The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism

LOUIS DUPRÉ

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

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

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E-ISBN 978-0-268-07781-5

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CONTENTS

Preface

CHAPTER 1. What Was and What Is Romanticism?

PART I.

Typology of Romantic Literature

CHAPTER 2. English Romantic Poetry

CHAPTER 3. German Romantic Poetry

CHAPTER 4. French Romantic Poetry

PART II.

Systematic Discussion of Romantic Aesthetics, Psychology, and Ethics

CHAPTER 5. The Beautiful and the Sublime

CHAPTER 6. The Romantic Image of the Person as Reflected in the Novel

CHAPTER 7. Romantic Ethics

CHAPTER 8. Political Theories after the French Revolution

PART III.

Syntheses of Romantic Thought

CHAPTER 9. The Romantic Idea of History

CHAPTER 10. Philosophical Foundations of Romantic Thought

CHAPTER 11. A New Religion?

Conclusion

Notes

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 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. 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.

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.

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

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 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.

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 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 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. 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, nineteenth-century 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?

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 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, 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. 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.

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 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 pre-Romantic 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 appearance 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 genre¹² 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 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