Romanticism (It's All in the Name...)

Three books, all with the same title, Romanticism, deal with the same topic. Indeed, all employ the same key word in discussing the art and philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet each of the books' three authors, Aiden Day, David Blayney Brown, and Michael Ferber, understand the term "Romanticism" in slightly different ways.

Day's work, published as a part of the New Critical Idiom series by Routledge, begins its introduction by quoting heavily from M.H. Abrams, whose book The Mirror and the Lamp helped to illuminate Romanticism for the 20th century. In his first chapter, "Enlightenment or Romantic?", Day then sets up the dichotomy between Enlightenment thinking and Romanticism that is often rehearsed by scholars. On the Enlightenment side are figures like William Godwin, who "argued that human beings act in line with reason and that it is impossible for them to be rationally persuaded by an argument without their conduct being regulated accordingly." Romanticism, by contrast, in the works of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a "celebration of subjectivity."

The second chapter looks at constructions of the term "Romantic" which first appeared in the 17th century. Thomas Shadwell wrote disapprovingly of all things "Romantick" in the preface to his 1668 play The Sullen Lovers. By 1820, debates over Romantic literature raged on the European Continent, but Lord Byron declared he saw no conflict between the "Classical" and the "Romantic" among English writers. Later critics latched on to the term "Romantic" to describe a variety of authors in Britain, but Day warns against dubbing movements in retrospect. "Literature is not" he contends "something which can be regarded as occupying a 'trans-historical' space, but something which must be read as subject to the discourses and ideologies of a particular time and place."

Day's project is best summed up by the title of his third chapter: "Enlightenment AND Romantic." For Day, these two movements are inextricably linked. On the one hand, writers of the Romantic era continued to work towards the progressive social justice championed by Enlightenment figures like Godwin, while at the same time their focus did shift to that of the interior rather than the external world. A key figure here is Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose commitment to social change informed his "study of solitary imagination." Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein can even be read as a defense of Day's "and" proposition, since the broodingly interior Frankenstein must ultimately face the consequences of the creature he has unleashed onto the world. As Day puts it, "the writings of those who have formerly been defined as Romantic are not necessarily anti-Enlightenment in any simple sense."

Though that might seem a fitting conclusion, Day includes a final chapter on "Gender and the Sublime" analyzing some of the consequences of Romantic theory first postulated in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke. Certainly, Burke genders the sublime as masculine and its companion "beautiful" as feminine. Day's point, however, is that this gendering continued to influence Romantic poets. For instance, Wordsworth gendered Nature as feminine, but the female Nature only aided him in apprehending a higher "invisible world." This higher world, Day argues, is associated with the interior mind of the poet, and is thus gendered as masculine. Such arguments break down when the author is a woman, but Day contends that female writers of the period were skeptical of feelings of the sublime and instead focused on nature herself.

David Blayney Brown takes a different approach to Romanticism. While Day focuses on poets and novelists, Brown is interested in painters. He begins his introduction with an examination of Eugène Delacroix's painting The Death of Sardanapalus. He claims the "moral vacuum" at the heart of the piece is "all the more shocking for ignoring the message of the play by the English poet Lord Byron from which he had taken his subject." Notice that Day, discussing literature, ignores drama, while Brown, examining the visual arts, pays close attention to the theatre.

Brown finds a literary parallel for Delacroix's Romanticism in Victor Hugo, whose 1827 preface to his play Cromwell "advocated a rich variety of expression and experience to reflect the complexity of the world and the self, rather than the cold formalism of classical drama, and recognized the value of the ugly or grotesque in engaging the senses, rather than beauty in winning only admiration." For Brown, The Death of Sardanapalus is a "pictorial equivalent" to Hugo's theoretical preface.

Day emphasizes the continuity between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, but Brown stresses how revolutionary the new movement was. He claims: "Not since the Renaissance had such a profound change come over the Western consciousness." Instead of incorporating a collective ideal, the Romantic artists "emphasized individual experience, feeling, and expression." This, of course, came from the French Revolution, which Day emphasizes, but also from the rise and fall of Napoleon. As Brown puts it: "Romanticism was born in opposition and sorrow, in social or national crisis and in individual trauma."

Brown traces the term "Romantic" to Friedrich Schlegel, who in the first issue of the journal Athenaeum in 1798, identified the Romantic with "progressive universal poetry" not based on "inherited and culturally specific forms." Schlegel was writing in the German university town of Jena, which became a hotbed of Romanticism. Though not in Jena, the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe contributed greatly to the movement as well, and Brown cites Goethe's 1789 play Torquato Tasso as an inspiration for Delacroix's Tasso in the Madhouse, painted fifty years later.

Tasso was a Renaissance poet and playwright, but more modern poets also provided inspiration to Romantic artists. Brown cites Thomas Chatterton, a poet whose suicide in 1770 inspired Henry Wallis (painting in the 1850s) to create the magnificent Death of Chatterton, now hanging in the Tate Gallery in London. The cult of Chatterton was not confined to England, either, as Brown observes that the French writer Alfred de Vigny turned the poet's story into the play Chatterton, which "was a hit in Paris in 1835."

So while Day is interested in Romanticism as a philosophical movement in dialogue with the Enlightenment, Brown sees it as an artistic movement born of political turmoil. Michael Ferber wrestles with both of these concepts in his Romanticism, which bears the subtitle A Very Short Introduction. For him, Romanticism is both an intellectual movement and an artistic movement, and while he sees both sides as distinct, he does not seem to emphasize one over the other. Both of these elements, the philosophical and the aesthetic, are present in the pre-Romantic movement Ferber identifies as Sensibility.

Sensibility is a term that was much more in use in the eighteenth century than "Romantic" or "Romantick." It was associated with such works of "storm and stress" as Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and with Gothic writers, including Horace Walpole and Matthew G. Lewis. Ferber also connects it to poets like Mary Robinson, as well as the hugely influential critic and novelist Madame de Staël.

While Ferber successfully traces elements of Sensibility into Romanticism, he definitely seems to be coming at Romanticism from a position of greatly misunderstanding the period's drama. I can overlook his calling Shelley's Prometheus Unbound the poet's "greatest work" as that is a matter of taste. Downright strange, however, is Ferber's comment that Byron's Manfred is "unperformable." Is Ferber really unaware of the many, many successful performances there have been of Manfred? Samuel Phelps was probably the most famous actor to produce the play, but Manfred became so popular that toy theatre versions were made.

For all its faults, though, Ferber's book does give a decent introduction to Romanticism. It attempts to be more balanced than either Day or Brown, gazing into the philosophical and the aesthetic alike. In the end, as Ferber suggests, neither side can be fully understood without the other.

The Roots of Romanticism

In 1965, the great critic and theorist Isaiah Berlin gave a series of lectures on Romanticism. Posthumously published as the book The Roots of Romanticism, Berlin's lectures offer remarkable insight not just into Romanticism in general, but specifically into Romantic drama.

In the opening chapter, "In Search of a Definition," Berlin uses Romantic drama to try to get to the heart of what Romanticism really is. For a Sturm und Drang play like Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers, there is no answer to the question of who is right or wrong. Georg Büchner's later play The Death of Danton offers an even further challenge. Danton does not deserve to die, Berlin argues, "yet Robespierre was perfectly right in putting him to death." What matters in Romanticism is not so much what the values are, but "that people should dedicate themselves to these values with all that is in them."

Berlin considers Romanticism to be an attack on the Enlightenment, and identifies the true fathers of the movement as philosophers such as Johann Georg Hamann and Hamann's pupil, Johan Gottfried Herder, as well as the great Immanuel Kant. In discussing these philosophers, however, Berlin illustrates their principles by turning to dramatists. For instance, he singles out Friedrich Klinger, whose play Sturm und Drang gave a name to the entire German proto-Romantic movement. Klinger's play The Twins depicts a man who kills his weaker twin, claiming his brother will not allow him to fully develop his own nature. Such a viewpoint is entirely alien to that of the Enlightenment.

Kant leads a group that Berlin calls "the Restrained Romantics." Raised on Lutheran pietism, Kant was "virtually intoxicated by the idea of human freedom," according to Berlin. Playwrights like Schiller picked up on this obsession with freedom. The hero of Schiller's Fiesco, for instance, acts abominably, but acts with freedom, unlike the rabble in the play who need a leader they can blindly follow. According to Schiller, men must go through the stage of Notstaat in which they are governed by necessity, to Vernunftstaat in which they are governed by rationality, to a finally liberated state in which man is driven by Spieltrieb.  This "play drive" creates its own rules, because it knows that all standards are invented, so the only way to live life authentically is by creating one's own rules.

This type of thinking, however, leads to what Berlin calls "Unbridled Romanticism." This movement included writers like Friedrich Schlegel, whose novel Lucinde advocated free love. It also broke out in the playful meta-theatricality of Ludwig Tieck, whose play Puss-in-Boots contains an on-stage audience openly questioning the conventions of the theatre.

Such unbridled Romantics produced lasting effects, which Berlin illustrates with the stage history of Mozart's Don Giovanni. After devils dragged off his title character to hell, Mozart had the more respectable characters sing a sextet. For a hundred years, however, the Romantics refused to stage the original ending, since they had elevated the villain of the piece to the status of "a vast myth."

This myth, of course, was manifest in the person of Lord Byron. According to Berlin, "Byron's chief emphasis is upon the indomitable will, and the whole philosophy of the view that there is a world which must be subdued and subjugated by superior persons, takes its rise from him." Berlin even quotes Byron's Manfred saying:

My Spirit walked not with the souls of men,

Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes;

The thirst of their ambition was not mine,

The aim of their existence was not mine;

My joys — my griefs — my passions — and my powers,

Made me a stranger...

This unbridled Romanticism seems far from tolerant. But Berlin argues that it ultimately led to tolerance. If each extreme, individualistic genius can be right in his own way, what right have we to criticize anyone? Though Berlin notes the connections between Romanticism and authoritarianism (particularly Fascism), he finds it ultimately democratic. 

Coleridge's Remorse

In 1811, Samuel Taylor Coleridge began a series of lectures of Shakespeare and Milton. The lectures, which were preserved in shorthand form, show the poet had a tremendous grasp of drama. They also attracted some future playwrights, including Lord Byron.

The early lectures were less than spectacular, perhaps in part because Coleridge was suffering from opium-induced severe constipation. However, by the seventh lecture, given on December 9, 1811, Coleridge was hitting his stride, speaking insightfully about Romeo and Juliet. In one particularly good passage, his discussion of the play seemed to rise to the level of rhapsody:

Romeo became enamoured of the ideal he formed in his own mind & then as it were christened the first real being as that which he desired. He appeared to be in love with Rosaline, but in truth he was in love only with his own idea. He felt the necessity of being beloved which no noble mind can be without: Shakespeare then introduces Romeo to Juliet and makes it not only a violent but permanent love at first sight which had been so often ridiculed in Shakespeare.

The lectures expressed Coleridge's opinions about drama, though the sentiments were not always entirely original. Beginning with his ninth lecture, he began borrowing heavily from August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose German theories of vegetable genius greatly influenced a number of Romantic writers.

When he got to Hamlet in the twelfth lecture, delivered on January 2, 1812, Coleridge articulated the Romantic vision of the Danish prince as a man of brilliance incapable of making up his mind:

Yet with all this sense of duty, this resolution arising out of conviction nothing is done: this admirable & consistent character, deeply acquainted with his own feelings, painting them with such wonderful power & accuracy, and just as strongly convinced of the fitness of executing the solemn charge committed to him, still yields to the same retiring from all reality, which is the result of having what we express by the term a world within himself.

Around this time, Coleridge had influence over another future playwright, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The young Shelley bought copies of all of Coleridge's works and spoke of him as the most important literary figure of the time. The two were supposed to meet in February of 1812, but just missed each other.

Eventually, Coleridge's own work did reach the stage, and on January 23, 1813, Drury Lane premiered his tragedy Remorse, a reworking of his earlier play Osorio. The play was an enormous success, with an initial run of twenty nights. Coleridge wrote of the triumph to his wife:

You will have heard, that on my entering the Box on Saturday Night I was discovered by the Pit--& that they all turned their faces toward our Box, & gave a treble chear of Claps, I mention these things because it will please Southey to hear that there is a large number of Persons in London, who hail with enthusiasm any prospect of the Stage's becoming purified & rendered classical. My success, if I succeed (of which, I assure you, I entertain doubts in my opinion well-founded, both from the want of a prominent Actor for Ordonio, & from the want of vulgar Pathos...) but if I succeed, I succeed for others as well as for myself--

Of course, he did succeed, and was now Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Playwright. And as he predicted, he succeeded not just for himself, but for others, too. The success of Remorse no doubt helped to spur Byron to write Manfred and Shelley to write The Cenci. Neither of those plays were performed within their authors' short lifetimes, but they both came to have an extraordinary impact on the theatre to come.

Even Leigh Hunt, a political enemy of Coleridge, reluctantly had to give Remorse its due. In an article on tragic actors published in February of 1815, Hunt called the play "the only tragedy touched with real poetry for the last fifty years." This is perhaps too harsh, as it leaves out Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro, and De Montfort by Joanna Baillie. Still, Remorse helped to inspire a younger generation, including Byron and Shelley, so that it would not be the only great tragedy written for the next fifty years

The Evolution of Madame de Staël

Anne Louise Germaine Necker was an odd fish. Her parents were Swiss Protestants who settled in Paris in the mid-eighteenth century. The year after she was born, her father went into politics, eventually rising to become the Minister of Finance for King Louis XVI.

Did I mention that her dad was Jacques Necker? You know, the financial genius who did everything he could to save Louis's rear end, and whose dismissal by the king helped to precipitate the French Revolution? Yeah, that Jacques Necker.

And her mom? That would be Suzanne Curchod. She used to hang out with Diderot, and she exchanged letters with Rousseau and Voltaire. Edward Gibbon wanted to marry her, but she pretty much turned him down.

So with those two as your parents, it's probably hard to not be a genius. (Especially when you're an only child and your brilliant father dotes on you all the time.)

When she was 20, Germaine married the Swedish ambassador to Paris, Eric Magnus Staël-Holstein. They split after a couple of years, but she took his name, becoming known to history as Madame de Staël.

Madame de Staël published--under her own name--some rather radical little pieces right before the Revolution. She had to flee the Reign of Terror, but she returned to France after the fall of Robespierre and wrote a fascinating book called The Influence of Literature on Society. With this work of literary criticism, de Staël broke with traditional French Enlightenment thinking and began a journey along the road to Romanticism.

The Influence of Literature on Society holds that the rules of good taste are not arbitrary, but are based on "universal truths" that are "unanimously approved by all mankind." The book claims local customs often force authors of genius to depart from good taste, but that these minor errors in style should not obscure the greatness of works tainted by barbarous (read, non-French) customs.

The great example of this, of course, was Shakespeare. In her chapter on Shakespearean Tragedy, de Staël writes:

In Shakespeare there are beauties of the first order which appeal to all nations and all epochs. In Shakespeare there are also flaws which may be attributed to the Elizabethan period and peculiarities which are so popular with the English that they continue to have success on the English stage.

She claims that Shakespeare is superior to the Greeks in his portrayal of the passions, but inferior to them in terms of artful composition, citing "dull patches, useless repetitions, and incoherent images." The reason for these flaws, she claims, was that Will had to write for an ignorant audience. One gets the sense she thinks that if Shakespeare had only written for more civilized, French theatre goers, then his plays would have been perfect.

Later on in the book, de Staël links the style of Shakespeare and other English writers with the authors of Germany, theorizing about a type of imaginative literature emanating from the northern countries of Europe. While she does not prefer this literature to that of France, she recognizes its power, and she admits that highly structured French verse cannot always contain the deepest feelings of human passion. Ultimately, the book advocates "an intermediate genre between the decorum of the French poets and defects in taste of the Northern writers."

In 1800, de Staël still couldn't get beyond seeing Shakespeare--and other "Northern" writers--as being somehow defective. Perhaps writing her own imaginative works helped to change her mind. In 1802, de Staël published Delphine, an epistolary novel examining the roles of upper class women. She returned to France the next year, but she got in hot water with Napoleon and ended up touring Germany with her lover, a fellow Swiss-French writer names Benjamin Constant.

Now that she was spending some serious time in Germany, de Staël's feelings about that country and its literature began to change. She saw Goethe's theatre in Weimar and met Schlegel in Berlin. She then took a tour of Italy and wrote a new novel, Corinne. It was in 1810 that she wrote her second important piece of criticism: Germany.

Napoleon ordered all copies of the book destroyed. Three years later, she was able to have the book republished in London. What was it that made this book, more than Corinne, more than Delphine, more than The Influence of Literature on Society, so dangerous to the French Empire?

As de Staël points out in the book, many people in France had come to use the term "classical" as a synonym for perfection. French art was "classical" because it was based on Greek and Roman models. "Romantic" art by contrast had its origins in the songs of the troubadours of the chivalric age. In Germany, de Staël had the nerve to say that "classical" art wasn't necessarily the best way to go. In one passage she observed:

French poetry, being the most "classical" of all modern poetry, is the only modern poetry not familiar to the people. The stanzas of Tasso are sung by the gondoliers of Venice; Spaniards and Portugese of all classes know the verses of Calerdon and Camoëns by heart. Shakespeare is as much admired by the common folk of England as by the upper classes. Poems of Goethe and Bürger are set to music and can be heard from the banks of the Rhine to the Baltic. Our French poets are admired by the cultivated classes of France and the rest of Europe, but they are completely unknown to the common people, and to the middle class, even of the cities.

Thus, Germany linked all of French literature to the old aristocratic regime, and it associated foreign literatures with egalitarianism, which the Revolution had allegedly championed.

Madame de Staël was particularly biting when it came to drama. She attacked the French for holding fast to the unities of time and place when unity of action was the only one that really mattered. She did not advocate that French playwrights should adopt the methods and models of the Germans, but she welcomed foreign plays as a way to generate new ideas

Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy seems to have greatly moved her. She noted that German audiences watching the play did not mind lingering over lengthy scenes, appreciating the feelings of the characters rather than only being on the lookout for the plot. She expressed a desire to see Wallenstein on the French stage, but she added that the play demanded a "youthful spirit" that many in France lacked.

Acting in France was too bound by what de Staël described as "the art of declamation." She praised German actors, such as August Wilhelm Iffland, as well as the British actor David Garrick. The French actor she most admired was François-Joseph Talma, who found new ways of acting old scenes in order to breath fresh life into them. She concluded a long digression on Talma by saying:

The artist gives as much as is possible to French tragedy of what, justly or unjustly, the Germans accuse it of lacking: originality and naturalness. He knows how to characterize foreign manners in the diverse plays in which he acts, and no actor hazards greater effects by simple means. In his declamation Shakespeare and Racine are artistically joined. Why won't dramatists also attempt to unite in their compositions what the actor has so well combined in his acting?

Germany was more than mere literary criticism. It included a manifesto for a new type of dramaturgy. Napoleon, who had limited the number of theatres in Paris and sought to tightly regulate drama, would have none of that. But all the Napoleons in the world couldn't keep de Staël's successors, including romantic playwrights Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, from ultimately conquering the French stage.

German Theories of Vegetable Genius

Consciousness can be over-rated. At least that's what the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz believed. According to Leibniz, at any given moment, we each have an infinite number of perceptions within ourselves. That means there are constantly changes within our very souls of which we are unaware, because these changes are "too small and too numerous or too closely combined."

In the eighteenth century, the critic Johann Georg Sulzer picked up on how Leibniz's ideas could be applied to art. In his four-volume General Theory of the Fine Arts, Sulzer developed Leibniz's theories of the unconscious, frequently employing the metaphor of a plant to show how art can "bloom" without its creator being fully aware of what he is doing. In one passage, Sulzer writes:

It is a remarkable thing, belonging among other mysteries of psychology, that at times certain thoughts will not develop or let themselves be clearly grasped when we devote our full attention to them, yet long afterwards will present themselves in the greatest clarity of their own accord, when we are not in search of them, so that it seems as though in the interim they had grown unnoticed like a plant, and now suddenly stood before us in their full development and bloom.... Every artist must rely on such happy expressions of his genius, and if he cannot always find what he diligently seeks, must await with patience the ripening of his thoughts. 

Sulzer was not the only one to develop this biological view of art. The philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder saw all human endeavors as possessing the qualities of organic growth. Each culture, he believed, grew out of the peculiar conditions of its own time and place. Herder in turn became a great influence on the greatest of all German poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

"As I have looked upon nature, so do I now look upon art," Goethe wrote in one of his letters. For Goethe, a perfect work of art was a work of the human spirit, and thus also a work of nature. An artist must not just study an object. He must also penetrate into the depths of his own spirit, creating works in rivalry with nature, "at once natural and above nature," as Goethe put it.

Goethe's own work appeared that way to critics. Friedrich Schlegel wrote of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship that it was a "thoroughly organized and organizing work" and that it formed "itself into one whole." For Schlegel, Goethe's work expressed itself, almost without the need for a creator.

In 1800, a young Friedrich Schelling published his System of Transcendental Idealism, calling for a combining of intelligence and nature, of the conscious and the unconscious, of reflective freedom and blind necessity. This, Schelling said, is what art does, making art "the general organon of philosophy." According to Schelling, all artists must be inspired, receiving their art as a gift of grace. As he put it:

The artist is driven to production involuntarily, and even against an inner resistance.... No matter how purposeful he is, the artist, with respect to that which is genuinely objective in his production, seems to be under the influence of a power that sunders him from all other men and forces him to express or represent things that he himself does not entirely fathom, and whose significance is infinite.

Friedrich Schiller had already explored the idea of the unconscious creation of art in his 1795 essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry." After reading Schelling, however, Schiller had a strong reaction. Though an idealist himself, Schiller felt Schelling and his followers were going too far. In 1801 he wrote to Goethe:

I fear that in their ideas, these Idealist-gentlemen take too little notice of experience; in experience, the poet begins entirely with the unconscious... and poetry, it seems to me, consists precisely in being able to express and communicate that unconscious--i.e., to carry it over into an object.... The unconscious united with awareness constitutes the poetic artist.

Schlegel's older brother August agreed with Schiller in this more moderate view, that art is both conscious and unconscious. Still, he continued to use Sulzer's analogy of a plant to describe the process of artistic creation. In his published lectures On Dramatic Art and Literature, the elder Schlegel wrote that organic form:

is innate; it unfolds itself from within, and reaches its determination simultaneously with the fullest development of the seed.... In the fine arts, just as in the province of nature--the supreme artist--all genuine forms are organic....

Genius. Sheer German vegetable genius.

And that explains the German section at the heart of M.H. Abrams' book The Mirror and the Lamp. I'll cover the rest of the book, and try to explain how all this relates to the theatre, in my blog post tomorrow.

By the way, a special thank you to Alex J. Jefferies and the other talented vegetable artists of the Internet for their portraits of famous dead German philosophers. (I'm sure that's precisely what they were going for.)