“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 1 800, 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 ‘y°un9 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 to 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
