He is indeed the God who measures and divides, as “The Ancient of Days,” the God of Newton, who appears with a gigantic compass on Blake’s last and best-known plate, suggests. A second major figure in Blake’s theogony is Los. Chapter 3 of The Book of Urizen presents the primeval act of creation as a self-separation of the Creator, a splitting of the infinite fullness of being.8 Urizen has exiled himself out of his own

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eternity. Los, the fruit of Urizen’s self-separation, desperately tries to restore the primeval order. Yet the more he labors to repair the broken unity through mechanical means, the more the disorder increases. The story of Los presents an alternative to the Genesis narrative: a new attempt to create order through separation, followed by a new fall. Los is not a Savior, even though he is a god of pity. Indeed, he is so compassionate that his pity becomes impersonated in a female figure, Enitharmon. Together they gave birth to Orc (perhaps derived from Orcus, or hell), a wild character intent on clearing the world from oppression. “Orc is the pent-up energy in human nature and human history that is at first held down but eventually erupts or explodes.”9 The real Savior in Blake’s poem is Christ, who abolished laws and “mock’d the Sabbath and . . . the Sabbath’s God.” He has restored the primeval, divine Man, who stands at the center of the Gnostic Universe as one of the first aeons of the Absolute. After Sophia, the lowest aeon within the divine sphere, had sinned by a presumptuous desire for the Father (the Absolute), Christ enables her to rejoin the pleroma in a permanent union with him. At the end of Blake’s strange story, we cannot but wonder what attracted him, and to a lesser extent other Romantics, to Gnosticism. Was it the idea of a spiritual realm of wisdom and goodness that released them from the sadness of the objective world? Gnosticism appealed to many who preferred an internal religion over the “sensuous cult” of Christianity. Its spiritual quality insulated it from a faith that had been discredited by the critique of the Enlightenment. In addition, Gnosticism made some sense of the sudden reversal of the traditional order during the French Revolution and enabled its adherents to view the relation of good and evil in a new, more satisfying, light. Ultimately it was, as it had always been, a theodicy of a good God in the face of an evil world.

Th e R e t u r n o f M y t h o l o g y i n Schelling’s Late Philosophy

The Romantic resurgence of Gnosticism was accompanied by a renewed interest in mythology. The two had often been linked; the authors of

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ancient Gnostic systems had created their own mythologies to formulate ideas that neither common sense nor philosophy was able to express, and Blake had followed their example. Schelling, in contrast, interpreted the myth as an independent form of consciousness that constituted an early but essential stage of evolution toward religion. The polytheism inherent in mythical thought had played an essential role, in his judgment, in the rise of a true monotheism, that is, a belief in one God that nevertheless includes a plurality of relations within the divine unity. He considered such a plurality indispensable for conceiving finite beings as dependent on one, infinite God. Despite the flaws of Schelling’s work, no philosopher has yet surpassed the scope and intellectual depth of the two-volume treatise on myth that he composed during the final years of his life. Schelling’s first extensive discussion of mythology appeared in Schlegel’s Gespräch über die Poesie (Discourse on Poetry) (1800). Ludoviko, one of the participants in this “discourse” and now generally believed to represent Schelling himself, claims that Romantic poetry requires a new mythology, one built not on nature, as the ancient myths had been, but on the mind’s internal struggle toward self-consciousness. A year later, Schelling made the relation between art and mythology the core theme of his lectures on art delivered at the University of Jena (1802 – 3).10 In them he argued that art succeeds where philosophy fails, namely, in the capacity of representing the “absolute.” The absolute remains inaccessible to theoretical knowledge because such knowledge presupposes a separation between a knowing subject and a known object, while in aesthetic contemplation, subject and object coincide and thereby create at least an appearance of the absolute. But in art, and even more in religion, the mind also needs to represent the absolute. It does so by means of symbolic images. Mythology has traditionally provided such images. The author therefore devotes the longest part of his Philosophy of Art to an analysis of mythology. Following in the path of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Mythology, Schelling limited his discussion to Greek myths because of their superior aesthetic quality. In his later Lectures on Mythology, Schelling changed the position he had taken in the Philosophy of Art, in which his perspective had been purely aesthetic. Even in the earlier work, how-

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ever, he had noticed a significant religious distinction between classical mythology and Christian symbolism. For the Greeks, the gods were never fully individualized. In Christian thought, the central dogma of God’s incarnation in one individual abolished the ancient priority of the universal. Schelling noted in an early essay on Dante (1802 – 3): “As the ancient world was the world of universals, so is the modern that of individuals. In the former, the universal is truly the particular: the race acts as an individual. In the latter, the starting-point is the particular, which must become universal” (Sämmtliche Werke, 3:574). The later Lectures on Mythology form part of Schelling’s so-called positive philosophy. Schelling claims that unless philosophy takes account of revelation, either a natural revelation obtained by the mind’s unconscious power in mythology, or a supernatural one in revealed religion, human thought is not qualified to make any positive assertions about the Absolute. A negative philosophy, that is, any philosophy taking no account of a revelation of the Absolute, may recognize the possibility of revelation and be capable of examining the historical and logical credentials of any claims of revelation. Yet, if it accepts these credentials as legitimate, philosophy ought to assume a different, more open attitude toward revelation. It should investigate the various modes of revelation and the light they shed on human existence. The validity of Schelling’s distinction depends on the question of whether philosophy can ever admit as true a meaning over which it has no ultimate authority. How could an alleged communication of what lies beyond the reach of the critical mind become a legitimate part of philosophy? Schelling answers: “Most people understand by philosophy a science, which reason purely and simply generates out of itself. From that standpoint, it is natural enough to consider the philosophy of revelation an attempt to present the ideas of revealed religion as necessary, pure truths of reason or to reduce them to those” (Sämmtliche Werke, 14:4). Positive philosophy cannot be justified within such a narrow definition of philosophical thought. Why should philosophy not investigate the “logic” of mythology and revelation, just as it analyzes data empirically acquired by natural sciences? Schelling’s response is true enough, but he fails to take into account that the conclusions of the natural sciences have passed through strict criteria of truth, whereas the

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truth of religious revelation has not. Unless he adduces further evidence, it rests on its own authority. According to the Lectures, mythology fulfills an indispensable role in preparing the mind for accepting a natural or a supernatural revelation. Myths originate in natural cognitive processes, claim no unconditional authority, and are subject to scientific and philosophical investigation. Yet in his Einleitung in die Philosophie (Introduction to Philosophy) (completed in 1830, but published only in 1989), Schelling shows that mythology corresponds to the very conditions of Being and hence is a precondition of all metaphysical speculation. His analysis is based on his theory of the three potencies (Potenzen), which dominates his entire later metaphysics. They respond to three fundamental, ontological questions: What made Being possible? How did it actually come to be? Can Being be both absolute and relative? Negative philosophy does not pose those questions. Traditional metaphysics directly starts with the concept of Being, without questioning its possibility. Positive philosophy commences with the conditions of the possibility of Being. According to Schelling, these conditions are implied in the three stages of the complete mythical cycle. The first condition, the sheer possibility of Being (das Seinkönnen), becomes intelligible only if one assumes, with Fichte and Schelling, that a transcendent will precedes actual being. The second condition follows from the fulfillment of the first. Here, Being (das Sein) emerges without restrictions and therefore also without differentiations. For Being to become a particular reality, its impact must be restricted. A third condition, then, consists in the ability of infinite Being to withdraw into itself and to be only this and not that (das Sosein). This reflective move restricts the undifferentiated power of being. Only a positive philosophy, Schelling claims, is able to think the transition from the second condition, undifferentiated Being, to the third condition, particular being. Negative philosophy conceives of being as an empty infinite. It fails to explain how the finite can be, if being can be thought only as infinite.11 Instead, positive philosophy in the light of revelation conceives of infinite Being as endowed with, yet not divided by, determinate attributes of the Absolute. Without revelation foreshadowed in mythology, Schelling claims, metaphysics is unable to answer its most fundamental question: Why is there

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Being rather than nothing? Next, it is unable to conceive of differentiated being. Parmenides, our first metaphysician, had to exclude from his concept of being the concepts of finitude and determination, as illusory forms of non-being. Schelling argues that only an idea of an Absolute that includes internal determinations can be an adequate ground for the existence of particular realities. Mythology and revelation enable the mind to conceive of such an idea. Schelling, then, rejects the concept of mythology, still widespread in his time, as a corruption of a primeval monotheistic revelation. For him, the most primitive form of religion was not monotheistic, as the proponents of a primeval divine revelation claimed. Polytheism, as well as the mythology built on it, far from being a decline from a primeval monotheism, marks an ascent to a higher spiritual level. It prepares the possibility of reintegrating the multiplicity of creation within a divine unity. How, then, did polytheism start? Schelling refers to the earliest form of religious consciousness, which is a mythical prefiguration of the first potency/condition of Being, as the reign of Uranus (the sky), who, according to Hesiod, was the oldest of the Greek gods. In giving this undetermined religious awareness the name of a god, the Greek poet appears to make it part of a theogony, which it is not. The most archaic consciousness knows no gods. Only in a further stage does the potency of essence rebel against the crushing weight of blind, infinite, undifferentiated being. Greek mythology represents this weakening of the oppressive power of Kronos (a more mythologized version of Uranus) either by giving him a female consort who shares his dominion, or by violently depriving him of his potency (for instance, by being emasculated or killed by his son). The ancient Greek historian Herodotus refers to the female consort, who at this point emerges in the Near East, as Urania. Powerful goddesses such as the Assyrian Mylitta, the Semitic Astarte, or the Phrygian Cybele have shorn the male god of his power, if his own son had not done so before. In areas where the female gods had gradually come to dominate the male ones, they had become oppressive, as had occurred in all Near Eastern civilizations just mentioned. A young male, either a god or a halfgod, eventually ends their reign. In Greek mythology this mysterious middle-deity, called Dionysus or Heracles, mediates between gods and

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humans. A similar figure appears in Egyptian, Persian, and Phoenician mythology. In all cases, the young god or half-god first places himself in service to the male god, now subjected by the goddesses yet still powerful. Soon, however, the old god begins to suspect the young one of undermining his authority and tests his loyalty by imposing a number of dangerous tasks on him. Such were the works of Heracles, a similar half-god, possibly of Phoenician origin. The servant god survives his trials and, through the good works he had accomplished, wins the favor of humans, whose harsh lot he has shared. Eventually, he is killed yet in some way brought back to life, after which he takes over the power of the old god. Presuming that Greek and Near Eastern myths followed a common pattern, Schelling equated the various mediating gods of the Near East with Dionysus, just as Herodotus, the Greek historian, had done. The coming of Dionysus and his Phoenician, Egyptian, and Persian counterparts introduces the third theogonic phase, or potency, which reconciles the first with the second principle. The struggle between the two former principles had ended in a defeat of the dominant principle. According to Schelling, that primeval dominant principle lacked the complexity required by a spiritual religion. With the advent of the mediating god, the celestial kingdom became less exclusive: it mediated the one with the many, the divine with the human. For Schelling, the mythical version of the three potencies is completed with the coming of this mediating god. He mentions only three mythologies that have actually completed, each in a different way, the full cycle of the three potencies: the Egyptian, the Indian, and the Greek. I have discussed the place of the Egyptian and Indian mythologies in Schelling’s philosophy elsewhere.12 Here I focus only on the Greek model of his theory, on which his entire argument depends. Herodotus had claimed that the Greeks first raised theogony to an intelligible system by giving names to the gods. Although this was clearly incorrect, nevertheless, Schelling held that the more articulated particularity of Greek myths gives them a semblance of greater intelligibility than that of Egyptian and Near Eastern myths. The ambiguous figure of Demeter occupies a central position in Greek mythology. The Greek mysteries revolved around her. She was obviously much more than a seasonal goddess. According to Schelling,

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the goddess of agriculture stands between the world of the past, dominated by the oppressive power of Kronos, and the world of the future, liberated by Dionysus (Sämmtliche Werke, 12:631). The simple life of the age of Kronos (in Latin, Saturnus), despite its harsh conditions, continued to evoke nostalgic memories in the Greek mind. It was remembered as a golden age, a time when no border stones divided the fields and when the earth was treated as a common possession. While seeking her lost daughter Persephone, Demeter, in Schelling’s view, is looking for the lost god of the beginnings. (Schelling’s interpretation here is hard to justify.) The Eleusinian mysteries enacted the goddess’s fruitless search, her resignation, and at last, the redemption by her son. Demeter’s daughter Persephone plays a crucial role. Testing her freedom, she wanders off on her own and is abducted by the god of the underworld to his kingdom of darkness. In response to the pleas of her mother, Hades allows her to spend half a year above ground and half a year with him in the underworld. The obvious seasonal reference of the myth hides a more profound awareness of the destiny of freedom, which moves from innocence to fall to rebirth. Yet a third god plays a major part in the Eleusinian mysteries: Dionysus, now presented as the god of the future, concludes the mythical cycle. After having taken part in the earlier polytheistic struggle and having been killed, Dionysus rises to a new life and will survive all of the other gods. In Greek mythology, this polymorphic god appears in three different impersonations. First, he is the chthonian Zagreus, the wild son of Zeus and Persephone, and still very much a figure of the rustic, primitive age. The second Dionysus, the so-called Theban Bacchus, a son of Zeus and the nymph Semele, incarnates the joy and revelry that accompanies the liberation from the old, oppressive god. In his murder by raging maenads, Schelling sees a symbol of the fragmentation of the idea of one god into the many gods of polytheism. It is, however, the third Dionysus, Iakchos, the son of Zeus and Demeter, who stands central in the mysteries (Sämmtliche Werke, 13:465– 83). Iakchos assumes some features of the first and the second Dionysus. (The hierophants of the Eleusinian mysteries still referred to him as Zagreus.) Yet his significance lies elsewhere. He is the god of the future. The Eleusinian mysteries reveal the esoteric meaning of the myth, according to Schelling. Their dramatic presentation forced the participants to confront the primeval terror hidden in the mythical narratives.

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Yet in the end, they promised beatitude after death. The reliving of Persephone’s descent to Hades concluded in an encounter with the god of life. “Hades and Dionysus are one,” Plutarch had cryptically written. While watching the mythical events reenacted in the mysteries, the initiates were liberated from the endless continuance of the mythical process. In the Phaedrus, Plato likens the goal of philosophy to that of the mysteries, namely, to move from a material to a spiritual realm, where death has no more power over life. In fact, the mysteries have more in common with the tragedy, which was believed to have originated in songs commemorating the suffering and death of Dionysus. The performances of classical drama began with a sacrifice to the god of the mysteries. While participating in the trials of the suffering god, the Eleusinian initiates intensely experienced the pity and fear that Greek tragedy aesthetically formalized. Why were the mysteries secret? The stories of Demeter and Dionysus were universally known; poets had sung their adventures, and playwrights had presented them on the stage. So, how could what was publicly known be kept secret? Schelling linked the “secret” to Dionysus’s third impersonation. Iakchos, the third Dionysus, popularly depicted as a child at Demeter’s breast, was called “the god who comes,” the god of the future. That future had to remain secret because the god who was to bring the theogonic process to an end threatened not only the other gods but the very social system that rested on them. In his poem “Brod und Wein,” Hölderlin had compared Dionysus to Christ, the one who was to come and openly to proclaim the end of the ancient gods. In Schelling’s judgment as well, the mediating god prophetically announced another Savior (Sämmtliche Werke, 12:347). Yet this revelation was restricted to the initiated. Even the gods should not hear about it. It was to be “shown,” not to be told. Whoever betrayed it risked capital punishment. Today, Schelling’s interpretation of the still unsolved problem of the secrecy of the mysteries impresses us as highly speculative. The mysteries certainly contained no prophecy of a future monotheism. At most, they may have suggested that Dionysus, the god of the future, would bring the ruling divine hierarchy to an end. Schelling was undoubtedly right, however, about the consolation that the mysteries

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brought to the deep-seated melancholy that, despite an exuberant vitality, possessed the Hellenic mind. Even in its most confident creativity— indeed, there, particularly—one senses a sad awareness of the irredeemable finitude of existence. The mysteries promised a better life after death. Whether or not the primary significance of the myth is what we would call “religious,” in the strict sense of the term, does not directly affect Schelling’s thesis that the myth prepared the way for a monotheist religion. He merely claims that the myth made it possible to conceive of the Absolute as having internal relations and thereby as being able to justify the existence of finite, determinate being within and though its infinity. In his Philosophy of Revelation, Schelling attempted to show that the plurality of the mythical gods prepared the way for the acceptance of the Christian mystery of a trinitarian God. In that controversial work, he applied the theory of the potencies to Christian doctrine. Mythological polytheism was needed to render a spiritual, that is, an inclusive monotheism acceptable. To the ancient Christian claim that the Old Testament prepared Israel for the appearance of the Messiah, Schelling added that pagan mythology induced the nations to look forward to “the god who comes.” This teleological interpretation of the myth may be plausible to a Christian believer, but a nonbeliever may just as well reverse the relation between Christ and Dionysus and regard Jesus as a new impersonation of Dionysus, as Hölderlin had suggested in one of his earlier poems. Since neither of these interpretations has reached a consensus on the historical facts, it cannot be acceptable even to those who admit the legitimacy of a positive philosophy. Schelling stands on more solid ground when arguing that the fundamental difference between revelation and myth consists in the following: revelation, at least the Christian one, by claiming to rest on a historical basis (whatever the factual basis of this claim), protects its message from being dispersed into the limitless self-interpretations of the myth (Sämmtliche Werke, 14:229 – 33). Contemporary students of religion have objected for the most part to Schelling’s method of interpreting the ancient myth. His decision to build a general theory of myth on the limited basis of Near Eastern and Greek mythologies, while omitting Oceanian, Germanic, and Slavic

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ones, is, of course, hard to defend. Even more questionable is the philosophical scheme of the three potencies, insufficiently supported by empirical evidence, within which he forced this theory. Walter Schulz, in a classic study,13 claims that Schelling’s so-called positive philosophy remained essentially as “negative” as that of Fichte and Hegel. What Schelling ascribes to divine revelation is in fact predetermined by the philosophical structure of his theory. The allegedly real God of revelation still remains a God of philosophy. Schelling might have replied that his positive philosophy is philosophy mediated by faith, a method anticipated by Augustine and Anselm. But the difficulty still remains that the theory of potencies, which Schelling imposes upon revelation, predetermines the nature of its content. What at the beginning appeared to be a method for understanding the content of mythology and revelation, in the end turned out to constitute its very content. Symptomatic of this philosophical predetermination is that Schelling unreservedly equates the Christian idea of reconciliation with his philosophical category of “mediation.” If Schelling had not preestablished the content of myth and revelation by his philosophical categories, we might regard his positive philosophy as legitimate. But then the traditional name of such an enterprise would be theology, not philosophy.

Th e R o m a n t i c Th e o l o g i a n s : Schleiermacher, Baur, Moehler

How did the transcendent aspirations of the Romantics find a formal expression in theology? Germany was fortunate to produce a few theologians who were able to respond sensitively to these aspirations and even keep them within the limits of a recognizable religious tradition. Friedrich Ernst David Schleiermacher (1768 – 1843), who wrote two books that responded to the times, became the most important theologian of the century. After his early schooling with the Moravian Brethren, Schleiermacher studied at the Theological Faculty of the University of Halle, known for its Pietist leanings. He lost the naïve faith of his youth in becoming acquainted with the theology of the Enlightenment, but, he later wrote, he already had “developed a basic mystical tendency

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that saved me and supported me during all storms of doubt.” This mystical tendency explains the strong spiritual impact on his contemporaries of his unconventional, daring thought, which was combined with a genuine piety. Schleiermacher’s work as a pastor and theologian began at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, where he served as chaplain. People flocked to his weekly sermons, which he delivered almost without interruption for forty years—the last twenty-five years in Berlin’s Trinity Cathedral. Together with Wilhelm von Humboldt, he played a major role in the founding of the University of Berlin and became the first dean of the Faculty of Theology. During the French occupation of the city by Napoleon’s troops, he, like Fichte, preached a patriotism that, after Prussia’s military defeat, helped restore the confidence of his countrymen and prepare the way for the splendid German culture of the early nineteenth century. Above these achievements stands the personal attractiveness of a person for whom love and goodness counted as more important than scholarly reputation. In 1799 he published his Reden über die Religion: An die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Discourses on Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers).14 In his introduction to a 1926 reprint of the first edition, Rudolf Otto called it “a veritable manifesto of the Romantics in its view of nature and history; its struggle against rationalist culture and the Philistinism of rationalism in the State, Church, school, and society; its leaning toward fantasy, melancholy, presentiment, mysticism.” In the dedication to a friend from his Moravian schooldays, Schleiermacher claimed that he had written the book in response to a crisis caused by Enlightenment rationalism. This was not entirely true, since the “cultured despisers” of religion were, in the first place, his Romantic contemporaries and their great models, Goethe and Schiller. Those Romantics felt little sympathy for a “positive” religion derived from a supernatural revelation. Schleiermacher intended to show that such a religion contained more than his “cultured” contemporaries thought, and also that by failing to adopt it, they deprived themselves of the most essential part of their culture. “The different existing manifestations of religion you call positive religions. Under this name they have long been the object of a quite pre-eminent hate. Despite your repugnance to religion generally,

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you have always borne more easily with what for distinction is called natural religion” (Reden III, Pünjer, 243; Disc., 214). Ironically, Schleiermacher’s own concept of religion could hardly be considered to be more than “natural” itself. It differed from that of his adversaries only in that he built it on a subjective, psychological basis rather than on rational arguments or on the order of nature. Despite the controversial nature of his work, he never disowned it, often referred to it, and continued to make changes in each new edition. He merely softened some passages in the first edition that had come close to pantheism. How, then, did the young theologian conceive of religion? He did so not through the usual characteristics of divine revelation, ritual rubrics, and moral prescriptions, but by referring to a pre-intentional state of consciousness, before the mind begins to concentrate on any particular subject. “You must apprehend a living movement; you must know how to listen to yourselves before your own consciousness. At least you must be able to reconstruct from your consciousness your own state. What you are to notice is the rise of your consciousness and not to reflect upon something already there” (Reden II and III, Pünjer, 53; Disc., 41). That moment, before full consciousness, is inaccessible to reflection because by reflecting on it, one would turn feeling into thought. Strictly speaking, the mind can only remember the prereflective experience. Only one other experience may be compared to it: the unmediated intuition inherent in the aesthetic experience. (In the later editions of Reden über die Religion, Schleiermacher avoided the term intuition, as being too objective, and referred to the entire experience, both the subjective and the objective sides, as feeling.) Schleiermacher describes the religious experience as “the immediate feeling of the Infinite and the Eternal” (Reden II and III, Pünjer, 21; Disc., 16). But some distinctness between the finite self and its feelings on one side, and the Infinite on the other, must be preserved if this “feeling of a total one-ness with Nature” (Reden II, Pünjer, 93) is to avoid pantheism. Even in the more radical first edition of the Discourses he distinguishes religious feelings from nonreligious ones. A religious feeling essentially differs from any other kind, he claims, by the fact that it consists in a “consciousness of the absolute unity of all life, that is, of the Deity.”15 That statement, obviously, does not quite answer the question of how religious feelings differ from other feelings. Schleiermacher

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himself concedes that feelings alone are insufficient to justify the belief in a personal God. To those who object to the absence of any religious specification, he responds: “The rejection of the idea of a personal Deity does not decide against the presence of the Deity in feelings. The ground of such a rejection might be a humble consciousness of the limitation of personal existence” (Reden II and III, Pünjer, 127; Disc., 97). One can hardly charge Schleiermacher’s early theology with pantheism, given that his description of the religious experience applies as much, or as little, to deism or polytheism. He wrote his Discourses while he was working on a translation of Plato. Plato’s influence clearly appears in the “Second Discourse” of the first edition.16 He even mentions the anima mundi: “To love the World Spirit and joyfully to contemplate its work, that is the goal of our religion” (Reden I, Pünjer, 45). In Schleiermacher’s Der christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith) (1821), published twenty-two years after the first edition of the Discourses, we hear a very different voice. The author still holds that religion consists in feeling. Yet now he defines religious feelings as feelings of unconditional dependence, thereby giving them a more specific content. The religious person feels that at the core of his existence, he or she is absolutely dependent, that is, conditioned by a being outside of us. Schleiermacher does not further specify the nature of that absolute or of the person’s dependence on it. We do not know divine nature as it is in itself. One might wonder: Can an awareness of unconditional dependence still be called a feeling? Does the term dependence not imply some idea of that on which one is dependent? Schleiermacher, however, denies it. The term absolute being “does nothing more than express a feeling of absolute dependence.”17 Even the suggestion that there is an “infinite Being” independent of the finite is unwarranted, according to Schleiermacher, because the Absolute includes the finite as well as the infinite. Schleiermacher’s idea of feeling obviously differs from an unspecified mood. I suspect that it was similar to Fichte’s idea of subjectivity, which, if extended to infinity, becomes absolute and, in thereby surpassing any opposition, no longer differs from infinite objectivity. Critics objected to Schleiermacher’s presentation of feeling as a direct link with the absolute, just as they objected to Fichte’s concept of subjectivity as being absolute at its core. Yet feeling or subjectivity extended to infinity is not different from the objectivity that is raised to a degree

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of infinity by the traditional arguments for the existence of God. Conceiving the Absolute as Being is not better than conceiving it as an absolute subject. A specifically theistic requirement enters The Christian Faith when the author posits, as the one necessary condition of Christian theology, that all its dogmas must refer to Jesus Christ (CG, §17.1; CF, 1:83). He portrays Jesus as a man filled with the highest God-consciousness, whose teaching has been preserved in the Gospels and in the “symbols” of the Christian faith. To Schleiermacher, Scripture is normative, not because it is the foundation of faith, but because the foundational experience of faith of Jesus’ first followers grants Scripture a unique authority for transmitting that faith. The authors of the New Testament possessed faith before writing the sacred texts, and later Christians read them in the spirit of those who wrote them. “[They] are led to postulate a special condition of the apostolic mind in which its books were written” (CG, §128.2; CF, 2:593). Schleiermacher distinguishes the historical Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew who inherited the customs and beliefs of the community in which he was born, from Christ the universal human ideal. In the Gnostic tradition, Schleiermacher distinguishes this primary model (Urbild) from the historical Jesus and claims that only the former is divine. Schleiermacher’s systematic theology follows the principle of subjectivity to its extreme conclusions. Can we still call it a theology of Christian faith? Schleiermacher appears to be caught between a vague pantheism, on the one side, and a radically negative theology, on the other. The method of deducing an entire dogmatic theology from a mere feeling of absolute dependence empties all attributes traditionally ascribed to God of their objective content. The question raised about the religion of the Romantic poets here reappears in a new and subtler form: Does Schleiermacher present a new religion or a new interpretation of the traditional one, whose devout minister he remained all his life? The Discourses contain beautiful pages about religious feelings. But feelings, even if they are immediate experiences of unconditional dependence, have never been considered sufficient to constitute religion. Feeling alone is too passive: religion requires primarily an active response. Yet in The Christian Faith the author still uses the term feeling in referring to the foundational experience of all religion, especially of the Christian faith.

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Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792 –1860), like his great predecessor, defined religion as a feeling of the unconditional dependence of one’s existence. Unlike Schleiermacher, however, he balanced this passive dependence by stressing all the more the self ’s autonomy as well as its full responsibility in the secular realm. Baur’s idea of religion internalized Luther’s doctrine to a point where Church, sacraments, and dogma fulfill no more than an external, auxiliary function in assisting a person in his or her interior, private approach to God. For Bauer, the institutional Church is neither holy nor sanctifying, but merely instrumental for realizing an interior salvation. Redemption depends on feeling “accepted,” and it is in the experience of acceptance that the believer becomes aware of his or her total dependence on God. A second influence on Baur’s thought and method was that of Hegel’s philosophy. Baur applied the same historical-genealogical method to theology that the idealist philosopher had used in his system of philosophy. Theology, for Baur, consists of the history of theology. In that historical domain he remains one of the great theologians of the Romantic era, thoroughly familiar with the ancient sources and scrupulously honest in interpreting them. With him began what we refer to as “scientific theology.” His influence on later theology has been enormous. One of the most instructive encounters in Romantic theology was that between Baur and the young Catholic theologian Johann Adam Moehler (1796 –1838). The very talented Moehler had much in common with Baur. He had studied at several Protestant universities, and his field of studies, patristics, forced him to take a primarily historical approach to theology. Yet Moehler used history for a purpose opposite to Baur’s, namely, to prove the unchangeableness of the Catholic Church and the consistency of her dogmas. In his early Die Einheit in der Kirche oder das Prinzip des Katholizismus dargestellt im Geiste der Kirchenväter der drei ersten Jahrhunderte (The Unity of the Church, or, the Principle of Catholicism presented in the Spirit of the Church Fathers of the First Three Centuries) (1829), he developed an original theology of the Church.18 This remarkably erudite work, with a long appendix of sources taken from the Greek and Latin Fathers, is as Romantic as Baur’s theology of interiority. For Moehler, the center of theology is the Church—“a direct divine power animated in and through the Holy Ghost” (§40). In his mystical restatement of Catholic doctrine, the

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animating presence of the Holy Spirit balances the Church’s organic identity with her doctrinal and ritual development. “Through the power of the Holy Spirit, external faith bears an immediate certainty in itself, testifies of itself, even as sensations originating in the body directly attain consciousness through the inner sense” (§39). The uninterrupted dynamic presence of the Spirit, he argues, guarantees continuity in an ever-developing doctrine. Moehler anticipates what John Henry Newman was to write some fifty years later on the development of Christian doctrine. For Moehler, then, the Church, rather than being a mere instrument, is the body of salvation. In and through her, the Christian discovers a supernatural dimension in reality and enters a different mode of life. Moehler attempts to preserve the autonomy of creation, not by imposing a supernatural realm upon the natural one, but by placing the entire secular order within the sacred one of grace. Each of the two theologians, Baur and Moehler, developed a different aspect of the Romantic consciousness: the Lutheran Baur highlights the subjective quality of faith; the Catholic Moehler stresses the dynamic, organic nature of the Church. Moehler, like Baur, asserts God’s direct presence and activity in the soul, yet he does so through the mediation of the historical Church. Like Baur again, he stresses that faith should become gnosis, as the Alexandrian Fathers Clement and Origen had taught. He quotes Clement: “It is the exclusive role of God’s grace and his Logos, to reveal to us the unknown [God]” (§36). Moehler spelled out his differences with Baur in his Symbolik: Darstellung der dogmatischen Gegensätze der Katholiken und Protestanten nach ihren öffentlichen Bekenntnisschriften (Theory of [Ecclesiastical] Symbols: Presentation of the Dogmatic Oppositions between Catholics and Protestants according to Their Public Confessions) (1832). Moehler objected to Baur’s separation between an internal religion and a secular world. Catholics resist the isolation of faith from society. They consider themselves called to sanctify the world. Yet, Baur replied, the Catholic Church, by separating her hierarchy from the common believers and by imposing all kinds of rules on the faithful for achieving her goal of universal sanctification, had actually estranged them from this world. Protestants, having from the beginning clearly distinguished the Kingdom of God from that of the world, accepted the world as it was and were prepared to deal with it on its own terms.19

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Moehler’s theology owed much to the Catholic philosopher and scientist Franz von Baader (1765–1841), one of the most brilliant thinkers at a time when there were many. In his Vorlesungen über religiöse Philosophie (Lectures on Religious Philosophy) (1827) and in his Speculative Dogmatik (1828, 1830, 1833), Baader defended the thesis that philosophy must be complemented by theology. He had studied Fichte and Schelling, yet felt closest to Hegel, whom he frequently cites in support of his theory. Unlike those three idealists, however, Baader did not regard philosophy as the ultimate authority of thought. Philosophy may pass final judgment on the logic of ideas but is not qualified to assess their existential value. It deals with possibility, not with reality. Moreover, the mind attains its full potential only when its three functions— sensation, understanding, and spirit—operate in harmony with each other. Yet they seldom do. Revelation alerts the mind of its imperfection and offers the means for correcting it. Baader never confused theology with philosophy, nor did he consider the former to be an intellectual addition to the latter. What humanity learns from revelation, he holds, does not “increase” its rational knowledge: reason remains self-sufficient. Nevertheless, when affirming that revelation affects philosophy’s understanding of itself, he makes reason’s authority subordinate to one that lies outside philosophy. How does the believer know that the God to whom he traces this alleged revelation exists? For Baader, the certainty of God’s existence is neither a postulate, as it was for Kant, nor a necessary belief, as for Jacobi, nor a philosophical conclusion, as for Hegel. It consists in the immediate, natural knowledge of the absolute Ground of thinking and reality. The necessary existence of such a Ground is, for Baader, an essential condition of consciousness. It needs no arguments, nor can arguments prove it. The traditional proofs of the existence of God are self-contradictory in that they try to prove the Ground while at the same time assuming that we ignore the Ground on which the arguments rest. Thus, Baader criticizes Descartes and his followers for building the knowledge of the unconditional on conditional arguments. Rather than building the infinite, that is, the unconditioned, upon the finite (the conditioned), Baader adopts the idea, common among mystics, that the mind is rooted in God’s Being and consequently that the mind, in knowing itself, knows the Ground of itself. In his view, the

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mind knows God only through God. Baader refers to Meister Eckhart’s words that the eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees Himself. When Baader read this passage to Hegel, he responded that it contained the essence of his entire philosophy.20 On one central point, however, Baader differs from Hegel. According to Hegel, creation is not the effect of a free choice: it follows from a logical necessity in God. Baader avoided this conclusion by pointing out, as did Schelling in his Philosophy of Revelation, that God’s Being, in the mystery of the Trinity, is internally differentiated. He thereby made the possibility of divine selfreflection independent of creation. Contrary to Hegel, who had identified the generation of the divine Word (the Logos of the Trinity) with the beginning of creation, for Baader, God’s self-differentiation into Word and Spirit establishes the possibility of a free creation. Because the divine Logos is God’s self-reflection, divine self-consciousness does not depend on creation. This argument shows how closely philosophy and theology remain connected in Baader’s thought, even though they never coincide. What to the philosopher remains a purely hypothetical speculation is supreme truth to the theologian. The religious language of Romanticism leaves a confused impression. The ambiguity between pantheism and panentheism in the Romantic poets, which began with Goethe and culminated in the great English poets, was never resolved. Leading theologians, such as Schleiermacher and Baur, found ancient theological concepts inadequate for articulating a new sense of union with, and immanence in, the Absolute. In his Prophecies, Blake even questioned what theist believers have always thought to be an indispensable minimum of faith, namely, the acceptance of a divinely established order in which good has an unconditional priority over evil. For Blake, the one-sided cult of the good originated in an idolatry of reason and order. Schelling’s redefinition of mythology reversed its role, from the strongest antagonist of monotheistic religion to a necessary preparation for it. Without question, the theology of the Romantic era reflects the age’s intense search for the Absolute, both transcendent and immanent, as well as its deep uncertainty about ways to find it.

Conclusion

At the end of this study of the spiritual sources of modern culture, begun with my Passage to Modernity, continued with my The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture, and completed with the present volume on Romanticism, I must pose the question of modernity again. Throughout these pages I have assumed that a real caesura separates the modern culture of the West from the ancient and medieval ones. What spiritually distinguishes modernity is, in the first place, a preoccupation with rational foundations. Of course, a concern with reason has marked Western culture since its Socratic beginnings. However, that concern had not been about reason as a foundation, that is, as a self-supporting ultimate principle of thought. Plato had begun his philosophy with casual conversations, unrestricted by meta-narrative rules. The discussions of the early Platonic dialogues remain open to all viewpoints, provided the speaker does not contradict himself. In his later dialogues, Plato did assume certain principles as absolute. The good, the true, and the beautiful appear as non-negotiable constants in an otherwise flexible discussion. Yet these dominant concepts were thought to be Ideas, given before they became subject to the authority of human reason. Jews, Christians, and Muslims continued much of this tradition and explicitly averred the mind’s dependence on a transcendent source. That changed in the modern age. The idea of a subordination of human thought and action to an ulterior authority came to be challenged, and this challenge touched off a search for a foundation in reason itself. What brought about this change was neither agnosticism nor atheism but rather, at least at the beginning, a Nominalist theology of 337

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unrestricted and unpredictable divine omnipotence, which made the alleged authority of a transcendent source unreliable. Henceforth, humans found themselves forced to establish the foundation of truth in reason alone. This theoretical autonomy also required a practical emancipation from any but self-imposed restraints. Has the rationalism of modern culture come to an end? Did Nietzsche, Heidegger, and postmodern thinkers and artists cease to require the authority of a foundation in reason? Or are we still, though perhaps in a new way, continuing the rationalist tradition of the modern age? I think that it may be too early to raise this question and I therefore agree with Richard Rorty’s conclusion: “It seems best to think of Heidegger and Derrida simply as post-Nietzschean philosophers—to assign them places in a conversational sequence which runs from Descartes through Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche and beyond, rather than to view them as initiating or manifesting a radical departure.”1 Nonetheless, major changes appeared in modern thought when it started criticizing itself. Self-criticism had begun with Descartes, who clearly worried about the subjectivism at the root of modern thought. It culminated in the Romantic consciousness and was formalized in the idealist philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In the early nineteenth century, the suspicion that the principle of pure rationality was insufficient to serve as the exclusive ground of consciousness became a certainty. The Romantics never abandoned the subjective principle of modern culture. However, they criticized the divided nature of modern thought, which opposed subjectivism to the rational-objectivism inherent in the language of science. Kant, after having reestablished the reliability of science by linking all objective processes to a subjective source, still remains in doubt about the reality of the thing-in-itself. This showed how acute the awareness of an inner opposition between thought and reality had become. However, and here lies the Romantics’ true originality, since there appeared to be no way to escape the mind’s self-enclosed subjectivity, idealist philosophers as well as Romantic poets trusted that a more fundamental exploration of the grounding subject would lead to a groundless absolute, in which the opposition between mind and reality would cease to exist. Throughout this book I have argued that the subjectivism of the great Romantics was anything but the self-centered sen-

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timentality found in minor Romantic poets and occasionally even in major ones, such as Lamartine and de Musset. The inward move of great ones, such as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Hölderlin, and of philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, was an attempt to break through the limits of finitude, the objective as well as the subjective, toward an all-inclusive absolute. Some have interpreted this Romantic search for an absolute as religiously inspired. Yet early Romantics conceived of the absolute as being entirely immanent in the mind and in nature. Only later did many express the need for a transcendent foundation of subjective consciousness in the terms of traditional religious language. But even the Romantic idea of transcendence did not simply coincide with the traditional one of religion. In some German theologians, such as David Friedrich Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Ludwig Feuerbach, religion was no more than the initial impulse of a move toward self-transcendence. In England, this search for an absolute partly continued to support a religious revival that had started with the Cambridge Platonists and had later become divided into a number of evangelical movements.Yet it also inspired a pantheistic naturalism that developed into a scientific positivism, as well as an aesthetic impressionism. The Romantic Movement belongs to an already distant past. Yet Romanticism has not ceased to exist. Under various names, it has continued to express an unsatisfied search for wholeness. The sense of alienation, sharply articulated by Nietzsche, which heavily weighed on twentieth-century philosophies and on an increasingly somber literature, still remained intrinsically linked to the disappointment of Romantic aspirations. Today a feeling of resignation, following centuries of frustrated attempts to overcome the problems inherent in modern consciousness, has obscured their presence. Nevertheless, they still hide deep in the contemporary mind. Nor did the aesthetics of Romanticism end with the industrial revolution, as Blake’s invectives against the “dark Satanic Mills” and Hugo’s strident critique of the modernization of the architecture of Paris or the brutal gigantism of modern technology (in his poem “Pleine Mer”) might suggest. Impressionism may have started as an anti-Romantic naturalism. Yet gradually, traces of a Romantic realism began to reappear.

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Light hesitantly penetrated the somber landscapes of coal mines and darkened rivers. The steam of Monet’s locomotives merging with the clouds of the sky announces the return of Romantic harmony. In literature no less than in the arts, a Romantic glimmer might be observed, even in Zola’s crudely naturalist novels. A serious study of medieval thinkers, after centuries of neglect, was stimulated by the stress that philosophers such as Aquinas and Duns Scotus had placed on the transcendent dimension of thought which had been lacking in the rationalist and empiricist philosophies of the modern age. “Romantic” above all are our revived fears and uncertainties about the future. Like passengers on Victor Hugo’s gigantic ship Leviathan, too large to dock in any existing harbor, we feel frightened by the creative power of our own freedom. How far should we pursue the possibilities that science and technology have opened up ? Do we possess the moral maturity to control the awesome forces we have unleashed? Freedom and rationality appear to have outgrown our capacity to do so. The enormity both of our newly acquired powers and of our ignorance of how to master them has awakened an acute anxiety about the future. As the Romantics continue to remind us, this existential dread reopens the question of human boundaries and, with it, the question of what transcends them. Contemporary poets and artists, scientists and philosophers, caution that this question has become more urgent than ever for our self-understanding and, possibly, for our survival.

notes

Preface 1. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982–1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Louis Dupré, “Postmodernity or Late Modernity?” Review of Metaphysics 47 (December 1993): 277– 95.

chapter 1. What Was and What Is Romanticism? 1. For example, see A. O. Lovejoy, “Discrimination of Romanticism,” Review of Modern Languages 39 (1924): 229 – 51; Gerhard Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983). A number of American scholars have attacked this historical nominalism, among them René Wellek, the historian of modern criticism, and Geoffrey Hartman, the eminent Wordsworth interpreter. See René Wellek, Concepts of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 2:128 – 98; Geoffrey Hartman, “Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,” in Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 298 – 310. 2. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Révolte et mélancholie: Le romantisme à contre-courant (Paris: Payot, 1992). 3. Novalis, Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), 2:672. 4. Friedrich Schlegel, Fragmente, in Werke (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1980), 1:189 – 259. 5. See F. B. Baldensperger, “Romantique”: Ses analogues et ses équivalents, Harvard Studies in Philosophy and Literature 20 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937); Raymond Immerwahr, “Romantic and Its Cognates 341

342 | Notes to Pages 6 –17

in England, Germany, and France,” and George Whalley, “England / RomanticRomanticism,” both in Romantic and Its Cognates, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). 6. See Georges Gusdorf, La naisssance de la conscience romantique au siècle des lumières (Paris: Payot, 1976). 7. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1965), 257– 58. 8. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, L’absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1978). 9. Friedrich Schlegel, “Brief über den Roman,” Gespräch über die Poesie, in Werke in zwei Bänden (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1980), 2:176. 10. See Henri Peyre, “Classicism,” in Encyclopedia Universalis  (online); also Henri Peyre, Qu’est-ce que le romantisme? (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1972), and Georges Gusdorf, Fondements du savoir romantique (Paris: Payot, 1982). 11. René Wellek, “The Term and Concept of Classicism in Literary History,” in Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 55 – 89. 12. See Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “Qu’est-ce qu’un classique?” in Les Lundis (Paris: Garnier, 1928), 3:38 – 55. 13. Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 1823–1832, trans. John Oxenford (1850) (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), March 21, 1830, p. 297 (translation altered). 14. Ibid., December 16, 1829, p. 273. 15. Germaine de Staël, De l’Allemagne (1810) (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), 1:234. 16. See Herbert John Clifford Grierson, The Background of English Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925). 17. See Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 18. See Leslie Brisman, Romantic Origins (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 19. Quoted in Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, First Series (London: Macmillan, 1916), 164. 20. Heinrich Heine, Die romantische Schule, in Heines Werke (Berlin: Säkularausgabe, 1992), vol. 8. Trans. Helen Mustard in Heinrich Heine, Selected Works (New York: Random House, 1973). 21. Jeffrey Sammons, Heinrich Heine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 194. This is a model of intellectual biography.

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22. See Josiah Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919); Donald Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985); Gary Shapiro, “An Ancient Quarrel in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” The Owl of Minerva 17, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 165 – 80, esp. 167; McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 38.

chap ter 2. English Romantic Poetry 1. My omission of Byron from the poets selected for discussion in this chapter finds some justification in the nature of his poetry. Northrop Frye writes, “In English literature, though he is always classified with the Romantic poets, he is Romantic only because the Byronic hero is a Romantic hero. . . . He has little technically in common with other English Romantics.” Byron himself identified far less with the Byronic hero than his Continental admirers believed. See G. B. Harrison, ed., Major British Writers (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), 2:159. 2. William Desmond, Being and Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 3. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, L’absolu littéraire, 42. 4. Philip Stambovsky has sensitively applied some of the principles here described to an analysis of three major poets. Not fortuitously, they were all Romantic, although only one belonged to the Romantic age: John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. They, like the ones I analyze in the following pages, posed the fundamental question on which metaphysics reflects. See Philip Stambovsky, Philosophical Conceptualization and Literary Art (Florham, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004). 5. Prelude III, 195 – 96, in The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). 6. William Wordsworth and Samuel T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed. (London, 1800). Of course, Wordsworth’s ballads as well as the preface also appear in the Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Hutchinson, cited above. 7. See Samuel T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), vol. 1, ch. 13. 8. Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787– 1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 67. 9. Cyrus Hamlin, Hermeneutics of Form: Romantic Poetics in Theory and Practice (New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1998), 163.

344 | Notes to Pages 31– 51

10. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 67. 11. Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality,” in Poetical Works of Wordsworth, 460 – 62. 12. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 122. 13. Collected Letters of Samuel Tayor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 1:279. 14. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960). 15. See Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming 2013), ch. 15. 16. The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London:Oxford University Press, 1960), 362 – 68. 17. See Cyrus Hamlin’s detailed analysis of “Dejection” in his Hermeneutics of Form, 210 – 35. 18. Cf. John H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930; 1970), 113 –15. 19. See Biographia Literaria, ed. Shawcross, vol. 1, ch. 9. 20. See James Clayton, “Coleridge and the Logos: The Trinitarian Unity of Consciousness and Culture,” Journal of Religion 70, no. 2 (April 1990): 213 – 40. 21. Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 136. 22. Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, Second Series (1888) (London: Macmillan, 1915), 237– 38. 23. All quotations of Shelley are from The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, newly ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (New York: Gordian Press, 1965). 24. Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 89. 25. On the “original” character of the mountain, cf. Brisman, Romantic Origins, 147– 49. 26. The same contrast with the poet’s boyhood appears in Wordworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” and in Coleridge’s “Dejection.” 27. Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 8. 28. On love’s relation to freedom in Shelley’s work, cf. Herman Servotte, Stem en Visioen: Engelse dichters en het verdwijnen van God (Kapellen, Belgium: De Nederlandse Boekhandel, 1992), 57– 70.

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29. Shelley, Complete Works, 10:401. 30. See Ellsworth Barnard, Shelley’s Religion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1937), 294. 31. Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949; 1970), vol. 3, Romantic Faith, 357. 32. Quotations are from the Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H.W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1956; 1966). Cf. Brisman, Romantic Origins, 82 – 83. 33. Morris Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry: A Study in His Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 66. The author’s detailed commentary on Endymion sheds light on many dark spots. 34. Cf. Stuart A. Ende, Keats and the Sublime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 35. See Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 36. Desmond, Being and Between, 302. 37. Vendler, The Odes of John Keats, 121, 124. 38. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). 39. See Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Bern-Bümpliz: Bertelli Verlag, 1959), and especially Michel Henry, Voir l’invisible (Paris: Éd. François Bourin, 1988).

chap ter 3. German Romantic Poetry 1. Henry Hatfield, Goethe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 80. 2. The best commentary in English is the detailed one that Cyrus Hamlin added to his edition of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy; Background and Sources . . . , trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: Norton, 1976; 2nd ed., 2000). 3. Friedrich Schlegel, “On the Study of Greek Poetry,” in Prosaische Jugendschriften, trans. Cyrus Hamlin, in Faust, ed. Hamlin (1976 ed.), 554. 4. Wolfgang Binder, “Goethe’s Classical Conception of Faust,” in Faust, ed. Hamlin (1976 ed.), 567– 84. 5. I have used several of the numerous editions of Schiller as well as of Goethe. For lyrical and dramatic works of Schiller, I cite here Schillers Werke, 5 vols., Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker (Weimar: Volksverlag, 1962), with Roman and Arabic numerals referring to volume and starting page, respectively.

346 | Notes to Pages 72 – 87

6. Cf. Theodore Ziolkowski, The Classical German Elegy, 1795 – 1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), ch. 6. 7. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, English and German facing, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), I, 3. Roman and Arabic numerals refer to letter number and paragraph number, respectively. 8. Erich Heller, The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1959; Harcourt Brace, 1976), ch. 2. 9. On the tragic in Schiller’s dramas, cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Die Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (Freiburg: Johannes Verlag, 1947), 347– 406. 10. I refer to Novalis, Hymnen an die Nacht, in Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe, ed. Richard Samuel (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1978). All further quotations of Novalis are taken from Werke, unless otherwise indicated. 11. Albert Béguin, L’âme romantique et le rêve (1937) (Paris: José Corti, 1991), 283. 12. Charles Passage, Novalis: Hymns to the Night and Other Selected Writings (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1960), 7– 8. 13. A translation of “Monolog” appears in German Romantic Criticism, ed. Leslie Wilson, trans. Alexander Gelley (New York: Continuum, 1982), 82 – 83. 14. Kristin Pfefferkorn, Novalis: A Romantic’s Theory of Language and Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 18 – 21. 15. This document (less than three pages)—“Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” in Hegel, Frühe Schriften, Werke, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971)—was composed by the three students, Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin. The handwriting is Hegel’s, yet most Hegel scholars now agree that the probable author was Hölderlin. 16. I refer for all poetry and prose by Hölderlin to the one-volume Sämtliche Werke, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992). 17. Commentaries on this poem are found in Jochen Schmidt, Hölderlins Elegie “Brod und Wein” (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968), and Richard Unger, Hölderlin’s Major Poetry: The Dialetics of Unity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), ch. 6. Both works have guided this interpretation. 18. See Reiner Strunk, Echo des Himmels: Poetische Religion (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 2007). In English the best work remains Richard Unger’s Hölderlin’s Major Poetry. 19. Martin Heidegger, “Remembrance of the Poet,” in Existence and Being, trans. with introduction by Werner Brock (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949). 20. The most thorough analysis of those hymns is found in Jochen Schmidt, Hölderlins geschichtsphilosophische Hymnen “Friedensfeier,” “Der Einzige,”

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“Patmos” (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990). A more Christian interpretation appears in Strunk, Echo des Himmels. 21. Walther Rehm, Orpheus, der Dichter und die Toten: Selbstdeutung und Totenkult bei Novalis, Hölderlin, Rilke (Düsseldorf: L. Schwann, 1950).

chap ter 4. French Romantic Poetry 1. Ferdinand Brunetière, “Alfred de Vigny,” in L’Evolution de la Poésie Lyrique en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1906), 2:26. 2. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 107. 3. Claude Millet, Introduction to La Légende des Siècles (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2000). 4. Peyre, Qu’est-ce que le romantisme?, 159. 5. F. Lambert, La Légende des Siècles: Fragments (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 128.

chap ter 5. The Beautiful and the Sublime 1. On the aesthetics of Baumgarten and Winckelmann, see my The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 2. Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 33. 3. Goethe, “On German Architecture,” in Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and trans. Ernest and Ellen Nordroff (New York: Suhrkamp, 1986). 4. Henry James, “Hawthorne,” in The Shock of Recognition, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: Modern Library/Random House, 1955), 474. 5. On the strange history of the term allegory, see Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (Cambridge: Walker de Berry, 1960). 6. Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 148 – 59. 7. F.W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 222 – 23. 8. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophische Vorlesungen insbesondere über Philosophie der Sprache und des Wortes, in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 10, ed. and intro. Ernst Behler (Munich-Paderborn-Vienna: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1969), 353.

348 | Notes to Pages 125 –144

9. I refer to Knox’s translation in quotations: G.W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). 10. Hotho was Privatdozent in Aesthetics at the University of Berlin and assistant to the director of the new Art Museum of Berlin. From Hotho’s own writings—Vorstudien für Leben und Kunst (Preparatory Studies for Life and Art) (1835) and his later Geschichte der deutschen und niederländischen Malerei (History of German and Netherlandish Painting) (1842)—it appears that he held quite different views than Hegel, especially on the sociocultural factors that influence the development of art. Some seem to have found their way into his Hegel edition. In recent years, based on Hegel’s Nachschriften, Dr. Gethmann-Siefert has begun the arduous task of disentangling those foreign elements from the original text. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Stuttgart and Frankfurt: Cotta and Insel Verlag, 1960). Section numbers are identical in all editions. English translation by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London, 1906); for a more recent edition, DeWitt H. Parker, Schopenhauer: Selections (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924; 1956), 1– 380. 12. Bernard Bosanquet, History of Aesthetics (London: Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1892), 445. 13. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903 –12). My references are all to Modern Painters, 2nd ed., 5 vols. (Sunnyside Orpington: George Allen, 1892). 14. This was the form in which David A. Downes condensed it in his excellent Ruskin’s Landscape of Beatitude (New York: Peter Lang, 1984). 15. Cf. Alan A. Johnson, “The ‘Scarlet Cloud’: Ruskin’s Revaluation of the Sixteenth-Century Venetian Masters,” in Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 17, no. 2 (1988): 151– 72. Hereafter, the journal is cited as Clio. 16. I have argued elsewhere that even the landscapes of Reformed painters such as Jacob Ruysdael and Jan van Goyen were “symbols of transcendence.” See my Transcendent Selfhood (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), ch. 5. 17. On the origins of the Gothic revival in England, Kenneth Clark’s The Gothic Revival (1928) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964) remains an informative and lively guide. 18. Cf. Henri Martineau’s authoritative L’oeuvre de Stendhal (Paris: Albin Michel, 1966), ch. 16. 19. Henri Lefebvre, “Vers un nouveau romantisme?” in his Introduction à la modernité (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1962), 235 – 73. 20. Ibid., 273.

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21. Cf. Martin Turnell, The Art of French Fiction (New York: New Directions, 1957), 76. 22. Paul Bourget, Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine (Paris: Plon, 1924). 23. Michel Crouzet, “Préface,” in La Chartreuse de Parme (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1964), 26. chapter 6. The Romantic Image of the Person as Reflected in the Novel 1. Gusdorf, Naissance de la conscience romantique au siècle des lumières, Part II, chs. 5 and 6. 2. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971; 1982), 46. (I did not follow this translation in my citation.) The novel was not entirely absent from antiquity. Apuleius’ Golden Ass (second century BC) was written in the Hellenistic era, when the closed society of the city state had collapsed, but well before moral and religious sources had established a new, stable foundation of society. Nor had the epic ceased to exist at the beginning of the modern age. 3. See Didier Maleuvre, The Religion of Reality (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006). 4. Goethe’s Werke, vol. 11 (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1968), 407. 5. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart, 1943 –), 3:236. Cited parenthetically by volume and page. 6. Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (1905) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupert, 1965), 275. 7. Charles T. Brooks, “Preface,” in his translation of Titan: A Romance, 2 vols. (Boston: Tichnor and Fields, 1864), 1:iv. In citations I refer first to the original German edition: Titan, 4 vols. (Berlin: Buchhandlung Metzdorff, 1800 –1803), followed by the Brooks translation. 8. Albert Béguin, L’âme romantique et le rêve (1937), ch. 10. 9. See Walther Rehm, Geschichte des deutschen Romans (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1927), 1:91. 10. See Ernst-Robert Curtius, Essai sur la France (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1932). 11. I cite and translate from the Pléiade edition of Nerval’s Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 693 – 750, quotation p. 695. I have also consulted Pierre-Georges Castex’s edition with commentary (Paris: SEDES, 1979). 12. An excellent introduction to the phenomenon as it appeared in France is Henri M. Peyre, Qu’est-ce que le romantisme?, ch. 5, “Mal du siècle et pessimisme romantique.”

350 | Notes to Pages 171–192

13. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan (New York: Random House, 1973), 60. 14. See Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), 325, 327; J. B. Baillie, Phenomenology of Mind, trans., intro. and notes (London: Macmillan, 1931; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), 475, 477. 15. Georges Poulet, Études sur le Temps Humain (Paris: Plon, 1950), 1:218 – 45. 16. Benjamin Constant, De la Religion (Lausanne: Bibliothèque Normande, 1971), bk. 7, ch. 9, 3:377– 78. 17. Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, ed. Josef Müller (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923), §56. 18. That was the thesis of Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). 19. Barbara Hardy, A Reading of Jane Austen (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 14. 20. Quoted by Hardy, ibid., 49. 21. D.W. Harding, “Regulated Hatred,” in Scrutiny (March 1940), republished in Modern Literary Criticism, ed. Irving Howe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 239 – 54. 22. Maaja A. Stewart, Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen’s Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). 23. See Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen among Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 24. E. M. Foster, Aspects of the Novel (1927) (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1954). 25. George Steiner, After Babel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975; 1981), 8 – 9. 26. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1953), 17. 27. I quote from the Garnier edition in four volumes, edited and annotated by Jean-Claude Berchet (Paris: Garnier, 1989). I first refer to book and chapter, next to volume and page number. In this case, XV, 7; 2:124.

chap ter 7. Romantic Ethics 1. Thomas Pfau in Minding the Modern has critically analyzed the modern forgetfulness of this ethical constituent in the concept of person and the cata-

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strophic effects this loss has had on the intellectual and moral tradition of Western thought. 2. I refer to the edition and translation of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man by Wilkinson and Willoughby; Roman and Arabic numerals refer to letter number and paragraph number, respectively. 3. Cf. Susan Langer’s great work on the development of consciousness, with its significant title Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, 3 vols. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1966). 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichtes Sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit, 1845), 4:106. 5. See Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800), in Werke, 2:273 – 76; The Vocation of Man, trans. William Smith (1889), ed. Roderick M. Chisholm (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), 107–11. 6. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Baillie, 648. This term does not appear in the translation by A.V. Miller of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 7. Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Bk. IV, §63, translated in part as The World as Will and Idea, in Schopenhauer, Selections, ed. De Witt H. Parker (New York: Scribner, 1928; 1956), 246. 8. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 77–104. See also Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. 9. Sören Kierkegaard, Om begrebet ironi, in Samlede Vaerker, ed. A. B. Drachman, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962), 1:236. Quotations from The Concept of Irony, trans. with introduction and notes by Lee Capel (New York: Harper and Row), 233. 10. Cf. Otto Pöggeler, Hegels Kritik der Romantik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1999), 62 – 74. 11. See Kierkegaard, Enten-Eller (SV II–III); Either-Or, vol. 1, trans. David and Lillian Swenson, vol. 2, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944); and Stadierne paa Livets Vej (SV VII–VIII); Stages on Life’s Way, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940). 12. Kierkegaard, Om begrebet ironi, 1:287; Concept of Irony, 292. An excellent analysis of Kierkegaard’s critique of Romantic irony is Brian Soderquist’s The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Sören Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: C. A. Reinzel, 2007), ch. 5. 13. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1831) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, n.d. [1895]). I refer parenthetically to book, chapter, and page numbers.

352 | Notes to Pages 205 – 225

14. Carlyle, Past and Present (1843), intro. and notes by Richard D. Alfick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 17. 15. In a letter to his beloved countess, Mme Eveline Hanska, Balzac wrote: “I am not orthodox and do not believe in the Roman Church. Swedenborgism, which is more than a Christian recapitulation of ancient ideas, is my religion, though I should add to that the incomprehensibility of God.” Lettres à l’Etrangère, vol. 1 (1833 – 42) (Paris, n.d.), 403. 16. Victor Brombert, in his “Introduction” to the Laurel Language edition of La peau de chagrin (1962). I have used a number of editions of Balzac. But the best complete one of the novels was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1955 – 56) in eleven volumes. 17. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 116. 18. Quoted in André Maurois, Prometheus: The Life of Balzac, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 226. 19. Maurois, Prometheus, 210. 20. Samuel Rogers, Balzac and the Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953), 159. 21. Ibid., 86 – 87. chapter 8. Political Theories after the French Revolution 1. See Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romantics (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962). 2. Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France, in Oeuvres Complètes (Lyon: Librairie Générale Catholique et Classique, 1884), vol. 1, trans. and ed. Richard Lebrun (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); partial trans. in The Works of Joseph de Maistre, trans., ed., and with introduction by Jack Lively (London: Macmillan, 1965; New York: Schocken Books, 1971). I have mostly used Lively’s translation wherever it was available. 3. Lettres et Opuscules inédits du Comte Joseph de Maistre, 2 vols. (Paris: Vaton, 1853). 4. Les Soirées de St. Pétersbourg, in Oeuvres Complètes, vols. 4 and 5. St. Petersburg Dialogues, trans. and ed. Richard Lebrun (Montreal: Queen’s University Press, 1994). Partial trans. in Lively, which I mostly use. 5. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Portraits Littéraires (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1844), 2:387. 6. Benjamin Constant, Des réactions politiques, Collection Champs (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 148.

Notes to Pages 226 – 234

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7. Cf. André Van de Putte, “De vrijheid van de modernen. Notities bij het politiek denken van B. Constant,” in Aspecten van de machtsregulering: Studies aangeboden aan Prof. Dr. E. Jonghe ter gelegenheid van zijn emeritaat, ed. Esther Meulemans (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 1988), 137– 50. 8. De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation (1814), in Oeuvres de Benjamin Constant (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1957). See especially ch. 9, p. 1024, for the argument paraphrased. 9. Kant, “Eine alte Frage . . .” (1798), in Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Preussische Akademie, 1902 – 42), 7:88. “An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?” trans. Robert E. Anchor, in Kant on History, ed. Lewis Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 147. 10. Fichte, Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urtheile über die französische Revolution, in J.G. Fichte, Gesamtausgabe, ed. R. Lauth and H. Jacob (Stuttgart–Bad Canstatt: Frommann Holzboog, 1962 –), 1:1. 11. Cf. Paul Cruysberghs, “Fichte en het recht op revolutie,” in Revolutie en filosofie: De filosofische receptie van de Franse Revolutie in Duitsland, ed. Paul Cruysberghs (Leuven: Universitaire Pers, 1990), 63 – 98. See also, in the same volume, Antoon Braeckman, “Intellectuele revolutie. Politieke formatie: Schelling en Hegel over de Franse Revolutie,” 135 – 78. 12. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, in Gesamtausgabe, 13:182. 13. Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums, in Schellings Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: Beck and Oldenbourg, 1927), based on the original edition of 1857 by K. F. Schelling, 3:247. 14. Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1936), 282. 15. Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Hoffmeister (1952), 418; Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Baillie, p. 604; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller, p. 359. 16. Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution, trans. and introduced by Richard Dien Winfield (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 43. 17. See Eric Weil, Hegel et l’état (Paris: Vrin, 1950). 18. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1955), 37. 19. Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796 – 97), in vol. 3 of Select Works of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874 – 78; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 180. 20. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1973), 302. 21. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Own Times, ed. by His Daughter (London: William Pickering, 1850), 1:47.

354 | Notes to Pages 234 – 250

22. See Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History. 23. Henri Saint-Simon, Oeuvres choisies (Brussels: Van Moonen, 1859), 2:5 –166. 24. Henri Saint-Simon, L’organisateur, in Oeuvres (Paris, 1865 – 78), 4:89. 25. Henri Saint-Simon, Cathéchisme des industriels, in Oeuvres choisies, 3:71. 26. Émile Durkheim, Socialism, trans. Charlotte Sattler (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 129. 27. See Henri de Lubac, The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon, trans. R. E. Scantlebury (London: Sheed and Ward, 1948), particularly ch. 8, “Hegel’s Synthesis and Proudhon’s Equilibrium.” 28. I have discussed this question in my The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1966) and Marx’s Social Critique of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 29. Quoted in Pierre Haubtmann, Proudhon, Marx et la pensée allemande (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires, 1981), 145, 84. The author has carefully compared the original texts in the Proudhon Archives. 30. See de Lubac, The Un-Marxian Socialist, ch. 5, “Proudhon the Theologian.”

chapter 9 . The Romantic Idea of History 1. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1953), 4. 2. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), 30. 3. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 50 – 51. 4. Ray L. Hart, Unfinished Man and the Imagination (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 135. 5. Paul Valéry, “The Outlook for Intelligence,” in Collected Works, trans. Jackson Mathews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958 – 75), 10:135. 6. R. F. Beerling, Heden en verleden (Arnhem: Van Loghum Slaterus, 1962), 131. 7. Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Über die Aufgabe des Geschichtschreibers,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Prussian Academy, 1903), 4:35 – 56; “On the Historian’s Task,” trans. Louis Mink, History and Theory 6, no. 1 (1967): 57– 71. 8. Macaulay’s “The Task of the Modern Historian” is a shortened version of “History,” in Thomas Babington Macaulay, Collected Works, Albany

Notes to Pages 251– 266

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Edition (London: Longmans Green, 1898), vol. 7. The abridged version appeared in The Pocket University (New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1925), 2:3 – 22. 9. Macaulay, “The Task of the Modern Historian,” in Pocket University, 2:10. 10. See E.W. Meachen, “From a Historical Religion to a Religion of History: Robert Southey and the Heroic in History,” Clio 9 (1980): 229 – 52. 11. In an excellent article, “On History, Chaos, and Carlyle,” Clio 33, no. 4 (2004): 397– 414, Jonathan Taylor shows, on the basis of the mathematical theories of Mandelbrot, that long-term forecasts, even on climatic patterns, are in principle impossible. This is contrary to the belief of some computer analysts, who consider an approximation to total predictability at least theoretically possible, provided we feed an enormously large number of data into a supercomputer. 12. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, n.d.), 1:211. 13. Cf. John B. Lamb, “A Chaos of Being: Carlyle and the Shandean Web of History,” Clio 20, no. 1 (1990): 23 – 37. 14. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), in Carlyle’s Complete Works, The Sterling Edition (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, n.d.), 1:379. Abbreviated hereafter as CW. 15. John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, “Ranke,” in Selected Writings, ed. J. Rufus Fears (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 2:168. 16. Leopold von Ranke, Historische Characterbilder, selected and introduced by Richard Steinfeld (Berlin: Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft, n.d.), 10. 17. Katrien Maurer, “The Rhetoric of Literary Realism in Leopold von Ranke’s Historiography,” Clio 35, no. 2 (2006): 309 – 28. 18. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution Française, 2nd ed. (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1868), vol. 1, Préface, 38. 19. For a selection of Guizot’s lectures on the history of civilization in Europe and France, in a translation by William Hazlitt with an excellent introduction by Stanley Mellon, see François Guizot, Historical Essays and Lectures, ed. Stanley Mellon, Classic European Historians (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972). 20. Ibid., 173. 21. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962). 22. See John Lauer, Sir Walter Scott (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1966). This short work contains an insightful discussion of Scott’s works.

356 | Notes to Pages 266 – 283

23. Anthony Thorlby, “The Historical Novel,” in Literature and Western Civilization: The Modern World, ed. David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London: Aldus Books, 1975), 1:513 – 36, quotation p. 518. 24. See Virginia Woolf, “Phases of Fiction,” in Granite and Rainbow: Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 106 – 7; reprinted in Modern Literary Criticism: An Anthology, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Grove Press, 1958). 25. Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History, 160.

chapter 10. Philosophical Foundations of Romantic Thought 1. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), esp. 52ff. 2. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925; New York: New American Library, 1948), 76. 3. Donald Sutherland, On Romanticism (Albany: New York University Press, 1971), 110. 4. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933; New York: New American Library, 1955), 192 – 93. 5. J. G. Fichte, “Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre” (1797), in Johann Gottlieb Fichtes Sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit, 1845), 1:469; “Second Introduction,” in J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge; with First and Second Introductions to the Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Appleton, Century, Croft, 1970), 43. The translation is referred to hereafter as HL. 6. Martin Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971), 45. 7. Fichte, “Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre” (Attempt at a New Presentation of the Science of Knowledge) (1797), in Werke, 1:533. Cf. Martial Guéroult, L’évolution et la structure de la Doctrine de la Science chez Fichte (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1930), 1:185 – 211; Miklos Vetö, De Kant à Schelling, vol. 1 (Grenoble: Jerôme Millon, 1998). 8. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800), in Werke, 2:179; The Vocation of Man, trans. Smith, ed. Chisholm, 37. 9. Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts, in Werke, 3:17. 10. See Dieter Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967). 11. Dieter Henrich has drawn attention to the major significance of this change.

Notes to Pages 284 – 298

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12. Fichte, “Über den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung,” Philosophisches Journal 8, issues 1 and 2 (1783); in Werke, 5:175 – 89. 13. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, oder auch die Religionslehre (1806), in Werke, 5:397– 580. 14. Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800), in Schellings Werke, ed. Schröter, based on the original edition of 1857 by K. F. Schelling, 2:427. I have mostly followed the excellent translation of Peter Heath: System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978; 1993). This translation preserves in the margin the pagination of the original edition of 1857, which also appears in the Schröter edition. 15. Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, trans. James H. Tufts (New York Macmillan, 1901; New York: Harper Brothers, 1958), 599. 16. The letter appears in H. Fuhrmann, F.W. Schelling. Briefe und Dokumente, Band 1– 3 (Bonn: H. Bovier Verlag, 1962 – 75), quoted in Petra Werner, Uebereinstimmung und Gegensatz: Zum Widerspruch im Verhältnis zwischen A. von Humboldt und F. W. J. Schelling (Berlin: Alexander-Humboldt-Forschungsstelle, 2000). I have also consulted Werner’s fine monograph on the reactions of other scientists to Schelling’s work. 17. For a good presentation of the problem of subjectivism in Hegel’s predecessors as well as in his own early philosophy, see J. M. Kirsten, “Die emansiepasiemotief in Hegel se jeugdwerk,” Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif voor Wysbegeerte 7 (1988): 195 – 212. 18. Otto Pöggeler, Hegels Kritik der Romantik (Munich: Fink, 1998). 19. Georges Le Roy, L’expérience de l’effort et de la grâce chez Maine de Biran (Paris: Boivin & Editeurs, 1937), 310. 20. Maine de Biran, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, in Oeuvres de Maine de Biran, ed. Pierre Tisserand (Paris: Alcan, 1920), vol. 1. Henri Gouhier has adopted this edition in his Oeuvres Choisies (Paris: Aubier, 1942) in one volume with a splendid introduction. Recently, F. T. C. Moore’s critical edition of the Essai in the new edition of the Oeuvres de Maine de Biran, vol. 7 (Paris: Vrin 2001), has rearranged the material, omitted much that does not belong to the text, and has carefully sorted out the various manuscripts written over a period of more than ten years. The previous edition by Pierre Tisserand (Paris: Alcan, 1920) republished the first edition by François Naville and his son Erneste of 1859. Despite the problems of the Tisserand edition, pointed out and corrected by F. T. C. Moore, I have chosen to follow it as more appropriate for an introduction to Maine de Biran’s thought. I have also consulted Moore’s corrections.

358 | Notes to Pages 299 – 311

21. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. J. H. Fichte (1845) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1965), 5:16. 22. Maine de Biran, Journal, ed. Henri Gouhier (Neuchatel: La Baconnière, 1954 – 55), April 1821; vol. 2, 318 – 19. This Journal consists of four cahiers spanning the period from early 1815 until May 1824, published in two volumes, indicated hereafter by volume and page number. 23. Maine de Biran, “Notes sur la philosophie de Kant,” in Oeuvres Choisies (ed. Gouhier), 214 –15. 24. Maine de Biran, “Rapports des sciences naturelles avec la psychologie,” in Oeuvres Choisies (ed. Gouhier), 155 – 207. 25. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 341– 42. 26. Le Roy in L’expérience de l’effort et de la grâce chez Maine de Biran describes both this critique and the unrest in the chapter entitled “La recherche de l’absolu.” 27. Maine de Biran, “Notes sur la philosophie de Kant,” in Oeuvres Choisies (ed. Gouhier), 230. 28. Ibid., 222. 29. Maine de Biran, “Fragments relatifs aux fondements de la morale et de la religion,” in Oeuvres Choisies (ed. Gouhier), 257– 84. 30. Ibid., 275. 31. None of the editors of these essays has succeeded in producing a coherent text from the loose papers. Bernard Baertschi, the editor of a recent critical edition, appears to have found the most probable order of the fragments. He considers the important final “Vie de l’esprit,” combined with the passages in the Journal from October 28 until November 30, 1823 (Journal, 2:399 – 417), sufficient to follow the general course of the author’s thought. See Maine de Biran, Dernière Philosophie, Existence et Anthropologie, in Oeuvres de Maine de Biran (Paris: Vrin, 1989), vol. 10, pt. 2, 358. 32. Maine de Biran, Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie, in Oeuvres, vol. 10, pt. 2, 290. 33. Ibid., 290, 295 – 96.

chapter 11. A New Religion? 1. Gérard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, vol. 1, 1800 – 1880 (Toulouse: Bibliothèque historique Privat, 1985), 9.

Notes to Pages 312 – 329

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2. See Hans Weil, Die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsprinzips (Basel, 1972); Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 7 ff. 3. See Hartman, The Unmediated Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954) and Beyond Formalism. Also see Michael Hamburger, Contraries: Studies in German Literature (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 78. 4. See Henry Weinfield, “ ‘These Beauteous Forms’: ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the Post-Enlightenment Religious Crisis,” Religion and the Arts 6, no. 3 (2002): 257– 90. 5. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, quoting F. D. Maurice, 122. 6. See Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Return in Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 7. Blake was foremost an apocalyptic writer, as Thomas J. J. Altizer shows in The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake (Ann Arbor: Michigan State University Press, 1967) and in History as Apocalypse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). See also Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 8. William Blake, Blake’s Poetry and Designs, selected and ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 141. 9. Ibid., 104. 10. Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1927; 1965), 3:375 – 507. The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). The page numbers of this translation appear after the references to the German text. Other works referred to in this section include Einführung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, in Sämmtliche Werke, Abteilung II, vol. 1, commonly (and therefore also here) referred to as vol. 11; Philosophie der Mythologie, in Sämmtliche Werke, Abt. II, vol. 2, referred to as vol. 12; Philosophie der Offenbarung, in Sämmtliche Werke, Abt. II, vols. 3 and 4, referred to as vols. 13 and 14. 11. Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1830), ed. Walter Ehrhardt (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1989), 98 – 100. Cf. Peter Koslowski, Philosophien der Offenbarung (Paderborn: F. Schöning, 2001), 603 – 4. 12. Louis Dupré, “The Role of Mythology in Schelling’s Late Philosophy,” Journal of Religion 87, no. 1 (2007): 1– 20. 13. Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Pfullingen: Neske, 1975). 14. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Reden über die Religion: An die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, critical ed. by C. G. Bernhard Pünjer (Braunschweig: Schetschke, 1879). Pünjer indicates the variations in each of the three editions

360 | Notes to Pages 330 – 338

of this work. The Philosophische Bibliothek has republished the first edition (Hamburg: Meiner, 1958, with numerous reprints), which I follow. For important variations, I refer to the second and third editions as Reden II and III, followed by the pagination in Pünjer. In English, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (1893) (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958, with reprints). Oman’s translation is based on the third edition. I refer to it here as Disc. (Discourses). 15. Schleiermacher, Psychologie, ed. Ludwig George (Berlin, 1862), 460. 16. Cf. Giovanni Moretto, “Platonismo e Romanticismo: Platone nei Discorsi sulla religione di Schleiermacher,” in Schleiermacher, ed. Marco Olivetti, Archivio de Filosofia 52 (Padua: CEDAM, 1984), 233 – 69. Moretto has traced many passages in the Discourses to parallel passages in Plato and shows that the Discourses reflect Schleiermacher’s attempt to interpret Plato’s Timaeus, the dialogue about the cosmos, through the Phaedo, the dialogue about the soul. 17. Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube, 2nd ed., ed. Martin Redeker (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), §14.1; The Christian Faith, trans. H. R. Mackintosh, J. S. Stewart, et al. (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 1:68. Abbreviated respectively as CG and CF. Cf. Robert R. Williams, Schleiermacher the Theologian: The Construction of the Doctrine of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 82. 18. Johann Adam Moehler, Die Einheit in der Kirche oder das Prinzip des Katholizismus . . . (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald, 1925). Citations refer to the numbered short sections. 19. See Anton van Harskamp, “Katholicisme en protestantisme als antagonistische medestanders: Het debat tussen J. A. Möhler en F. C. Baur,” in Openheid en Isolement: Het voorbeeld van de katholieke theologie in de negentiende eeuw, ed. E. Borgman and A. Van Harskamp (Kampen: Kok, 1992), 41– 71. Also see van Harskamp’s “Controverse tussen J. A. Möhler en F. C. Baur,” Tijdschrift voor Theologie 24 (1984): 235 – 46. 20. See Hermann Glockner, Hegel (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1920; 1954), 1:158.

Conclusion 1. Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1– 2.

index

Abrams, M. H., 34 Natural Supernaturalism, 314 absolute, 32, 94, 140 – 41, 304 Fichte on, vii–viii, 283, 287 Goethe on, 73, 313 –14 Hegel on, 294 – 95 nature and, 287, 290 Romanticism search for, 339 Schelling on, vii–viii, 287, 288, 289, 290, 293 – 94, 321, 323, 327 Schleiermacher on, 331– 32, 336 Acton, Lord, 256, 258 Adolphe (Constant), 149, 171, 172 – 73, 174 Aeschylus, 48, 51, 189 Akenside, Mark, 25 Alain-Fournier, 170 Alexander the Great, 289 alienation, 240, 339 allegory, 120 – 21 Althusius, Johannes Politica, 221 Ampère, André-Marie, 301 Angelico, Fra, 131 anti-illuminism, 76 Anton Reiser (Moritz), 149, 153, 180, 181– 83, 191

Apollo Slaying the Python (Hesiod), 138 Apuleius, 166 Golden Ass, 170, 349n2 architecture, 118 –19, 139 – 40, 339 in ancient Greece, 117, 140 See also Gothic Revival Ariosto, Ludovico, 11, 100 Aristotelianism, 149, 238 Aristotle, 149, 174 Arnim, Achim von, 17 Die Kronewächter, 172 Arnold, Matthew, 24, 43 art for art’s sake, 141 Christianity and, 12, 123, 126 classical, 12, 123, 125 Goethe on, 118 –19, 121, 122, 188 – 89 Hegel on, 125 – 27 history and, 250 nature and, 117, 119, 121, 131, 143 as poiesis, 117 Schelling on, 292, 293 – 94, 320 truth and, 134 – 35 Venetian, 135, 136 – 37, 138 atheism, 242, 283, 284, 313 361

362 | Index

Athenäum, 8 –10, 76, 118 Auerbach, Erich Mimesis, 207 Augustine Confessions, 27, 180 – 81 Aulard, François-Alphonse, 249 Aurélia (Nerval), 164, 165 – 68, 169, 170 Austen, Jane, 175 – 80 Emma, 175, 178, 179 irony of, 175, 179 Mansfield Park, 178 Pride and Prejudice, 176 – 77 as Romantic writer, ix, 175 satire of, 178 – 79 Sense and Sensibility, 175 – 76 on women and personhood, 149, 175, 176 – 78 autobiography by Augustine, 180 – 81 by Chateaubriand, 181, 183 – 90, 191 by Goethe, 65, 154, 191 by Montaigne, 181 by Moritz, 180, 181– 83, 191 Romanticism and, 180, 181, 191 by Rousseau, 180, 191, 198 by Stendhal, 180 by Wordsworth, 31 Baader, Franz von, 335 – 36 Vorlesungen über religiöse Philosophie, 335 Babbitt, Irving, 55 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 127 Bacon, Roger, 236 Baillie, J. B., 197– 98 ballads, 5

Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 317 Balzac, Honoré de, 179, 209 – 20 on consciousness, 213 –14 on good and evil, 211–12, 219 religious views of, 352n15 as Romanticist, 209, 216 –17 and Scott, 270 on time and place, 214 –15 Balzac, Honoré de, works of Les Chouans, 210, 270 Le Colonel Chabert, 218 –19 Le curé de Tours, 212 –13, 214 La Duchesse de Langeais, 215, 216 –17 Eugénie Grandet, 214 Ferragus, 214 La fille aux yeux d’or, 214 –15 Les illusions perdues, 270 Louis Lambert, 209, 213 –14 Le médicin de campagne, 215 –16 La peau de chagrin, 210 –12, 218 Le Père Goriot, 217–18 La psysiologie du marriage, 210 La recherche de l’absolu, 213, 214, 218 Scènes de la vie privée, 210, 219 Séraphita, 209 Barrès, Maurice, 170 Baudelaire, Charles, 112 Bauer, Bruno, 313, 339 Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 312 –13, 333 – 34 Der christliche Gnosis, 315 on Gnosticism, 314 –15, 317 Moehler and, 334 Baumgarten, Alexander Aesthetics, 117 Bautain, L. E., 310

Index

beauty, 46, 117– 47, 159, 188 – 89, 198 Hegel on, 296 Keats on, 55 – 56, 61 Plato on, 143, 200, 337 Schelling on, 122 – 23 Schopenhauer on, 128 – 29, 199, 200 Stendhal on, 143 – 44 sublime and, 16, 123, 128 – 29 truth and, 133 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 129 Béguin, Albert, 161, 218 Being, 24, 248, 276 – 77, 283, 322 – 23 Dasein and, 285 – 86 substance and, 303 – 4 Bellini, Gentile, 135 Bellini, Giovanni, 135 Berchem, Claes Pieterszoon, 138 Bergson, Henri, 297, 307 Berlin, Isaiah The Roots of Romanticism, 1 Bible, 188 – 89 Bildung ideal, 312 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 26, 36, 37 Blake, William, 81, 339 The Book of Urizen, 317, 318 –19 Gnosticism of, 277, 314, 317–19, 320 “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” 317–18 Prophecies, 336 Blanche, Emile, 166, 169 Bloch, Marc, 247 Blondel, Maurice, 307 Bloom, Harold, 44 Bodkin, Maud, 37

| 363

Boehme, Jacob, 317 Bonald, Louis-Gabriel de, 310 Bosanquet, Bernard History of Aesthetics, 130 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 13, 109 bourgeoisie, 237– 38 Bourget, Paul Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine, 144 Braudel, Fernand, 251 Brentano, Clemens, 17 Bronte, Charlotte, 177 Brooks, Charles, 160 Brooks, Peter, 106 Browning, Robert, 54 Buddhism, 130, 199 Buffon, Comte de, 277 Bunbury, Lydia, 102 Burckhardt, Jacob, 248 – 49 Bürger, Gottfried August “Leonore,” 5 Burke, Edmund Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris, 232 Paine reply to, 232 – 33 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 231– 32 Burns, Robert, 256 Byron, Lord, 3, 309, 343n1 Calvinism, 203, 255, 269 Camoëns, Luiz Vaz de, 151 Carlyle, Thomas, 202 – 7 biographical information, 202 – 3 on ethics and morality, 204 – 5, 206 – 7 on French Revolution, 203, 249, 252 – 54, 265 as historian, 252 – 56

364 | Index

Carlyle, Thomas (cont.) on poets as prophets, 203, 255 on Ranke, 256 religious philosophy of, 203 reshaping of English language by, 203 as Romanticist, 202, 207, 252 on Scott, 266 social and political writings of, 205 – 6, 207 Carlyle, Thomas, works of The French Revolution, 203, 252, 253, 254, 265 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 206 – 7, 254 – 56 History of Friedrich II, 203, 256 “On History,” 252 – 53 Past and Present, 205 – 6 Sartor Resartus, 203 – 5 Catholic Church, 136, 238 – 39, 242, 259 – 60, 310 –12, 333 – 34 See also Christianity Cavell, Stanley, 275 Cervantes, Miguel de, 11 Chamfort, Nicolas, 8 Chamisso, Adelbert von Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, 163 chansons de geste, 151 Charpentier, Julie von, 78 La Chartreuse de Parme (Stendhal), 144 – 46 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 3, 146 biographical information, 183 – 90 and Christianity, 188 – 89, 310 “De Buonoparte et des Bourbons,” 189

Essai sur les Révolutions, 187– 88 and French Revolution, 95, 184, 185, 187– 88 Génie du Christianisme, 171, 183, 188 – 89, 310 Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, 181, 183 – 90, 191 and Napoleon, 185, 188, 189 – 90 René, 171– 72, 186 Chénier, André, 95, 103 Chrétien de Troyes, 151 Christ, 79, 103, 327, 332 Gnosticism and, 316 –17 Hölderlin depiction of, 85, 87, 88 – 91 Christensen, Jerome, 42 Christianity, 16, 54, 136 – 37, 247, 264, 304 – 5, 312, 321 art and, 12, 123, 126 Chateaubriand and, 171, 188 – 89 de Vigny on, 102, 103, 309 Gnosticism and, 38, 314, 315, 316 –17 God and, 12, 318, 327 Hugo and, 12, 112, 113, 309 on personhood, 148, 316 Saint-Simon on, 238 – 39 worldview of, 11, 151 See also Catholic Church; religion La Chute d’un Ange (Lamartine), 99 –100, 314 civilization, 247, 264 civil society, 231, 260 classicism, 8 –15, 64, 126, 160 classical languages and, 4 Enlightenment and, 95, 122 and French theater, 12 –13 French vs. German, 13 –14

Index

Goethe and, 14 –15, 66 – 67, 69, 118 –19 Romanticism as distinct from, 12 –13, 14 Schiller and, 6, 14, 66, 71, 122 Stendhal critique of, 143 – 44 Clootz, Anacharsis, 221 Coleridge, Samuel, 24, 35 – 42, 202 education and reading, 35 – 36 Fichte and Schelling and, 35, 41 on French Revolution, 2, 233 – 34 Gnostic tendency in, 38 Idealism and, 40, 41 on imagination, 36, 37, 120 journalistic essays, 36, 41, 42 Kant and, 35 – 36, 41 as literary critic, 35, 36 on nature and natural, 38, 39, 49 philosophy of, 35 – 36, 37, 40 – 42 Plato and, 35, 40 poetry of, 18, 36 political views of, 36, 233 – 34 symbolism in, 37– 38 Wordsworth and, 24, 26, 35, 37 Coleridge, Samuel, works of “The Ancient Mariner,” 37 “The Beauty of Buttermere,” 42 Biographia Literaria, 26, 36, 37 “Christabel,” 37 “Dejection,” 38 – 40 “Essay on Faith,” 41 Essays on His Own Times, 233 – 34 “Fears in Solitude,” 234 “The Keswick Imposter,” 42 “Kubla Khan,” 37 “On the Present War,” 233 – 34 “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 37– 38 Collins, William, 17, 25, 171

| 365

Le Colonel Chabert (Balzac), 218 –19 comedy, 125, 143, 151 Comte, Auguste, 224, 235, 238 Condillac, Étienne Bonnet de, 297, 298 Condorcet, Marquis de, 235 Confessions (Rousseau), 180, 191, 198 Conrad, Joseph, 179 consciousness, 123, 213 –14, 302, 330, 339 conscience and, 198, 202 Fichte on, 279, 282, 286 – 87 Hegel on, 198, 295, 296 Maine de Biran on, 303 – 4, 306 Considérant, Victor Prosper, 111 Constant, Benjamin Adolphe, 149, 171, 172 – 73, 174 De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation, 226 Des réactions politiques, 225 de Staël and, 173, 225 as political thinker, 225 – 27 Principes de politique, 226 on psychology of love, 173 – 74 Reflections on Peace, 225 Cook, James, 38 Cooper, James Fenimore, 266 Copernican Revolution, 274 Corday, Charlotte, 254 Corneille, Pierre, 13, 104 cosmology, 277, 278, 291– 92 Cousin, Victor, 301 Cowper, William, 25, 171 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 117, 119, 122, 126, 278 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 2, 121– 22, 192 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 37, 278, 279, 283

366 | Index

Croce, Benedetto, 55 Cromwell (Hugo), 12, 13, 95, 105, 112 Cromwell, Oliver, 256 Crusades, 236, 264 – 65 Cudworth, Ralph True Intellectual System of the Universe, 35 Le curé de Tours (Balzac), 212 –13, 214 Curtius, Ernst-Robert Essay sur la France, 164, 221 Cuyp, Aelbert, 137, 138 Dasein, 285 – 86 Dante Alighieri, 10, 120, 132, 133, 166 Divina Commedia, 189 poetry of, 113, 255 as Romantic, 142 Vita Nuova, 168, 170 Danton, Georges, 225, 261– 62 death Novalis on, 79 Wordsworth on, 31– 32, 33 de Castries, Marquise, 216 Defoe, Daniel, 266 de Hooch, Pieter, 138 “Dejection” (Coleridge), 38 – 40 de Maistre, Joseph Considérations sur la France, 222 Du pape, 310 as political thinker, 222 – 24 and Romanticism, ix Soirées de Saint Pétersbourg, 223, 224 Demeter, 324 – 25 de Musset, Alfred, 15 –16, 170, 309, 339 La Confession d’un enfant du siècle, 171

De Quincey, Thomas, 2 Recollections of the Lake Poets, 18, 25 Derrida, Jacques, 338 Descartes, René, 149, 152, 298, 299, 338 Maine de Biran on, 300, 301, 302 Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Brentano and Arnim), 17 Desmond, William Being and Between, 24 de Staël, Madame Germaine, 146, 173, 225 De l’Allemagne, 12 de Vigny, Alfred, 102 – 5 biographical information, 102 “La bouteille à la mer,” 104 Chatterton, 102, 104 Chute d’un Ange and, 103 Cinq-Mars, 102, 270 Daphne, 102 “Le Déluge,” 103 – 4 Journal, 102, 103, 105 “La Maison du Berger,” 105 “Moïse,” 103 “Le Mont des Oliviers,” 103 “La Mort du Loup,” 104 – 5 on religion and Christianity, 102, 103, 309 Poèmes antiques et modernes, 102, 103 Servitude et grandeur militaires, 102 Stello, 102 dialectics, 241, 295 Dickens, Charles, 179 Diderot, Denis, 6, 125 Letter on the Deaf and the Dumb, 117 Die Kronenwächter (von Arnim), 271– 73 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 159

Index

Dionysus, 324, 325, 326 displacement, 150 divine revelation, 34, 86, 323, 328, 330 Dorval, Marie, 102 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 179 double, 167 drama. See theater and drama dreams, 16, 150, 152, 166, 169 – 70 La Duchesse de Langeais (Balzac), 215, 216 –17 Duns Scotus, 340 Dürer, Albrecht, 137 Durkheim, Émile, 239 Eckhart, Meister, 287, 336 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 17, 65 elegies, 82 – 83, 86, 97 as Romantic genre, 71– 72 Eleusinian mysteries, 325 – 26 Eliot, George, 175, 180 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 34 emotions. See feelings and emotions Empedocles, 92 – 93 Endymion (Keats), 55 – 57 Engels, Friedrich, 313 On the Condition of the Working Class in England, 140, 205 England. See Great Britain Enlightenment, 65, 122, 155, 310 –11 aesthetics of, 117–18 classicism and, 95, 122 French Revolution and, 1, 95, 223 religion and, 309, 313, 318 Romanticism and, 1, 4, 6, 15, 23, 24, 117–18 Euripides, 7 Europe idea of as cultural unity, 263 – 65

| 367

evil, 195, 316 Gnosticism on, 316, 318 good and, 112 –13, 211–12, 219, 316, 318, 319 Fairchild, Hoxie, 54 Faust (Goethe), 67, 166, 168, 278, 313 –14 about, 67– 68 Faust II (Goethe), 14, 67, 70 feelings and emotions, 23, 121– 22, 150, 163, 194 religion and, 330 – 32 Fénelon, François, 307 Dialogues des Morts, 146 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 240 – 41, 242, 313, 339 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 279 – 86 on absolute, vii–viii, 283, 287 on Being, 285 – 86 Carlyle on, 255 Coleridge and, 35, 41 on consciousness, 279, 282, 285, 286 – 87 on ethics, 194 – 96 on freedom, 18, 194, 195 on French Revolution, 227– 28 on German identity, 2, 228 – 29 Hegel and, 196, 197 Hölderlin and, 92 Idealism of, 18, 117, 280 – 81, 282 – 83, 284, 338 Jean Paul and, 160 Kant and, 18, 192, 279 – 80, 281 knowledge theory of, 6, 192 Maine de Biran and, 299, 301 and nature, 284, 289 as political thinker, 227– 29 on religion and God, 284 – 86 and Romanticism, 6, 194

368 | Index

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (cont.) Schelling break with, 287 Schopenhauer and, 127, 128 on self and selfhood, 99, 194, 280, 281, 282 – 83, 284, 287, 313 on subjectivity, 283, 331, 339 and transcendence, 42, 281, 285, 313 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, works of Addresses to the German Nation, 2, 228 – 29 Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urtheile über die französische Revolution, 227– 28 Der geschlossene Handelsstaat, 228 “On the Ground of Our Belief in Divine Providence,” 284 Science of Knowledge, 155, 279, 280 – 81, 283, 284 Theory of Knowledge, 6, 194, 195, 196 Über das Wesen des Gelehrten, 255 The Vocation of Man, 195 – 96, 284, 285 The Way to the Blessed Life, 285, 286 Fielding, Henry, 266 Flaubert, Gustave, 179, 209 Foscolo, Ugo, 142 Foster, E. M., 179 Fourier, Charles, 207, 239 – 40 France, 13, 87, 232, 237– 38, 254 Bourbon Restoration, 13, 95, 210, 248, 311 Catholic Church in, 310 –12 revolution of 1830, 97, 311 Romantic Movement in, 95, 105 Romantic poetry in, 95 –113 theater in, 12 –13, 143 See also Napoleon Franz II, 273

Frederick II of Prussia, 312 freedom, vii, 3, 193, 194 – 95, 225 – 26, 229 Fichte on, 18, 194, 195 Kant on, 2, 18, 75, 193, 275 Michelet on, 258, 259 nature and, 132 Romanticism and, 3, 197 Schelling on, 18, 289 – 90, 294 French Revolution, vii, 13, 222 – 27, 249 Blake on, 317–18 Burke on, 231– 32 Carlyle history of, 203, 249, 252 – 54, 265 Chateaubriand and, 95, 184, 185, 187– 88 Coleridge on, 2, 233 – 34 Constant on, 225, 226 de Maistre on, 222 de Vigny and, 102 Enlightenment and, 1, 95, 223 Fichte on, 227– 28 Guizot on, 263 Hegel and, 18, 229, 230, 231 as historic break, 2, 247– 48, 260, 265, 319 Hölderlin and, 81, 229 Hugo on, 105 Michelet history of, 16, 249, 252, 257, 258 – 62 political ideas of, 221– 22, 226, 259, 260 religion and, 259 – 60 Romanticism and, 6, 13, 274 Saint-Simon on, 235, 237 Schelling on, 229 Schiller and, 193 Terreur of, 18, 228, 254, 261, 262 Wordsworth and, 30, 233

Index

The Friend, 36 Frye, Northrop, 343n1 Galileo, 277 The Garden of Hesperus (Hesiod), 138 Gautier, Théophile, 16, 141, 150 Genesis, 99, 318 –19 Géricault, Théodore, 16 Germany, 18, 65, 171, 230, 256 and French Revolution, 2, 227 Napoleonic occupation of, 228 – 29, 273, 329 national awakening of, 4, 8, 71, 153, 329 Romantic Movement in, 8 –10, 76, 122 Romantic poetry in, 5, 18, 64 – 94 secularization in, 312 –14 theater in, 153 unification dreams in, 163, 273 Gibbon, Edward, 250, 251 Gilbert, William, 149 Giorgione, 138 Gnosticism, 38, 277, 278, 314 –19 of Blake, 277, 314, 317–19, 320 Christianity and, 38, 314, 315, 316 –17 historical origins, 315 Platonism and, 315, 316 revival of, 317 God, 12, 41, 94, 204, 223, 242, 307, 318 Blake on, 318 –19 Christianity and, 12, 318, 327 divine revelation by, 34, 86, 323, 328, 330 existence of, 300, 335 – 36 Fichte on, 284 – 86 history and, 251, 253 Kant on, 275, 300

| 369

Romanticism and, 313, 314 Schelling on, 289, 320, 327, 328, 336 Shelley on, 44, 53 – 54, 309 Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, 43 Goerres, Joseph, 17 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 4, 64 – 70, 263 on absolute, 73, 313 –14 on art and aestheticism, 118 – 21, 122, 188 – 89 autobiographical work by, 65, 154, 191 classicism of, 14 –15, 66 – 67, 69, 118 –19 Hegel on, 68 Heine and, 17, 65, 66 influence of, 68, 78, 121 irony of, 154, 156 Italian journey of, 121, 152 – 53 as lyrical poet, 65 – 66 on nature, 3, 121, 278, 313 on Newton, 277 Novalis and, 78, 155 Orientalism of, 68 – 69 Pietism and, 151, 154 and religion, 309, 329 and Romanticism, 6, 14, 64 – 65, 67, 155 Schelling and, 67, 291 Schiller and, 70 – 71, 72 – 73, 74, 75 on Scott, 269 – 70 Sturm und Drang and, 64, 73, 153 on symbols and symbolism, 121, 122 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, works of “An den Mond,” 66 “Blessed Longing,” 69

370 | Index

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, works of (cont.) Conversations with Eckermann, 73, 269 – 70 Dichtung und Wahrheit, 65, 154, 191 Egmont, 75 “Der Erlkönig,” 65 – 66 Faust, 67– 68, 166, 168, 278, 313 –14 Faust II, 14, 67, 70 Goetz von Berlichingen, 64, 65, 73 “Harzreise im Winter,” 66 “Heidenröslein,” 65 Hermann und Dorothea, 3, 7 Iphigenie auf Tauris, 15, 66, 75 Italian Journey, 121 “Der König in Thule,” 65 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 64, 65, 151, 171 Maximen und Reflexionen, 120, 121 Roman Elegies, 15, 66 – 67 “Der Sanger,” 65 Tasso, 75 “Über allen Gipfeln,” 66 The Venetian Epigrams, 66, 67 “Von deutscher Baukunst,” 118 –19 West-Österlicher Divan, 68 – 69 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 6, 65, 67, 151, 153 – 56, 175, 190 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules, 209 Gontard, Jakob, 82 Gontard, Susette, 82, 90, 157 good, 336, 337 and evil, 112 –13, 211–12, 219, 316, 318, 319 Gothic Revival, 139 – 40

Gouhier, Henri, 297 Gray, Thomas, 6, 17, 25, 171 “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” 314 Great Britain, 171, 232, 233 France and, 2, 232 Romantic Movement in, 17–18, 35 – 36, 130 Romantic poetry in, 5, 23 – 64 social conditions in, 205, 234 Greece, classical, 14, 122, 151, 349n2 aesthetic values in, 3, 117, 129, 132, 159 architecture of, 117, 140 Hegel on, 126, 229 Hölderlin and, 83, 84 – 85, 89, 93 mythology of, 321, 323 – 26 poetry of, 7 Romantic turn to, 3 Gregory XVI, 311 Grimm, Jacob, 4 – 5 Grün, Karl, 240 Guillaume, Jean, 170 Guizot, François, 247, 263 – 65 Hafiz, Sufi, 69 Hamann, Johann Georg, 4, 203 Handel, George Frideric, 127 Hanska, Eveline, 216 Harding, D.W., 178 Hardy, Barbara, 176 Hartley, David, 35 Hartman, Geoffrey, 31 Criticism in the Wilderness, 118 Hawkins, Richard, 38 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 129 Hazlitt, William, 18

Index

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 263, 333 on absolute, 294 – 95 aesthetic theory of, 125 – 27 Baader and, 335, 336 on classical Greece, 126, 229 on consciousness, 198, 295, 296 dialectics of, 241, 295 ethics and morality of, 196 – 98 Fichte and, 196, 197 and French Revolution, 18, 229, 230, 231 Hölderlin and, 18, 81, 346n15 on Kant, 126, 197 philosophy of, 280, 294 – 96, 338 political system of, 229 – 31 Proudhon and, 241– 42 on religion, 125 – 27, 296 and Romanticism, 18 –19, 265, 294, 295 – 96 Rousseau and, 230 Schelling and, 18, 295 – 96 subjectivism of, 295, 339 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, works of The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, 294 – 95 Lectures on Aesthetics, 68, 200 Phenomenology of Spirit, 18 –19, 125, 172, 196 – 98, 231, 295 – 96 Philosophy of Religion, 126 Philosophy of Right, 231 Realphilosophie, 230 – 31 System der Sittlichkeit, 230 Die Verfassung Deutschlands, 230 Heidegger, Martin, 86 – 87, 275, 279, 285, 338

| 371

Heine, Heinrich, 16, 200 Goethe and, 17, 65, 66 Die romantische Schule, 17 Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Novalis), 78, 79 – 81 Heller, Erich “In Two Minds about Schiller,” 73 Heraclitus, 159 Herculaneum, 14 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 4, 14, 64, 160 Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 249 Herodotus, 323, 324 heroes, 255 – 56, 270 Hesiod, 138, 323 Hirt, Ludwig “Über das Kunstschöne,” 119 historical novels by Balzac, 210, 265 by Kleist, 270 – 71 by Scott, 265 – 70 by von Arnim, 271– 73 Historie de la Révolution Française (Michelet), 258 – 62 history, 101, 247– 73 art and, 250 Carlyle on, 252 – 56 Chateaubriand on, 188 – 90 French Revolution and, 247– 48 Guizot on, 263 – 65 heroes of, 255 – 56 as made by great men, 256, 257– 58 Michelet on, 16, 249, 252, 256, 257, 258 – 62 process of, 109, 253 Ranke on, 256 – 58

372 | Index

history (cont.) Romantic view of, 248, 251, 265 – 66 Schelling on, 288 – 89 as science, 249, 256 writing of, 249 – 51, 252, 257, 258 Hobbes, Thomas Leviathan, 221 Hoffman, E. T. A., 16, 150 “The Sandman,” 152 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 66, 81– 94, 339 biographical information, 81 Christ depiction by, 85, 87, 88 – 91 and classical Greece, 83, 84 – 85, 89, 93 on divine presence, 16, 89, 94 elegies of, 82 – 83, 86 Hegel and, 18, 81, 346n15 hymns of, 81– 82, 87– 88, 91– 92 mental illness of, 90, 92 odes by, 23 political views of, 229 on religion, 24, 87– 92, 94, 159 Schelling and, 81, 85, 346n15 Schiller influence on, 156 on selfhood, 157– 59 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, works of “Der Abschied,” 82 “Der Archipelagus,” 82 – 84 “Bread and Wine,” 82, 84 – 85 “Der Einzige,” 87– 90 “Friedensfeier,” 87 “Heimkunft,” 86 – 87 “Hymn to the Goddess of Harmony,” 82 Hyperion, 3, 156 – 59, 175 “Die Liebenden,” 82

“Menons Klagen um Diotima,” 82 “Patmos,” 90 – 92 Der Tod des Empedokles, 92 – 94 “Wie wenn am Feiertage,” 85 – 86 Homer, 7, 83, 132, 133, 189 Iliad, 99, 109 Hooker, Richard Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 221 Horace, 7 Die Horen, 70 Hotho, Heinrich Gustav, 125, 348n10 Hugo, Victor, 105 –13 biographical information, 105 critique of modernization of architecture of Paris, 339 drama by, 105, 106 – 7 Gnosticism in, 314 on history, 109 on Lamartine, 96 poetry of, 12, 13, 23, 98, 107, 113 political activity of, 105 – 6 on religion and Christianity, 12, 112, 113, 309 rhetoric of, 106, 113, 146 and Romantic Movement, 105 on Scott, 270 on social conditions, 107– 8 and tragedy, 105 – 7 Hugo, Victor, works of Les Chatiments, 106 Les Contemplations, 106, 108 Cromwell, 12, 13, 95, 105, 112 Dieu, 106, 109, 113 La Fin de Satan, 106, 109, 112 –13 Hernani, 105 La Légende des Siècles, 106, 109 –12, 111 Les Misérables, 106, 270

Index

Notre Dame de Paris, 270 “Oceano nox,” 107– 8 Odes et Poésies diverses, 107 Orientales, 107, 113 Les Voix Intérieures, 107 humanism, 4, 15, 192 human nature, 110 –11, 200 Humboldt, Alexander von, 293 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 250, 329 Hume, David, 250, 251, 278 humor, 124, 143 Hunt, Leigh, 43, 63 Hurd, Bishop Richard Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 6 Husserl, Edmund, 277– 78 Hymns to the Night (Novalis), 23, 76 – 78, 79 Hyperion (Hölderlin), 3, 156– 59, 175 Hyperion (Keats), 55, 57– 58, 62 Idealism, 73, 81, 199, 276 – 78, 287, 290, 317 Coleridge and, 40, 41 Fichte and, 18, 117, 280 – 81, 282 – 83, 284, 338 Kant and, 274, 280 Maine de Biran and, 299 – 300 Schelling and, 117, 287– 94, 338 idylls, 71– 72 imagination, 128, 217 Coleridge on, 36, 37, 120 Hugo and, 107, 113 Romanticism and, 16, 131, 152 Ruskin on, 131, 133 Wordsworth on, 17, 27, 29 – 30, 34, 37 imitation theory, 119 immortality, 32, 53, 200 individuation, 199 infinite, 3, 117–18, 124, 248, 313

| 373

irony, 123 – 24, 179 Austen and, 175, 179 Goethe and, 154, 156 Hegel on, 200 humor and, 124 Kierkegaard on, 200, 201 Romantic, 118, 175, 200 Socratic, 123, 124, 200 Isis, 78 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 82, 160, 313 Jacobins, 232, 234, 261 James, Henry, 120 – 21, 175, 180 Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), 119, 124, 161, 166, 174 – 75 biographical information, 159 Carlyle and, 204, 254 philosophical knowledge of, 159 – 60 on selfhood, 190 – 91 Titan, 159 – 63, 190 – 91, 204 Die unsichtbare Loge, 159 Vorschule der Ästhetic, 11–12, 159, 161, 174 – 75 Jena Romantics, 8 –10, 122 Jocelyn (Lamartine), 98 – 99, 101 Johnson, Claudia, 178 Joseph II of Austria, 312 Judaism, 315, 316 Jung, Carl Gustav, 38, 167, 169 – 70 Kandinsky, Wassily Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 61 Kant, Immanuel aesthetic views of, 119, 122, 126 Coleridge and, 35 – 36, 41 Critique of Judgment, 117, 119, 122, 126, 278

374 | Index

Kant, Immanuel (cont.) Critique of Practical Reason, 2, 121– 22, 192 Critique of Pure Reason, 37, 278, 279, 283 on Europe, 236 Fichte and, 18, 192, 279 – 80, 281 on freedom, 2, 18, 75, 193, 275 on God, 275, 300 Hegel on, 126, 197 and Idealism, 127, 274, 280 influence of, 68, 159 – 60, 192 Maine de Biran and, 299, 300, 301, 302, 308 moral philosophy of, 274 – 75 on nature, 119, 278 Schelling and, 18, 192, 294 on science, 278, 338 thing-in-itself concept of, 40 – 41, 281, 283, 300, 338 The Vocation of Man, 281 Keats, John, 23, 46, 55 – 63 on beauty, 55 – 56, 61 on nature, 55, 56, 57 and Romanticism, 55 Wordsworth and, 58 Keats, John, works of Endymion, 55 – 57 Hyperion, 55, 57– 58, 62 “Lines Written in the Highlands after a Visit to Burns’ Country,” 57 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 58, 59 – 61 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 58, 59 “Ode to Autumn,” 58, 62 – 63 “Ode to Psyche,” 58 – 59 “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” 58

“On Visiting the Tomb of Burns,” 57 Poems, 55 Kierkegaard, Søren, 203 Concept of Irony, 200 Diary of a Seducer, 201 Either-Or, 201 Fear and Trembling, 201– 2 Kleist, Heinrich von, 270 – 71 Klettenberg, Katharina, 154 Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian, 64 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 127 Knox, John, 255 Koerner, Gottfried, 70 Kühn, Sophie von, 76, 77– 78 Lacordaire, Henri, 311 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe L’absolu littéraire, 9 La Fontaine, Jean de, 13 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 95 –101, 339 biographical information, 95 – 96 on nature, 97 poetry of, 97, 101 political views and career, 97– 98, 101 on religion and theology, 97, 99 –100, 309 Sainte-Beuve on, 97, 101 Lamartine, Alphonse de, works of La Chute d’un Ange, 99 –100, 314 “Epitre à M. de Sainte-Beauve,” 97 “Gethsémani,” 98 L’Histoire des Girondins, 98, 101 “L’isolement,” 97 Jocelyn, 98 – 99, 101 “Le Lac,” 96 Marseillaise de la Paix, 98

Index

Méditations poétiques, 23, 96 “Ode sur les Révolutions,” 97 “La politique rationnelle,” 97 Recueillements poétiques, 101 “Le Vallon,” 96 – 97 “La Vigne et la Maison,” 100 –101 Lamennais, Félicité de, 310 –12 Livre du peuple, 312 Paroles d’un croyant, 311–12 landscapes, 12, 131– 32, 136, 137 language, 4 – 5, 78 Lanzi, Luigi, 142 La Rochefoucauld, François de, 8 L’avenir, 311 Leavis, F. R., 55 Lefebvre, Georges, 249 Lefebvre, Henri, 143 – 44 La Légende des Siècles (Hugo), 106, 109 –12 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 150, 298 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Goethe), 64, 65, 151, 171 Leopardi, Giacomo, 142 Leroux, Pierre, 111 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 14, 65, 82 Emilia Galotti, 11, 65 Lacoon, 117 Minna von Barnhelm, 65 Lewes, Henry, 177 Liebig, Justus von, 293 “Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 30 – 31, 32, 314 literary criticism, 35 – 36, 55, 118 Locke, John, 298 loneliness, 40, 149, 172 Lorrain, Claude, 6, 12, 131, 137 Los, 318 –19

| 375

Louis Lambert (Balzac), 209, 213 –14 Louis-Philippe, 185, 210 Louis XVIII, 185, 189, 238, 263, 297 love, 173 – 74 brother-sister, 172, 186 erotic, 99 as universal ideal, 51, 54, 92 – 93 Lowell, James Russell, 24 Lowth, Bishop Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 5 Löwy, Michel, 3 Lucinde (Schlegel), 123, 197, 200 – 201 Lukács, Georg, 151, 269 The Historical Novel, 265 Theory of the Novel, 171 Luther, Martin, 255, 271– 72, 333 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge), 17, 26 – 27, 37 Macaulay, Thomas Babington “The Task of the Modern Historian,” 250, 251 Maine de Biran, 144, 296 – 308 biographical information, 297 Idealism of, 299 – 300 on metaphysics, 297– 98, 301, 302 and religion, 302 – 3, 305 – 6, 307– 8 and Romanticism, 308 Maine de Biran, works of Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, 298, 299, 303, 357n20 “Fragments relatifs aux fondements de la morale et de la religion,” 303

376 | Index

Maine de Biran, works of (cont.) Journal, 298, 299, 300, 302 – 3, 304 – 5, 307, 358n22 “Notes sur la philosophie de Kant,” 300, 301– 2, 303 Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie, 304, 305, 306 “Rapports des sciences naturalles avec la psychologie,” 299 maladie du siècle, 170 – 71 Malebranche, Nicolas, 307– 8 Mann, Golo, 227 Manzoni, Alessandro, 142 The Betrothed, 147, 270 Marat, Jean-Paul, 261, 262 Marcus Aurelius, 307 Martin, John, 16 Marx, Karl, 205, 313 The XVIII Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 237 The Class Struggles in France, 237 The Communist Manifesto, 196, 207, 240 The Holy Family, 240 Misère de la philosophie, 241 Proudhon and, 240 – 42, 243 Maurice, F. D., 34, 314 The Meaning of Meaning (Ogden and Richards), 36 melancholy, 83, 100, 146, 149, 171, 314, 327 Romanticism and, 15, 141, 329 melodrama, 106, 216 Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (Chateaubriand) as autobiography, 181, 183 – 90, 191 reviewers on, 185 writing of, 183 – 84 Mendelssohn, Dorothea, 8

Messiaen, Olivier, 129 metaphysics, 302 Maine de Biran on, 297– 98, 301, 302 Schelling on, 322 – 23 Michael Kohlhaas (Kleist), 270 – 71 Michelangelo, 118 Michelet, Jules on French Revolution, 16, 249, 252, 257, 258 – 62 on history, 256, 262 as political radical, 259 Middle Ages, 112, 132, 151, 235 – 36, 287 Mill, John Stuart, 263 Milton, John, 23, 35, 58, 127, 151 Paradise Lost, 23, 189 mimesis, 117, 155 mind, 124, 280, 299, 307, 313, 337 body and, 149 – 50 Maine de Biran on, 298, 301, 306 nature and, 34 reality and, 127, 301 Mirabeau, Comte de, 254 modernity, vii, x, 337 Romanticism and, 3, 4 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 130 – 31, 135, 136, 137– 39 Moehler, Johann Adam, 312 –13, 333 – 35 Symbolik, 334 Mohammed, prophet, 255 Molière, 13, 142 – 43 monotheism, 255, 320, 323, 326, 327 Montaigne, Michel de Essais, 181 Montalembert, Charles de, 311 Montesquieu, 146

Index

morality, 139, 199, 238, 304 Carlyle on, 204 – 5, 206 – 7 Fichte on, 195, 196 Hegel on, 196 – 97 Kant on, 121– 22 Maine de Biran on, 303, 305 Moreau, Pierre, 188 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 121, 182 – 83 Anton Reiser, 149, 153, 180, 181– 83, 191 “Begriff des in sich Vollendeten,” 121 The Morning Post, 36, 42 Murdoch, Iris, 199 – 200 Murray, Gilbert, 54 music, 127, 129, 143 – 44 poetry and, 7, 78 Musil, Robert Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 172 mysticism, viii, 130, 313, 329 mythology Gnostic revival and, 319 – 20 Greek, 321, 323 – 26 Schelling on, 10, 320 – 28, 336 Nancy, Jean-Luc L’absolu littéraire, 9 Napoleon Bonaparte, 2, 18, 87, 226, 236, 248, 249 Catholic Church and, 309 –10 Chateaubriand and, 185, 188, 189 – 90 fall of, 68, 273 occupation of Germany by, 228 – 29, 273, 329 Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon), 106 nationalism, 4, 8, 142, 221, 229, 249 naturalism, 134, 136 – 37, 140 – 41, 204, 339 – 40

| 377

nature, viii, 12, 97, 136, 156, 204, 281, 290 absolute and, 287 art and, 117, 119, 121, 131, 143 Coleridge on, 38, 39 Fichte on, 284, 289 freedom and, 132 Goethe on, 3, 121, 278, 313 Kant on, 119, 278 Keats on, 55, 56, 57 modern physics and, 276 – 77, 278 Novalis on, 83, 122 Schelling on, 18, 41, 287, 289 – 93, 313 Shelley on, 45, 47, 54 Wordsworth on, 24, 31– 32, 34, 314 Nerval, Gérard de, 150, 164 – 70 Aurélia, 164, 165 – 68, 169, 170 as autobiographical novelist, 191 Jean Paul as influence on, 166 and Romanticism, 170 Sylvie, 164 – 65, 170 Voyage en Orient, 168 Newman, John Henry, 41– 42, 324 Newton, Isaac, 277 Nicolas of Cusa, 287 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 199, 338, 339 noble savage, 224 Nodier, Charles, 150 Nominalist theology, 148, 150, 337– 38 nostalgia, 66, 73, 149 nothingness, 24, 104 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 16, 17, 24, 75 – 81, 203 – 4 biographical information, 75 – 76 Goethe and, 78, 155 on language, 5, 78 on nature, 83, 122

378 | Index

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) (cont.) poetry concept of, 10, 78 – 79, 122 and Romanticism, 8, 76, 79, 81 on science, 10, 278 symbolic theory of, 78 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), works of Fragments, 77– 78 Geistliche Lieder, 78 Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 78, 79 – 81 Hymns to the Night, 23, 76 – 78, 79 Journals, 78 Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, 78 “Monolog,” 5, 78, 122 novel, 151, 155 – 56, 164, 179, 207, 214 autobiographical, 65, 180, 182, 191 character in, 174 – 75 Lukács on, 151, 171, 265, 269 as narrative, 179 plot in, 174 See also historical novels occult, 278 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 58, 59 – 61 odes, 5, 23, 31, 38, 58 Odin, 255 Ogden, C. K., 36 On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller), 7, 72, 121, 122, 192, 193 – 94 O’Regan, Cyril Gnostic Return in Modernity, 317 Orpheus, 169 Otto, Rudolf, 329

Ovid, 66 Owen, Robert, 205 paganism, 135, 316, 327 Paine, Thomas, 221 The Rights of Man, 232 – 33 painting, 61, 118, 127, 130 – 39 color and light in, 132, 134 landscape, 12, 131– 32, 136, 137 Romanticism and, 16 pantheism, 34, 336 Paracelsus, 278 Parmenides, 24 Passage, Charles E., 77 Pater, Walter, 35 pathetic fallacy, 133 Patinir, Joachim, 132 Peacock, T. L., 51 La peau de chagrin (Balzac), 210 –12, 218 Pellico, Silvio, 142 Pepys, Samuel, 6 Percy, Thomas The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 5 Le Père Gortiot (Balzac), 217–18 personhood, 149, 202, 284 Christianity on, 148, 316 Romanticism and, 148 women and, 148 – 49, 175, 176 – 79 See also selfhood Perugino, Pietro, 131 Pétrement, Simone A Separate God, 38 Pfau, Thomas, 38, 202 Minding the Modern, 202 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 125, 172, 196 – 98, 231, 295 – 96 on Romanticism, 18 –19

Index

Philo, 315 philosophy, 235, 274 – 308 of Coleridge, 35 – 36, 37, 40 – 42 of Hegel, 280, 294 – 96, 338 poetry and, 18, 36 reality and, 280 of Schelling, 280, 321– 22, 328 science and, 321– 22 theology and, 236, 328, 335 Philosophy of Nature (Schelling), 10, 284, 289, 292, 293 physics, 10, 276 – 78 Pietism, 151, 154, 313 Pindarus, 35, 83 Pitt, William, 234 Pius VII, 310 Plato, 128, 136, 306 – 7 Apology, 200 on beauty, 143, 200, 337 Coleridge and, 35, 40 on Demiurge, 315 Phaedo, 306 Phaedrus, 326 on soul, 32, 149, 291 Timaeus, 315 Platonism, 46, 150, 238, 307, 315, 316 Plotinus, 315 Plutarch, 326 poetry, ix, 5, 23, 24, 118, 133 Christian, 11, 12 classical, 12, 13, 14 of Coleridge, 18, 36 of Dante, 113, 255 English, 5, 23 – 63 French, 95 –113 F. Schlegel on, 5, 7, 11 German, 5, 18, 64 – 94 Greek, 7 of Hugo, 12, 13, 23, 98, 107, 113

| 379

idyll and elegy genres of, 71– 72 of Lamartine, 97, 101 music and, 7, 78 naïve, 7, 99 Novalis on, 8, 10, 76, 78 – 79, 81, 122 philosophy and, 18, 36 poets as prophets, 203, 255 prose and, 13, 27 religion and, 10, 86 Schelling on, 10 Schiller on, 7, 72 – 73 sentimental, 7– 8, 11 Shelley on, 53 – 54 transcendence and, 16, 61, 72 – 73 Wordsworth on, 26 – 27 polytheism, 10, 126, 320, 323, 325, 327 Pompeii, 12, 14 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 149 positivism, 235, 293, 339 Poulet, Georges, 174 Poussin, Nicolas, 137 Praz, Mario The Romantic Agony, 15 predictability, 252, 355n11 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 25, 27– 30, 31, 33 – 34, 44 – 45 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 176 – 77 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 48 – 51, 55, 58, 314 Propertius, 66 prose, 95 poetry and, 13, 27 Protestantism, 127, 238 – 39, 334 See also Christianity; Reformation Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 207, 224 biographical information, 239 on Catholicism and God, 242

380 | Index

Marx and, 240 – 42, 243 political ideas of, 239 – 43 Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, 240 and Romanticism, 243 Système des contradictions économiques, 241, 242 Proust, Marcel, 164, 170 psychology, 150, 163, 164, 170, 173 – 74, 218 –19 Pugin, Augustus Welby, 139 Quietism, 150, 307 Quispel, Gilles, 317 Racine, Jean, 13, 142, 189 Radcliffe, Ann, 16 Ranke, Leopold von Carlyle on, 256 Geschichte Wallensteins, 257 on history, 256 – 58 History of England, 256 Michelet and, 258 – 59 Weltgeschichte, 257, 258 rationalism, 95, 107, 298, 308, 329, 338 Die Räuber (Schiller), 70, 73– 74, 181 realism, 74, 112, 133, 146, 301 Romantic, 339 – 40 reality, 37, 134, 199, 275, 281, 302 dreams and, 152 ideal and, 69 – 70, 73, 74, 287 Maine de Biran on, 299 – 300, 301 mind and, 127, 301 philosophy and, 280 reason, 125, 337, 338 Reformation, 137, 238 – 39, 255, 271– 72 Rehm, Walther Orpheus, der Dichter und die Toten, 89

religion, 10, 150, 200, 309 – 36 aesthetics and, 89, 125 – 27 Baader and, 335 – 36 Balzac and, 352n15 Baur and, 333 – 34 Chateaubriand and, 188 – 89 culture and, 312 de Vigny and, 102 Enlightenment and, 309, 313, 318 Feuerbach on, 240 – 41, 313, 339 Fichte on, 284 – 86 French Revolution and, 259 – 60 Goethe and, 309, 329 Hegel on, 125 – 27, 296 Hölderlin on, 24, 87– 92, 94, 159 Hugo and, 12, 112, 113, 309 Lamartine and, 97, 99 –100, 309 Maine de Biran and, 302 – 3, 305 – 6, 307– 8 Michelet on, 259 – 60 Moehler and, 333 – 34 Nerval and, 170 Novalis and, 79 Romanticism and, 16, 313 –14, 328, 329, 336 Ruskin on, 138 – 39 Saint-Simon on, 236, 238 – 39 Schelling on, 323 Schiller and, 70, 73, 309, 329 Schleiermacher on, 309, 314, 329 – 32 Shelley and, 44, 53 – 54, 309 See also Christianity; theology Rembrandt van Rijn, 127, 131, 137 Renan, Ernst Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, 181 Renaissance, 14, 147, 149 aesthetic tastes of, 112, 132, 140 personhood in, 148 René (Chateaubriand), 171– 72, 186

Index

Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas Monsieur Nicolas, 181 revolution of 1848, 98, 101, 248, 263 Revue des deux mondes, 102 Reynolds, John, 58 Ricardo, David, 205 Richards, I. A., 36, 51 Ricoeur, Paul, 248 “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge), 37– 38 Robespierre, Maximilien, 226, 260, 261, 262 Roman Empire, 13, 66, 239, 258, 263 – 64 Romanticism Austen and, ix, 175 autobiographies and, 180, 181, 191 classicism and, 12 –13, 14 creative nature of, 117, 118 de Maistre and, ix description of, 1– 8 Enlightenment and, 1, 4, 6, 15, 23, 24, 117–18 Fichte and, 6, 194 freedom and, 3, 197 French Revolution and, 6, 13, 274 Gnosticism and, 319 God and, 313, 314 Goethe and, 6, 14, 64 – 65, 67, 155 Hegel and, 18 –19, 265, 294, 295 – 96 history and, 248, 251, 265 – 66 Hugo and, 105 as idea, 15 –19, 98 Idealism and, 78 imagination and, 16, 131, 152 irony and, 118, 175, 200 in Italy, 142

| 381

Jena group and, 8 –10, 122 Maine de Biran and, 308 melancholy and, 15, 141, 329 Novalis and, 8, 10, 76, 78 – 79, 81, 122 realism and, 339 – 40 religion and, 16, 313 –14, 328, 329, 336 Rousseau and, 6, 180 Schelling and, 8, 294 Schiller and, 6, 121 search for absolute, 339 selfhood and, 148, 151, 190 Shakespeare and, 10, 11, 142 Shelley and, 53 – 54 Stendhal and, 141, 142, 143 – 44, 147 subjectivism and, 338 – 39 subsequent fate of, viii, 339 as term, 5 – 6, 17–18, 170 and vernacular languages, 4 – 5 Wordsworth and, 24, 25, 31 as worldview, 3 – 4 Rorty, Richard, 338 Rosa, Salvator, 6, 137 Le Rouge et le Noir (Stendhal), 144, 207– 9, 218 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 95, 143 Carlyle on, 255 – 56 Confessions, 180, 191, 198 Hegel on, 230 La Nouvelle Héloïse, 170 and Romantic Movement, 6, 180 on social contract, 221, 226, 230, 234 The Social Contract, 25, 221 The Solitary Wanderer, 25 Wordsworth and, 25 Royce, Josiah, 19 Rubens, Peter Paul, 137

382 | Index

Ruskin, John on architecture, 139 – 40 Modern Painters, 130 – 31, 135, 136, 137– 39 on painting and aesthetics, 130– 41 on religion, 138 – 39 The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 139 The Stones of Venice, 135, 137, 138, 139 – 40 Time and Tide, 140 Unto This Last, 140 Ruysdael, Jacob, 127, 348n16 Ryan, Lawrence, 157 Said, Edward Culture and Empire, 178 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 13, 97, 101, 118, 223, 263 Saint-Martin, Louis-Claude de, 78, 209, 278 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 95, 97 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, 207, 224, 235 – 39 Cathéchisme des industriels, 237– 38 De la réorganisation de la société européenne, 236 on economics, 236 – 37 on French Revolution, 235, 237 L’Industrie, 237 Mémoire sur la science de l’homme, 235 – 36 Nouveau Christianisme, 238 – 39 L’Organisateur, 237 Le Politique, 237 on religion, 236, 238 – 39 Santayana, George, 55 Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 203 – 5 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 194 – 95 satire, 110, 143, 178

Say, Jean-Baptiste, 241 Traité d’economie politique, 236 – 37 Sayre, Robert, 3 Schelling, Friedrich, 16, 286 – 94, 313, 319 – 28, 339 on absolute, vii–viii, 287, 288, 289, 290, 293 – 94, 321, 323, 327 on aesthetics and beauty, 122 – 23, 135 on art, 292, 293 – 94, 320 Coleridge and, 35, 41 on freedom, 18, 289 – 90, 294 on French Revolution, 229 on God, 289, 320, 327, 328, 336 Goethe and, 67, 291 Hegel and, 18, 295 – 96 Hölderlin and, 81, 85, 346n15 Kant and, 18, 192, 294, 301 on metaphysics, 322 – 23 on mythology, 10, 320 – 28, 336 on nature, 18, 41, 287, 289 – 93, 313 on philosophy, 280, 321– 22, 328 on poetry, 10 and Romanticism, 8, 294 transcendental idealism of, 117, 287– 94, 338 Schelling, Friedrich, works of Einleitung in die Philosophie, 322 Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 289 – 90 Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, 287– 89 Lectures on Mythology, 85, 320 – 28 Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 289, 294, 320 – 21 Philosophy of Mythology, 85 Philosophy of Nature, 10, 284, 289, 292, 293

Index

Philosophy of Revelation, 327, 336 System of Transcendental Idealism, 287, 289, 292, 293 – 94 Schiller, Friedrich von, 17, 70 – 75, 78, 156, 313 aesthetic views of, 121– 22, 193 – 94 classicism of, 6, 14, 66, 71, 122 on ethics, 193 – 94 and French Revolution, 193 Goethe and, 70 – 71, 72 – 73, 74, 75 Kant influence and, 192 Novalis and, 78 on poetry, 7, 72 – 73 religion and, 70, 73, 309, 329 and Romanticism, 6, 121 and tragedy, 73, 74 – 75 Schiller, Friedrich von, works of Die Braut von Messina, 74 – 75 Don Carlos, 70, 74 “The Gods of Greece,” 71 Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 75 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 7, 72, 121, 122, 192, 193 – 94 On Grace and Dignity, 72, 121 Maria Stuart, 75 Die Räuber, 70, 73 – 74, 181 “Resignation,” 71 Roman Elegies, 72 Thalia, 156 Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 7, 72, 121 Wallenstein, 74, 75 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 7, 11, 12, 17, 67, 118 and Jena Romantics, 8, 9 –10 Lectures on Mythology, 320

| 383

Schlegel, Friedrich, 17, 66, 78, 123, 295 on aesthetics, 118, 123 – 24 “Critical Fragments,” 8 – 9 “Discourse on Poetry” (Gespräch über die Poesie), 9, 11, 320 on Goethe, 67, 155 Lectures on the Philosophy of Language, 123 – 24 Lucinde, 123, 197, 200 – 201 on poetry, 5, 7, 11 and Romanticism, 6, 8, 9 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst David, 2, 8, 16, 200 – 201, 328 – 32 biographical information, 328 – 29 The Christian Faith, 331– 32 Discourses on Religion, 309, 329, 331 on religion, 309, 314, 329 – 32 Schopenhauer, Arthur on aesthetics and art, 127– 30 ethics of, 199 – 200 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 127– 28 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich Symbolik des Traumes, 150 science, 130, 131, 235, 276 – 77, 278, 338 Hegel on, 296 Kant on, 278, 338 philosophy, 321– 22 poetry and, 10 Schelling on, 290 – 92, 321– 22 Scotland, 267– 68 Scott, Walter, 3, 133, 265 – 70 The Abbot, 266 The Bride of Lammermoor, 266 – 67 The Heart of Midlothian, 269

384 | Index

Scott, Walter (cont.) The Monastery, 266 Redgauntlet, 267, 268 – 69 Rob Roy, 267, 269 Waverley, 267– 68 sculpture, 118 secularization, 125, 127, 309, 311–14 self-consciousness, 99, 125, 202, 281, 306, 313 self-determination, 75, 304 selfhood and self, 152, 194 – 95 Fichte on, 99, 194, 280, 281, 282 – 83, 284, 287, 313 Hölderlin on, 157– 59 Jean Paul on, 190 – 91 Kant on, 192, 283 Maine de Biran on, 298, 299, 303 – 4, 306 Romanticism and, 151, 190 Schelling on, 288 transcendence of, 158, 281, 313, 339 Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 175– 76 sentimental, 7, 11 Shaftesbury, 6, 150 – 51 Shakespeare, William, 23, 35, 133, 255 and Romanticism, 10, 11, 142 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 23, 42 – 55, 339 aesthetic theory of, 53 biographical information, 42 – 43 on nature, 45, 47, 54 on nature of romantic poetry, 53 – 54 odes, 23, 47 political views, 42, 44 and religion and God, 44, 53 – 54, 309 Wordsworth and, 45

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, works of “Adonais,” 46, 52 – 53, 54 “A Defence of Poetry,” 53 “Epipsychidion,” 46, 52 Hellas, 45 – 46 “Hymn to Apollo,” 46 “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” 45 “Lines” of sorrowful farewell, 43 “Mont Blanc,” 44 The Necessity of Atheism, 42 – 43 “Ode to the West Wind,” 47 Prometheus Unbound, 48 – 51, 55, 58, 314 “Queen Mab,” 43 “To a Skylark,” 47– 48 Shulz, Walter, 328 Sinclair, Isaac von, 90, 92 Sismondi, Simonde, 173, 237 Smith, Adam Wealth of Nations, 236, 237 social contract Fichte on, 227– 28 Rousseau on, 25, 221, 226, 230, 234 social ethics, 196, 221 socialism, 140, 228, 248 sociology, 235, 239 Socrates, 123, 124, 200, 238 solipsism, 152 Sophocles, 83, 189 Antigone, 197 Oedipus at Colonus, 93 soul, 32, 149, 198, 305 body and, 149 – 52 Southey, Robert, 250, 251 Spenser, Edmund, 23 Faerie Queene, 56 Speusippus, 40 Spinoza, Baruch, 82, 279, 281, 290 Steiner, George, 179 – 80

Index

Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 141– 47 biographical information, 141– 42 moralist novels of, 207– 9 on music, 143 – 44 novel writing by, 144 – 46 and Romanticism, 141, 142, 143 – 44, 147 on theater, 143 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), works of La Chartreuse de Parme, 144 – 46 Les Chroniques Italiennes, 146 – 47 Dictionnaire de Musique, 143 Henri Brulard, 180 Histoire de la peinture en Italie, 142 Lifes of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio, 142 Racine et Shakespeare, 142 Rome, Naples, Florence, 142 Le Rouge et le Noir, 144, 207– 9, 218 Sterne, Laurence, 266 Carlyle on, 265 Tristram Shandy, 156, 204 Stewart, Maaja, 178 Stoicism, 151 Maine de Biran and, 304 – 5, 307 The Stones of Venice (Ruskin), 135, 137, 138, 139 – 40 Strauss, David Friedrich, 313, 339 Sturm und Drang, 64, 65, 73 – 74, 153, 181 Goethe and, 64, 73, 153 subjectivity and subjectivism, 41, 332, 334, 338 – 39 Fichte on, 283, 331, 339 Hegel on, 295, 339 sublime, 58, 265 beauty and, 16, 123, 128 – 29 Wordsworth on, 29, 30

| 385

Swedenborg, Emanuel, 166 Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell, 318 Sylvie (Nerval), 164 – 65, 170 symbolism, 37– 38, 320 – 21 Goethe on, 120, 121, 122 System of Transcendental Idealism (Schelling), 287, 289, 292, 293 – 94 Tallien, Jean-Lambert, 254 Tasso, Torquato, 10, 151 Gerusalemme Liberata, 189 Taylor, Frederick, 140 Taylor, Jonathan, 355n11 Teniers, David, 137 Terborch, Gerard, 138 theater and drama, 92 – 93, 179 in France, 12 –13, 143 in Germany, 153 Hugo and, 105, 106 – 7 theology, 328 – 36, 333 – 34 Nominalist, 148, 150, 337– 38 philosophy and, 236, 328, 335 See also religion Thierry, Augustin, 235, 236 Thiers, Adolphe, 249 thing-in-itself, 302 Kant on, 40 – 41, 281, 283, 300, 338 Thomas Aquinas, 340 Thomson, James The Seasons, 6 Tibullus, 66 Tieck, Ludwig, 8, 17, 78, 150, 200 time, 28, 63, 214 –15 Tintoretto, 136 Annunciation, 131 Titan (Jean Paul), 159 – 63, 190 – 91, 204

386 | Index

Titans, 48, 57– 58, 62, 99 Titian, 136 Todorov, Tzvetan Theories of the Symbol, 121 Tolstoy, Leo, 179 Tracy, Destutt de, 95, 146, 297 tragedy, 68, 143, 326 ancient, 151, 174 comedy and, 125 Hugo and, 105 – 7 Schiller and, 73, 74 – 75 transcendence, 29, 61, 135, 151, 337, 339 Coleridge on, 41– 42 Fichte on, 42, 281, 285, 313 Maine de Biran on, 302, 305, 306 poetry and, 16, 61, 72 – 73 Schelling on, 42, 313 selfhood and, 158, 281, 313, 339 Shelley on, 54 truth, 61, 133, 159, 337, 338 art and, 134 – 35 Turner, Joseph, 16, 131 Ruskin and, 130, 137, 138, 141 Turner, Sharon, 251 Uhland, Ludwig, 17 unconscious, 123, 150, 170 Valéry, Paul, 249 van der Weyden, Rogier, 119 van de Velde, Willem, 138 Van Dijck, Anthony, 137 Van Goyen, Jan, 127, 384n16 Vauvenargues, Marquis de, 8 Vedanta Hinduism, 130 Vendler, Helen, 58 Venice, 135, 136 – 37, 138 vernacular languages, 4 – 5

Veronese, Paolo, 136 Viallaneix, Paul, 105 Villers, Charles La philosophie de Kant, 300 Virgil, 189 Aeneid, 99, 109, 170 Viviani, Emilia, 43 Voegelin, Eric, 317 Voltaire, 125, 204, 251 von Arnim, Achim Die Kronenwächter, 271– 73 Wallenstein, Albrecht von, 74 Walpole, Horace, 16 war, 224 Warton, Thomas On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe, 6 Waverley novels (Scott), 3, 266 – 68 The Abbot, 266 The Bride of Lammermoor, 266 – 67 The Heart of Midlothian, 269 The Monastery, 266 Redgauntlet, 267, 268 – 69 Rob Roy, 267, 269 Waverley, 267– 68 Weltschmerz, 171 Westbrook, Harriet, 43 Whitehead, Alfred North Science and the Modern World, 276 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 125 Wilhelm, August, 6 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Goethe), 65, 67, 151, 153 – 56, 175, 190 and Romanticism, 6, 65, 155 Willemer, Johann Jacob von, 69 Willemer, Marianne, 69 Winckelmann, Johann, 14, 117 Windelband, Wilhelm, 293

Index

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 177 women, 148 – 49, 175, 176 – 78 Woolf, Virginia, 267 Wordsworth, William, 23, 24 – 35, 339 Coleridge and, 24, 26, 35, 37 on death and suffering, 31– 32, 33 French Revolution and, 30, 233 on imagination, 27, 29 – 30, 34, 37 Keats and, 58 on nature, 24, 31– 32, 34, 314 political views and involvement, 2, 25, 30, 233 religious pantheism of, 34 – 35 and Romanticism, 24, 25, 31 Shelley and, 45 on sublime, 29, 30

| 387

Wordsworth, William, works of The Excursion, 25 “Imitations of Immortality,” 31 “Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey,” 30 – 31, 32 – 33, 314 Lyrical Ballads, 17, 26 – 27, 37 The Prelude, 25, 27– 30, 31, 33 – 34, 44 – 45 Wouwermans, Phillips, 138 Wundt, Wilhelm Völkerpsychologie, 170 Yeats, William Butler, 55 Young, Edward, 6, 17, 25, 171 Night Thoughts on Death and Immortality, 76 Zola, Émile, 209, 340

Louis Dupré is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor Emeritus in the Philosophy of Religion at Yale University. He has published numerous books and articles, including Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

“The Quest of the Absolute is the third volume in Louis Dupré’s trilogy dealing with the origins and development of modernity and the major cultural currents defining its history. It follows Passage to Modernity (1993) and The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004). This third volume deals with the Romantic movement. Dupré’s impressive account is concerned to restore something of the full dimensionalities to Romanticism as a whole, to acknowledge something of the immense intellectual, political, and spiritual ambitions at work in it, without reneging on a reflective critical relation to it.” william desmond | author of The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic

“Louis Dupré’s fascinating portrayal of the Romantic soul urges us to look afresh at this crucial ‘third wave’ of modernity. His thorough insight, astonishing erudition, mild judgment, and unparalleled perspicacity bring to life the works and ideas of many whimsical personalities. He convincingly demonstrates that their restless search for existential depth and authenticity reveals layers of truth and meaning that can function as a mirror for our times.” joris geldhof | Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

“In this extraordinarily comprehensive and penetrating study, the capstone to a great scholarly career, Louis Dupré undertakes nothing less than a grand synthesis of Romantic thought; yet the book is beautifully written and a joy to read. Discussions of English, French, and German poetry and fiction are seamlessly linked to systematic analyses of Romantic aesthetics, psychology, and ethics, as well as such other aspects of Romantic thought as the new religious and historical conceptions that emerge in the period. The Quest of the Absolute is a brilliant, indeed indispensable, book, one that demonstrates, more clearly than any previous study, why Romanticism is still relevant to the struggles that confront us in the twenty-first century.” henry weinfield | University of Notre Dame

louis dupré is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor Emeritus in the Philosophy of Religion at Yale University. He has published numerous books and articles, including Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

university of notre da me press Notre Dame, in 46556  undpress.nd.edu