“What did they replace it with?”
“The new catchwords were ‘feeling,’ ‘imagination,’ ‘experience,’ and ‘yearning.’ Some of the Enlightenment thinkers had drawn attention to the importance of feeling—not least Rousseau—but at that time it was a criticism of the bias toward reason. What had been an undercurrent now became the mainstream of German culture.”
“So Kant’s popularity didn’t last very long?”
“Well, it did and it didn’t. Many of the Romantics saw themselves as Kant’s successors, since Kant had established that there was a limit to what we can know of ‘das Ding an sich.’ On the other hand, he had underlined the importance of the ego’s contribution to knowledge, or cognition. The individual was now completely free to interpret life in his own way. The Romantics exploited this in an almost unrestrained ‘ego-worship,’ which led to the exaltation of artistic genius.”
“Were there a lot of these geniuses?”
“Beethoven was one. His music expresses his own feelings and yearnings. Beethoven was in a sense a ‘free’ artist—unlike the Baroque masters such as Bach and Handel, who composed their works to the glory of God, mostly in strict musical forms.”
“I only know the Moonlight Sonata and the Fifth Symphony.”
“But you know how romantic the Moonlight Sonata is, and you can hear how dramatically Beethoven expresses himself in the Fifth Symphony.”
“You said the Renaissance humanists were individualists too.”
“Yes. There were many similarities between the Renaissance and Romanticism. A typical one was the importance of art to human cognition. Kant made a considerable contribution here as well. In his aesthetics he investigated what happens when we are overwhelmed by beauty—in a work of art, for instance. When we abandon ourselves to a work of art with no other intention than the aesthetic experience itself, we are brought closer to an experience of ‘das Ding an sich.’”
“So the artist can provide something philosophers can’t express?”
“That was the view of the Romantics. According to Kant, the artist plays freely on his faculty of cognition. The German poet Schiller developed Kant’s thought further. He wrote that the activity of the artist is like playing, and man is only free when he plays, because then he makes up his own rules. The Romantics believed that only art could bring us closer to ‘the inexpressible.’ Some went as far as to compare the artist to God.”
“Because the artist creates his own reality the way God created the world.”
“It was said that the artist had a ‘universe-creating imagination.’ In his transports of artistic rapture he could sense the dissolving of the boundary between dream and reality.
“Novalis, one of the young geniuses, said that ‘the world becomes a dream, and the dream becomes reality.’ He wrote a novel called Heinrich von Ofterdingen set in medieval times. It was unfinished when he died in 1801, but it was nevertheless a very significant novel. It tells of the young Heinrich who is searching for the ‘blue flower’ that he once saw in a dream and has yearned for ever since. The English Romantic poet Coleridge expressed the same idea; saying something like this:
What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?”
“How pretty!”
“This yearning for something distant and unattainable was characteristic of the Romantics. They longed for bygone eras, such as the Middle Ages, which now became enthusiastically reappraised after the Enlightenment’s negative evaluation. And they longed for distant cultures like the Orient with its mysticism. Or else they would feel drawn to Night, to Twilight, to old ruins and the supernatural. They were preoccupied with what we usually refer to as the dark side of life, or the murky, uncanny, and mystical.”
“It sounds to me like an exciting period. Who were these Romantics?”
“Romanticism was in the main an urban phenomenon. In the first half of the last century there was, in fact, a flourishing metropolitan culture in many parts of Europe, not least in Germany. The typical Romantics were young men, often university students, although they did not always take their studies very seriously. They had a decidedly anti–middle class approach to life and could refer to the police or their landladies as philistines, for example, or simply as the enemy.”
“I would never have dared rent a room to a Romantic!”
“The first generation of Romantics were young in about 1800, and we could actually call the Romantic Movement Europe’s first student uprising. The Romantics were not unlike the hippies a hundred and fifty years later.”
“You mean flower power and long hair, strumming their guitars and lying around?”
“Yes. It was once said that ‘idleness is the ideal of genius, and indolence the virtue of the Romantic.’ It was the duty of the Romantic to experience life—or to dream himself away from it. Day-to-day business could be taken care of by the philistines.”
“Byron was a Romantic poet, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, both Byron and Shelley were Romantic poets of the so-called Satanic school. Byron, moreover, provided the Romantic Age with its idol, the Byronic hero—the alien, moody, rebellious spirit—in life as well as in art. Byron himself could be both willful and passionate, and being also handsome, he was besieged by women of fashion. Public gossip attributed the romantic adventures of his verses to his own life, but although he had numerous liaisons, true love remained as illusive and as unattainable for him as Novalis’s blue flower. Novalis became engaged to a fourteen-year-old girl. She died four days after her fifteenth birthday, but Novalis remained devoted to her for the rest of his short life.”
“Did you say she died four days after her fifteenth birthday?”
“Yes…”
“I am fifteen years and four days old today.”
“So you are.”
“What was her name?”
“Her name was Sophie.”
“What?”
“Yes, it was…”
“You scare me. Could it be a coincidence?”
“I couldn’t say, Sophie. But her name was Sophie.”
“Go on!”
“Novalis himself died when he was only twenty-nine. He was one of the ‘young dead.’ Many of the Romantics died young, usually of tuberculosis. Some committed suicide…”
“Ugh!”
“Those who lived to be old usually stopped being Romantics at about the age of thirty. Some of them went on to become thoroughly middle-class and conservative.”
“They went over to the enemy, then.”
“Maybe. But we were talking about romantic love. The theme of unrequited love was introduced as early as 1774 by Goethe in his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. The book ends with young Werther shooting himself when he can’t have the woman he loves…”
“Was it necessary to go that far?”
“The suicide rate rose after the publication of the novel, and for a time the book was banned in Denmark and Norway. So being a Romantic was not without danger. Strong emotions were involved.”
“When you say ‘Romantic,’ I think of those great big landscape paintings, with dark forests and wild, rugged nature…preferably in swirling mists.”
“Yes, one of the features of Romanticism was this yearning for nature and nature’s mysteries. And as I said, it was not the kind of thing that arises in rural areas. You may recall Rousseau, who initiated the slogan ‘back to nature.’ The Romantics gave this slogan popular currency. Romanticism represents not least a reaction the Enlightenment’s mechanistic universe. It was said that Romanticism implied a renaissance of the old cosmic consciousness.”
“Explain that, please.”
“It means viewing nature as a whole; the Romantics were tracing their roots not only back to Spinoza, but also to Plotinus and Renaissance philosophers like Jakob Böhme and Giordano Bruno. What all t
hese thinkers had in common was that they experienced a divine ‘ego’ in nature.”
“They were pantheists then…”
“Both Descartes and Hume had drawn a sharp line between the ego and ‘extended’ reality. Kant had also left behind him a sharp distinction between the cognitive ‘I’ and nature ‘in itself.’ Now it was said that nature is nothing but one big ‘I.’ The Romantics also used the expressions ‘world soul’ or ‘world spirit.’”
“I see.”
“The leading Romantic philosopher was Schelling, who lived from 1775 to 1854. He wanted to unite mind and matter. All of nature—both the human soul and physical reality—is the expression of one Absolute, or world spirit, he believed.”
“Yes, just like Spinoza.”
“Nature is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature, said Schelling, since one senses a ‘structuring spirit’ everywhere in nature. He also said that matter is slumbering intelligence.”
“You’ll have to explain that a bit more clearly.”
“Schelling saw a ‘world spirit’ in nature, but he saw the same ‘world spirit’ in the human mind. The natural and the spiritual are actually expressions of the same thing.”
“Yes, why not?”
“World spirit can thus be sought both in nature and in one’s own mind. Novalis could therefore say ‘the path of mystery leads inwards.’ He was saying that man bears the whole universe within himself and comes closest to the mystery of the world by stepping inside himself.”
“That’s a very lovely thought.”
“For many Romantics, philosophy, nature study, and poetry formed a synthesis. Sitting in your attic dashing off inspired verses and investigating the life of plants or the composition of rocks were only two sides of the same coin because nature is not a dead mechanism, it is one living world spirit.”
“Another word and I think I’ll become a Romantic.”
“The Norwegian-born naturalist Henrik Steffens—whom Wergeland called ‘Norway’s departed laurel leaf’ because he had settled in Germany—went to Copenhagen in 1801 to lecture on German Romanticism. He characterized the Romantic Movement by saying, ‘Tired of the eternal efforts to fight our way through raw matter, we chose another way and sought to embrace the infinite. We went inside ourselves and created a new world…’”
“How can you remember all that?”
“A bagatelle, child.”
“Go on, then.”
“Schelling also saw a development in nature from earth and rock to the human mind. He drew attention to very gradual transitions from inanimate nature to more complicated life forms. It was characteristic of the Romantic view in general that nature was thought of as an organism, or in other words, a unity which is constantly developing its innate potentialities. Nature is like a flower unfolding its leaves and petals. Or like a poet unfolding his verses.”
“Doesn’t that remind you of Aristotle?”
“It does indeed. The Romantic natural philosophy had Aristotelian as well as Neoplatonic overtones. Aristotle had a more organic view of natural processes than the mechanical materialists…”
“Yes, that’s what I thought…”
“We find similar ideas at work in the field of history. A man who came to have great significance for the Romantics was the historical philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, who lived from 1744 to 1803. He believed that history is characterized by continuity, evolution, and design. We say he had a ‘dynamic’ view of history because he saw it as a process. The Enlightenment philosophers had often had a ‘static’ view of history. To them, there was only one universal reason which there could be more or less of at various periods. Herder showed that each historical epoch had its own intrinsic value and each nation its own character or ‘soul.’ The question is whether we can identify with other cultures.”
“So, just as we have to identify with another person’s situation to understand them better, we have to identify with other cultures to understand them too.”
“That is taken for granted nowadays. But in the Romantic period it was a new idea. Romanticism helped strengthen the feeling of national identity. It is no coincidence that the Norwegian struggle for national independence flourished at that particular time—in 1814.”
“I see.”
“Because Romanticism involved new orientations in so many areas, it has been usual to distinguish between two forms of Romanticism. There is what we call Universal Romanticism, referring to the Romantics who were preoccupied with nature, world soul, and artistic genius. This form of Romanticism flourished first, especially around 1800, in Germany, in the town of Jena.”
“And the other?”
“The other is the so-called National Romanticism, which became popular a little later, especially in the town of Heidelberg. The National Romantics were mainly interested in the history of ‘the people,’ the language of ‘the people,’ and the culture of ‘the people’ in general. And ‘the people’ were seen as an organism unfolding its innate potentiality—exactly like nature and history.”
“Tell me where you live, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
“What united these two aspects of Romanticism was first and foremost the key word ‘organism.’ The Romantics considered both a plant and a nation to be a living organism. A poetic work was also a living organism. Language was an organism. The entire physical world, even, was considered one organism. There is therefore no sharp dividing line between National Romanticism and Universal Romanticism. The world spirit was just as much present in the people and in popular culture as in nature and art.”
“I see.”
“Herder had been the forerunner, collecting folk songs from many lands under the eloquent title Voices of the People. He even referred to folktales as ‘the mother tongue of the people.’ The Brothers Grimm and others began to collect folk songs and fairy tales in Heidelberg. You must know of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”
“Oh sure, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Rumpelstiltskin, The Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel…”
“And many more. In Norway we had Asbjørnsen and Moe, who traveled around the country collecting ‘folks’ own tales.’ It was like harvesting a juicy fruit that was suddenly discovered to be both good and nourishing. And it was urgent—the fruit had already begun to fall. Folk songs were collected; the Norwegian language began to be studied scientifically. The old myths and sagas from heathen times were rediscovered, and composers all over Europe began to incorporate folk melodies into their compositions in an attempt to bridge the gap between folk music and art music.”
“What’s art music?”
“Art music is music composed by a particular person, like Beethoven. Folk music was not written by any particular person, it came from the people. That’s why we don’t know exactly when the various folk melodies date from. We distinguish in the same way between folktales and art tales.”
“So art tales are…?”
“They are tales written by an author, like Hans Christian Andersen. The fairy tale genre was passionately cultivated by the Romantics. One of the German masters of the genre was E.T.A. Hoffmann.”
“I’ve heard of The Tales of Hoffmann.”
“The fairy tale was the absolute literary ideal of the Romantics—in the same way that the absolute art form of the Baroque period was the theater. It gave the poet full scope to explore his own creativity.”
“He could play God to a fictional universe.”
“Precisely. And this is a good moment to sum up.”
“Go ahead.”
“The philosophers of Romanticism viewed the ‘world soul’ as an ‘ego’ which in a more or less dreamlike state created everything in the world. The philosopher Fichte said that nature stems from a higher, unconscious imagination. Schelling said explicitly that the world is ‘in God.’ God is aware of some of it, he believed, but there are other aspects of nature which represent the unknown in God. For God also has a dark side.”
“The thought is fascinating and fri
ghtening. It reminds me of Berkeley.”
“The relationship between the artist and his work was seen in exactly the same light. The fairy tale gave the writer free rein to exploit his ‘universe-creating imagination.’ And even the creative act was not always completely conscious. The writer could experience that his story was being written by some innate force. He could practically be in a hypnotic trance while he wrote.”
“He could?”
“Yes, but then he would suddenly destroy the illusion. He would intervene in the story and address ironic comments to the reader, so that the reader, at least momentarily, would be reminded that it was, after all, only a story.”
“I see.”
“At the same time the writer could remind his reader that it was he who was manipulating the fictional universe. This form of disillusion is called ‘romantic irony.’ Henrik Ibsen, for example, lets one of the characters in Peer Gyntsay: ‘One cannot die in the middle of Act Five.’”
“That’s a very funny line, actually. What he’s really saying is that he’s only a fictional character.”
“The statement is so paradoxical that we can certainly emphasize it with a new section.”
“What did you mean by that?”
“Oh, nothing, Sophie. But we did say that Novalis’s financée was called Sophie, just like you, and that she died when she was only fifteen years and four days old…”
“You’re scaring me, don’t you know that?”
Alberto sat staring, stony faced. Then he said: “But you needn’t be worried that you will meet the same fate as Novalis’s fiancée.”
“Why not?”
“Because there are several more chapters.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that anyone reading the story of Sophie and Alberto will know intuitively that there are many pages of the story still to come. We have only gotten as far as Romanticism.”
“You’re making me dizzy.”
“It’s really the major trying to make Hilde dizzy. It’s not very nice of him, is it? New section!”
Alberto had hardly finished speaking when a boy came running out of the woods. He had a turban on his head, and he was carrying an oil lamp.
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