The Romantic Revolution

by Tim Blanning

  The distinguished French critic Joseph d’Ortigue, who among other things wrote the first biography of his friend Berlioz, agreed. He satirized the philistine bourgeois in the shape of a lady from the fashionable Chaussée-d’Antin who gave her daughter a piano and music lessons in the same sort of spirit that she gave her son a coat and herself a cashmere jacket, because she regards music simply “as an item of fashion and vanity.”134 Also nodding his head in approval was Franz Liszt, for whom Paris was a base for almost thirty years. In an article in a musical periodical in 1835, he wrote that at private gatherings to which he was admitted, although “only an artist,” he sat depressed by the “ignorant silence” that greeted a work by one of the great masters while some wretched bagatelle was rewarded with rapture.135 It was no different in other musical centers, as Liszt found when he went to Milan to give a recital at La Scala. What the public there liked best was a medley drawn from familiar operas, during which they joined in whistling and humming the tunes. When he tried to raise the level with a more challenging piece, a member of the audience shouted out, “I come to the theatre for entertainment not instruction!”136

  This was a necessary result of the expansion of the public sphere. More and more people were feeling obliged to present themselves as cultured, but the culture they embraced seemed to be increasingly debased. Representative of the disdain felt by the artistic community was the description of the musical taste of the typical bourgeois offered by a Parisian periodical in 1843. Now that he had made a bit of money, he had traded up culturally, abandoning the barrel organ he used to like. Now he bought the latest album of “romances” and liked to have them played at home on the piano to show what a great music lover he is: “His daughter has a piano, that goes without saying, and of course a good and expensive one, so that he can boast, ‘That’s a fine instrument I’ve got there, better than anything the English manufacturers can turn out—I had to give three thousand francs for it.’ ” The bourgeois dismissed any music that was beyond him as “learned” [savant], preferring short pieces written for the piano, medleys of arias from comic operas, and especially quadrilles. So far as the other arts were concerned, he liked his paintings to be “bien fondue,” by which he meant portraits of people with pink complexions, sentimental paintings, or genre scenes. He liked his architecture to be covered with sculpture, “because if the buildings are well-covered one can see that one has got something for one’s money.” In short, the anonymous author concluded, the intelligentsia believes that the bourgeois has no understanding of beauty and likes only what is vulgar and stupid.137

  When charting the progress of the romantic revolution, there is a natural tendency to follow the example set by its supporters of oversimplifying the opposition. In reality, the Enlightenment was a house with many mansions, with some members occupying more than one simultaneously. What could seem more blithely optimistic than the following celebrated passage from Pope’s Essay on Man?

  All nature is but Art, unknown to thee;

  All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;

  All Discord, Harmony not understood.

  All partial Evil, universal Good:

  And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,

  One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.138

  Those lines were published in 1733. Four years later, in his imitation of the second epistle of the second book of Horace, Alexander Pope congratulated a friend who claimed to have conquered avarice but went on:

  I wish you joy, sir, of a tyrant gone;

  But does no other lord it at this hour,

  As wild and mad: the avarice of power?

  Does neither rage inflame, nor fear appal?

  Not the black fear of death, that saddens all?

  With terrors round, can Reason hold her throne,

  Despise the known, nor tremble at the unknown?

  Survey both worlds, intrepid and entire,

  In spite of witches, devils, dreams, and fire?139

  In a world in which the light shone by Newton still left many dark patches, there were plenty of irrational eruptions to sustain this more pessimistic view of life. The most spectacular occurred at 9:30 a.m. on November 1, 1755, when a devastating earthquake struck Lisbon. Many of the buildings left standing were then destroyed by a great tsunami if they lay near the waterfront or by fire if they were farther inland. The loss of life and suffering were commensurate. The Lisbon earthquake was not the worst that had ever been, but it was certainly the most publicized. This was chiefly due to the colossal impact of Voltaire’s “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster,” dashed off before the end of the month. It went through a score of editions during the following year, unleashing a torrent of pamphlets for and against.140

  Even more influential was the treatment in Candide, published in 1759, probably the most read of all Voltaire’s works and one of the two or three biggest sellers of the century. As the only three survivors of a shipwreck, Candide, Dr. Pangloss, and a brutal sailor struggle ashore at Lisbon just as the earthquake strikes. Candide exclaims that the end of the world must have come, the sailor rushes off in search of plunder, while Dr. Pangloss asks, “What can be the sufficing reason for this phenomenon?” in accordance with his guiding principle that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” In the person of the incorrigibly optimistic doctor, Voltaire was satirizing Leibniz in particular and more generally the view that “whatever is, is right.” So Pangloss upbraids the pillaging, whoring, drunken sailor with, “Friend, this is not right. You trespass against the universal reason, and abuse your time.” He also consoles the survivors with the cheering message that “all this is for the best, since, if there is a volcanic eruption at Lisbon, then it could not have occurred in any other spot. It is impossible that things should be elsewhere than where they are; for everything is good.”141

  Poor Candide and Pangloss have many trials and tribulations to endure before finally coming to rest on a small farm near Constantinople. In this school of hard knocks, Pangloss has learned nothing, and his fatuous optimism remains as unshakable as when he started out: “After all, I am a philosopher, and it would not become me to contradict myself.” Candide, on the other hand, can see that the only way of coming to terms with a cruel, arbitrary, and lawless world is to pull in one’s horns and get on pragmatically with modest practical improvements. His final words in the book, addressed to the ineffable Pangloss, are: “We must attend to our own garden” [Il faut cultiver notre jardin].

  Rousseau could not have written those lines.142 Satire, irony, understatement, did not belong to his repertoire, for the very good reason that he himself was neither satirical nor ironic nor understated. What separated him from Voltaire and the rest of the philosophes—and turned him into their bitterest enemy—was not so much specific ideas as a way of doing things. This was well put by Peter Gay: “There was something in him not to be explained by his style, his ideas, or his eccentricities alone, but compounded of all three, a strange element, that made his contemporaries uneasy.”143 That special ingredient was Rousseau’s insistence on doing everything from the inside—from inside himself. And what he found inside himself was a witches’ brew of emotions, neuroses, and paranoia. As his onetime friend but eventual enemy David Hume put it, Rousseau was so sensitive that it was as if he had been “stripped not only of his clothes but of his skin.”144 Yet this hypersensitivity was married to a wonderful talent for expressing himself in such a way as to inspire others. If Voltaire spoke to their heads, Rousseau went to their hearts, and, as Rousseau himself wrote of his mistress Madame de Warens, “instead of listening to her heart, which gave her good counsel, she listened to her reason, which gave her bad.”145 Fifty years later, John Keats wrote in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.”146

  The special quality of Rousseau’s achievement was brough
t out very well by Lytton Strachey in his Landmarks in French Literature, published in 1912: “The peculiar distinction of Rousseau was his originality.… He neither represented his age, nor led it; he opposed it. His outlook upon the world was truly revolutionary.… He was a prophet, with the strange inspiration of a prophet.” At the core of his prophecy was “his instinctive, overmastering perception of the importance and the dignity of the individual soul. It was in this perception that Rousseau’s great originality lay. His revolt was a spiritual revolt.… Rousseau was the first to unite two views, to revive the medieval theory of the soul without its theological trappings, and to believe—half unconsciously, perhaps, and yet with a profound conviction—that the individual, now, on this earth, and in himself, was the most important thing in the world.”147 The following chapter explores some of the ways in which the next generation of individuals took this insight further.

  2

  THE DARK SIDE

  OF THE MOON

  DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

  At the court of King Marke of Cornwall it is a clear and balmy summer’s night. As the sound of hunting horns dies away, Queen Isolde eagerly awaits the arrival of her lover, Sir Tristan. Deaf to the warnings of her maid, she gives the signal that the coast is clear by extinguishing the burning torch that illuminates the entrance to her chamber. Wasting no time, the two lovers are soon clasped in a passionate embrace, pouring out their love, to the accompaniment of tumultuous music. So begins, in act 2 of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, one of the longest duets in all opera. In the course of twenty minutes or so (depending on the conductor), the two lovers include in their lovemaking an assault on the day:

  To the day! To the day!

  Our most treacherous foe,

  Let there be hatred and denunciation!

  The daytime is the time of deceit, illusion, disappointment, and frustration. To “the wonder-world of the night,” on the other hand, Tristan and Isolde sing a paean of praise:

  O eternal night!

  Sweet night!

  Glorious, sublime

  Night of love!

  These lines initiate the final phase of the great duet, which builds to a series of grand orchestral climaxes and then ends with a piercing scream from the maid, as the cuckolded King Marke and his entourage enter. Post coitum triste. Tristan’s reaction is: “Dreary day, for the last time!” Like Keats, Tristan and Isolde were “half in love with easful Death.”1

  Written between 1857 and 1859, Tristan and Isolde was first performed in 1865 at Munich. By this time, romanticism in most branches of the creative arts was regarded as dead and buried. Only music was keeping the romantic flame burning brightly—a wholly appropriate metaphor, given the celebration of the night to be found in more than one of Wagner’s music-dramas. He was the latest (but not the last) in a very long line of night worshippers. More than a hundred years earlier, in 1742, the English clergyman Edward Young started publishing a multipart poem titled The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality. Trying to come to terms with three bereavements in quick succession, Young’s poetic therapy eventually ran to around ten thousand lines of blank verse. They proved to be hugely and enduringly popular, with over a hundred collected editions published during the next fifty years.2 The opening line—“Tir’d nature’s sweet Restorer, balmy Sleep!”—seems conventional enough, but soon Young breaks new ground by welcoming the night as the right time for exercising the imagination:

  By Day the Soul is passive, all her Thoughts

  Impos’d, precarious, broken, e’er mature.

  By Night, from Objects free, from Passion cool,

  Thoughts uncontroul’d, and unimpress’d, the Births

  Of pure Election, arbitrary range.

  Although Tristan and Isolde might not have agreed that the night left them “from Passion cool,” they could only have applauded Young’s distaste for the “feather’d Fopperies” beloved of daylight.

  As we have seen in the previous chapter, Young struck an especially responsive chord with German intellectuals when writing about the nature of genius. And so he did with his partiality for the night. By 1759 there were ten different German translations of Night-Thoughts available, his admirers numbering many of the leading lights of the literary scene—Bodmer, Klopstock (who wrote an ode “To Young”), Gellert, Wieland, Gerstenberg, Hamann, and Herder. The last-named wrote that he found the best setting for reading Young’s poems a starlit summer night in a garden bordering a churchyard “where ancient lime trees, stirred by the breath of night rustles shudders into the soul, and the philosophic owl emits from time to time its hollow accents from the ruins of a medieval castle or from its abode in the old Gothic tower.”3 He also accorded Young the ultimate accolade by hailing him as “a genius.”4 Herder’s friend Hamann told him he had had the uncanny experience of feeling “as if all my hypotheses had been a mere afterbirth of [Young’s] ‘Night-Thoughts,’ and, as if all my whims had been impregnated with his metaphors.”5

  This day/night duality became a favorite theme of the romantic revolution. In large measure, of course, this was a reaction to the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with light as a metaphor. The frontispiece of the Encyclopédie, created by Charles-Nicolas Cochin, summed up the multivolume project pictorially by depicting Truth in the form of a beautiful woman surrounded by a bright light, as Reason and Philosophy gently remove the superstitious veils that currently hide her splendor. As Novalis complained in Christianity, or Europe (1799): “Light became [the philosophers’] favourite subject on account of its mathematical obedience and freedom of movement. They were more interested in the refraction of its rays than in the play of its colours, and thus they named after it their great enterprise, Enlightenment.”6 In that brightly lit but sterile environment, rather like a hospital ward, he observed, the poetic imagination could not hope to flourish: “I know how like a dream all imagination is, how it loves night, meaningless, and solitude.”7

  The visual counterpoint to Cochin’s optimistic image was Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare of 1781. On a bed lies a sleeping woman, her legs apart, her arms dangling, her hair tumbling, her lips parted, her nostrils flared. On her stomach sits the goblin or incubus who is giving her such a disturbing dream. The manic mood is intensified by a mad-looking horse (the mare of the “night-mare”)8 with bulging eyes and open mouth, thrusting its head around a red curtain. A sensation when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1781, it also proved very popular in continental Europe, to which it spread in the form of engravings, often pirated locally.9 Goethe’s patron, Duke Karl August of Weimar, responded with enthusiasm when he saw a copy at the Leipzig book fair in 1783: “I have not seen anything for a long time that gives me so much pleasure,” he reported, and then set about collecting all available engravings by Fuseli.10 Probably no contemporary image was so often travestied by caricaturists.

  Much less well-known is the image painted by Fuseli on the back of the canvas, for the good reason that it was not revealed until the painting was acquired by the Detroit Institute of Arts in the middle of the twentieth century. This is a portrait of an attractive, shapely young woman in conventional, not to say demure, pose. Although Fuseli left no record as to her identity, it is likely that it was Anna Landolt, with whom he had fallen passionately in love when on a visit to his hometown of Zürich in 1779. Aware that his lack of means ruled out marriage, he felt unable to reveal his feelings to the lady in person but had no such inhibitions when it came to pouring his heart out to his friends. To Anna’s uncle, the celebrated writer Johann Kaspar Lavater, he wrote: “Is she in Zürich now? Last night I had her in bed with me—tossed my bed-clothes huggermugger—wound my hot and tight-clasped hands about her—fused her body and her soul together with my own—poured into her my spirit, breath and strength. Anyone who touches her now commits adultery and incest! She is mine, and I am hers. And have her I will” and “each earthly night since I left her, I have lain in her bed.”11 It seems reasonable to conclude
, with the art historian H. W. Janson, that the woman depicted on both sides of the canvas is Anna Landolt. On the engraved version a four-line verse by Erasmus Darwin was added:

  On his Night-Mare, thro’ the evening fog,

  Flits the squab fiend, o’er fen, lake and bog,

  Seeks some love-wilder’d maid by sleep opprest,

  Alights, and grinning, sits upon her breast.12

  If Fuseli is never mentioned today in the same breath as Reynolds or Gainsborough, he was very influential during his lifetime, both in England and on the continent, hailed as a genius by minds as diverse as Blake and Goethe.13 Although he was so much of an individualist that he can hardly be held to be representative of anything, he did unite in one strange personality many of the forces that were eroding enlightened classicism. Ideas of restraint, balance, and harmony were repugnant to him, both in his life and in his art—indeed, he would make no distinction between the two. Forced to flee from Zürich at the age of twenty-one after a courageous but imprudent attack on a corrupt city magistrate, he roamed around Europe, pursuing a bohemian lifestyle and acquiring the reputation revealed in his sobriquet “the wild Swiss.” Lavater described him to Herder as