Mario Praz. The Romantic Agony. New York: Oxford University Press, 1933. xxiv + 457 pp.

Reviewed by Janine C. Hartman (Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Cincinnati)

Published on H-Ideas (August, 2000)

Hartman on Prazs <i>The Romantic Agony</i>

Note: This review is part of the H-Ideas Retrospective Reviews series. This series reviews books published dur-
ing the twentieth century which have been deemed to be among the most important contributions to the field of
intellectual history.

In 1933 Praz produced this impressionistic and en- ers obsessions, maps to nightmare. The lineages of
cyclopedic study of romantic or decadent responses to the artists vision, sensation, isolation and suffering so
modernity, titled, in Italian, La carne, la morte, e il di- beloved of writers like Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Charles
avolo nella letteratura romantica. The preface to the first Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert and many less
English edition defines this as a study of certain states known stretch back through this thematic sampler into
of mind and peculiarities of behavior, which are given a the Gothic, Samuel Richardsons novels of the female
definite direction by various types and themes that re- menaced, and Irish translations of German ghost stories.
cur as insistently as myths engendered in the ferment Such outsider archetypes as the damned poet, vampire,
of blood (p. vii). This book traced patterns of con- and detective became familiar nineteenth century char-
sciousness in nineteenth century and Renaissance sen- acters. They were given particular definition and expo-
sibilities. Praz codified the deviant bourgeois imagina- sure through the new mass market of serial novels in
tion in search of the frisson; sex, horror, the supernatural, newspapers and magazines, as well as opera and program
in chapters with evocative formulations: the beauty of music. The preoccupation with intensity, concentrated
the Medusa, metamorphoses of Satan, la belle dame sans knowledge or feeling, whether transcendence or damna-
merci, Byzantium, Swinburne and le vice anglais. But tion, is omnipresent. The Romantics invoke it with Hec-
most importantly, this study of poetry, plays and nov- tor Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Wagner, celebrate with halluci-
els falls under the shadow of the divine marquis-the natory language like Charles Baudelaires Fleurs du mal,
marquis de Sade. Though deploring the infant Sade pub- lapidary diversions like Victor Hugos Les Orientales or
lishing industry, then under the aegis of French Surreal- Theophile Gautiers Emaux et Camees.
ism, Praz accepts Sade as the mythmaker of the educated
erotic sensibility, the imaginative grotesquerie, the advo- Stylized, elegant alienation from life combined with
artistic engagement to produce the solitary hero, the poet
cate of pain for aesthetic appreciation of all experience.
or dandy, the devouring woman, the writer as anatomist.
Sades fantasies of domination and extreme stimula- By the 1850s these roles existed as life stages for certain
tion, set in isolated castles and peopled by masters, vic- talented male (and occasionally) female bourgeois writ-
tims, and fatal women were the forbidden literature of ers, who commoditized their imaginative explorations of
the nineteenth century middle class, and, with Shake- bohemia, a dramatized Middle Ages, the Orient (real and
speare, the chief inspiration for English and French ro- embellished) and pharmaceutical alternative conscious-
mantic writers. These texts are windows upon writ- ness. The middle class that made the Industrial Revo-

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lution and new urban civilization also spawned its most ety bemused by technology driven change lost emotional
earnest critics, and their reading public. Generations of certainty in political and religious forms. It expressed
new writers from Keats to Wilde to DAnnunzio lived these anxieties through Romantic sensibility and a de-
,and wrote on the extremities of sensuality, drama, and sire to measure and mirror political decadence in cultural
the supernatural for the vicarious excitement of an in- mediums, and new rituals and religions; the cult of taste,
creasingly trammeled bourgeois public. religion as picaresque, the poet as legislator, transcen-
dence solely as personal gratification. Praz pioneered
The overly refined, time-weary writer becomes a
this particular geistgeschichte taking up in 1933 where
cliche by the time Anatole Baju founds Le Decadent and Gautier had left off. The appetite for intensity, its sat-
British sophomores treasure yellowbacked French novels isfaction, and purchase, continued into a twentieth and
as Baedekers of vice. J.K.Huysmans A Rebours, taken twenty first century.
as a guide for aspiring aesthetes, is a series of catalogues
on interiors, possessions, poses, for off the shelf origi- Nineteenth century Europes neurasthenia vanished
nality. Walter Paters Marius The Epicurean performs the in World War I. It returned in Weimar and Italy, with the
same function for the English. In both cases, possessions literary generation depicted in Martin Greens Children
signify personality and a nice deployment of language of the Sun. Some excellent studies of romanticism mining
and surfaces substitutes for the examined life. Prazs critical vein include Jacques Barzuns Classic, Ro-
mantic, Modern; H. G. Schenks The Mind of the European
Prazs broad reading organized and analyzed most Romantics, M. H. Abrams The Milk of Paradise, Althea
images, tropes and experiences defined as romantic or Hayters Opium and the Romantic Imagination, Ellen Mo-
decadent by contemporary practitioners and their ene-
ers The Dandy, Morse Peckhams The Triumph of Ro-
mies. In particular the themes he harvested from lit-
manticism, Paul Zweigs The Heresy of Self-Love, Roger L.
erature had great currency in nineteenth century the- Williams The Horror of Life, and Walter Kendricks The
ater, and extraordinary play in painting, twentieth cen- Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. The list
tury cinema and popular culture. An historian seeking could extend much further.
sources for Gustave Moreaus Salome, Irma Vepp, Hugos
Esmeralda, or Coppolas Bram Stokers Dracula should Reissued in the 1950s and 1970, Prazs book influ-
begin here. Scholars of the horror or supernatural genre enced important investigations into cultural despair, his-
will find the basis for Poes Roderick Usher and Anne torical pessimism, Sade, gay and lesbian studies, wom-
Rices Vampire Lestat, as well as every hopeful shock ens studies, Orientalism, the Gothic, criminal and drug
and upgraded Oscar Wildeism present on Gothic web- pathologies, music, the occult, symbolism, aesthetic
sites and television familiar to their undergraduates. This Catholicism and suicide. Art historians, literary histo-
landscape also produced the basis for much of Hugh Ken- rians, social historians, and students of urban mental-
ners Dublins Joyce, marrying the aesthetic to the Vic- ite build upon Prazs watershed study whenever they at-
torian heroic investigator, an adventurer into the para- tempt to chart the modern personality and its cultures
normal most recently incarnated in The X-Files, according homage to fear, passion, and beauty. Oxford University
to the Paris daily Le Monde. The individual confronts Press might consider reprinting it for the next genera-
the world, life, sensation, and acts or rejects, he believes, tion of Men in Black just discovering spleen, ideals,
always on his own terms. The reader, whether follow- and sympathetic horror.
ing Balzacs poets, or Don Delillos rock star in Ten Jones
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Citation: Janine C. Hartman. Review of Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony. H-Ideas, H-Net Reviews. August, 2000.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4423

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