A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century Part 13

cries Keats. But when Novalis, in his _Todessehnsucht_, exclaims, "Death is the romance of life," the sentiment has an alien sound. There was something mutually repellent between the more typical phases of English and German romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels, we know, cared little for Scott. We are told that Scott read the _Zeitung fur Einsiedler_, but we are not told what he thought of it. Perhaps romanticism, like transcendentalism, found a more congenial soil in New than in Old England. Longfellow spent the winter of 1835-36 in Heidelberg, calling on A. W. Schlegel at Bonn, on his way thither. "Hyperion" (1839) is saturated with German romance. Its hero, Paul Flemming, knew "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" almost by heart. No other German book had ever exercised such "wild and magic influence upon his imagination."

[1] Besides the authorities quoted or referred to in the text, the materials used in this chapter are drawn mainly from the standard histories of German literature; especially from Georg Brandes'

"Hauptstromungen in der Litteratur des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts"

(1872-76); Julian Schmidt's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur"

(Berlin, 1890); H. J. T. Hettner's "Litteraturgeschichte" (Braunschweig, 1872); Wilhelm Scherer's "History of German Literature" (Conybeare's translation, New York, 1886); Karl Hillebrand's "German Thought" (trans., New York, 1880); Vogt und Koch's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur"

(Leipzig and Wien, 1897). My own reading in the German romantics is by no means extensive. I have read, however, a number of Tieck's "Marchen"

and of Fouque's romances; Novalis' "Hymns to the Night" and "Heinrich von Ofterdingen"; A. W. Schlegel's "Lectures on Dramatic Literature" and F.

Schlegel's "Lucinde"; all of Uhland's ballads and most of Heine's writings in verse and prose; a large part of "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," and the selections from Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, and Joseph Gorres contained in Koch's "Deutsche National Litteratur," 146 Band (Stuttgart, 1891). These last include Brentano's "Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes,"

"Kasperl und Annerl," "Gockel und Hinkerl," etc., and Arnim's "Kronenwachter," a scene from "Die Papstin Johanna," etc. I have, of course, read Madame de Stael's "L'Allemagne"; all of Carlyle's papers on German literature, with his translations; the Grimm fairy tales and the like.

[2] "Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst," 1755. "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums," 1764.

[3] "Laoc.o.o.n," 1766.

[4] See vol. i., chap. xi.; and particularly pp. 383-87.

[5] See vol. i., pp. 422-23.

[6] Novalis' and Wackenroder's remains were edited by Tieck and F.

Schlegel. Arnim married Brentano's sister Bettina--Goethe's Bettina.

[7] _E.g._, Tieck's "Der Gestiefelte Kater," against Nicolai and the _Aufklarung_.

[8] As to the much-discussed romantic irony, the theory of which played a part in the German movement corresponding somewhat to Hugo's doctrine of the grotesque, it seems to have made no impression in England. I can discover no mention of it in Coleridge. Carlyle, in the first of his two essays on Richter (1827), expressly distinguishes true humour from irony, which he describes as a faculty of caricature, consisting "chiefly in a certain superficial distortion or reversal of objects"--the method of Swift or Voltaire. That is, Carlyle uses irony in the common English sense; the Socratic irony, the irony of the "Modest Proposal." The earliest attempt that I have encountered to interpret to the English public what Tieck and the Schlegels meant by "irony" is an article in _Blackwood's_ for September, 1835, on "The Modern German School of Irony"; but its a.n.a.lysis is not very _eingehend_.

[9] An English translation was published in this country in 1882. See also H. H. Boyesen's "Essays on German Literature" (1892) for three papers on the "Romantic School in Germany."

[10] Gentz, "The German Burke," translated the "Reflections on the Revolution in France" into German in 1796.

[11] See also in the same tract, Burke's tribute to the value of hereditary n.o.bility, and remember that these were the words of a Whig statesman.

[12] Dream books, medicine books, riddle books, almanacs, craftsmen's proverbs, fabulous travels, prophecies, legends, romances and the like, hawked about at fairs.

[13] For s...o...b..rg see also vol. i., pp. 376-77.

[14] "Ludwig Tieck": Introductions to "German Romance."

[15] Brentano's fragment "Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes," begun in 1803, deals with the Tannhauser story.

[16] "Kinder and Hausmahrchen" (1812-15). "Deutsche Sagen" (1816).

"Deutsche Mythologie" (1835).

[17] See vol. i., pp. 375-76.

[18] "If Cervantes' purpose," says Heine, "was merely to describe the fools who sought to restore the chivalry of the Middle Ages, . . . then it is a peculiarly comic irony of accident that the romantic school should furnish the best translation of a book in which their own folly is most amusingly ridiculed."

[19] F. Schlegel's declamations against printing and gun powder in his Vienna lectures of 1810 foretoken Ruskin's philippics against railways and factories.

[20] See vol. i., pp. 300, 337, 416.

[21] _Vide supra_, p. 88. A. W. Schlegel was in England in 1823. Tieck met Coleridge in England in 1818, having made his acquaintance in Italy some ten years before.

[22] Boyesen: "Aspects of the Romantic School."

[23] _Ibid_.

[24] "Ludwig Tieck," in "German Romance."

[25] "German Romance," four vols., Edinburgh.

[26] A. W. Schlegel says that romantic poetry is the representation (_Darstellung_) of the infinite through symbols.

[27] "Novalis and the Blue Flower."

[28] Carlyle.

[29] Selections from Novalis in an English translation were published at London in 1891.

CHAPTER V.

The Romantic Movement in France.[1]

French romanticism had aspects of its own which distinguished it from the English and the German alike. It differed from the former and agreed with the latter in being organised. In France, as in Germany, there was a romantic school, whose members were united by common literary principles and by personal a.s.sociation. There were sharply defined and hostile factions of cla.s.sics and romantics, with party cries, watchwords, and s.h.i.+bboleths; a propaganda carried on and a polemic waged in pamphlets, prefaces, and critical journals. Above all there was a leader. Walter Scott was the great romancer of Europe, but he was never the head of a school in his own country in the sense in which Victor Hugo was in France, or even in the sense in which the Schlegels were in Germany. Scott had imitators, but Hugo had disciples.

One point in which the French movement differed from both the English and the German was in the suddenness and violence of the outbreak. It was not so much a gradual development as a revolution, an explosion. The reason of this is to be found in the firmer hold which academic tradition had in France, the fountainhead of eighteenth-century cla.s.sicism.

Romanticism had a special work to do in the land of literary convention in a.s.serting the freedom of art and the unity of art and life.

Everything that is in life, said Hugo, is, or has a right to be in art.

The French, in political and social matters the most revolutionary people of Europe, were the most conservative in matters of taste. The Revolution even intensified the reigning cla.s.sicism by giving it a republican turn. The Jacobin orators appealed constantly to the examples of the Greek and Roman democracies. The G.o.ddess of Reason was enthroned in place of G.o.d, Sunday was abolished, and the names of the months and of the days of the week were changed. Dress under the Directory was patterned on antique modes--the liberty cap was Phrygian--and children born under the Republic were named after Roman patriots, Brutus, Ca.s.sius, etc. The great painter of the Revolution was David,[2] who painted his subjects in togas, with backgrounds of Greek temples. Voltaire's cla.s.sicism was monarchical and held to the Louis XIV. tradition; David's was republican. And yet the recognised formulae of taste and criticism were the same in 1800 as in 1775, or in 1675.

A second distinction of the French romanticism was its local concentration at Paris. The centripetal forces have always been greater in France than in England and Germany. The earlier group of German _Romantiker_ was, indeed, as we have seen, united for a time at Jena and Berlin; and the _Spatromantiker_ at Heidelberg. But this was dispersion itself as compared with the intense focussing of intellectual rays from every quarter of France upon the capital. In England, I hardly need repeat, there was next to no cohesion at all between the widely scattered men of letters whose work exhibited romantic traits.

In one particular the French movement resembled the English more nearly than the German. It kept itself almost entirely within the domain of art, and did not carry out its principles with German thoroughness and consistency into politics and religion. It made no efforts towards a practical restoration of the Middle Ages. At the beginning, indeed, French romanticism exhibited something a.n.a.logous to the Toryism of Scott, and the reactionary _Junkerism_ and neo-Catholicism of the Schlegels.

Chateaubriand in his "Genie du Christianisme" attempted a sort of aesthetic revival of Catholic Christianity, which had suffered so heavily by the deistic teachings of the last century and the atheism of the Revolution. Victor Hugo began in his "Odes et Ballades" (1822) as an enthusiastic adherent of monarchy and the church. "L'histoire des hommes," he wrote, "ne presente de poesie que jugee du haut des idees monarchiques et religieuses." But he advanced quite rapidly towards liberalism both in politics and religion. And of the young men who surrounded him, like Gautier, Labrunie, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, De Vigny, and others, it can only be affirmed that they were legitimist or republican, Catholic or agnostic, just as it happened and without affecting their fidelity to the literary canons of the new school.[3]

The German romanticism was philosophical; the French was artistic and social. The Parisian _ateliers_ as well as the Parisian _salons_ were nuclei of revolt against cla.s.sical traditions. "This intermixture of art with poetry," says Gautier,[4] "was and remains one of the characteristic marks of the new school, and enables us to understand why its earliest recruits were found more among artists than among men of letters. A mult.i.tude of objects, images, comparisons, which were believed to be irreducible to words, entered into the language and have stayed there.

The sphere of literature was enlarged, and now includes the sphere of art in its measureless circle." "At that time painting and poetry fraternised. The artists read the poets and the poets visited the artists. Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott were to be found in the studio as in the study. There were as many splotches of colour as of ink on the margins of those beautiful volumes that were so incessantly thumbed. Imaginations, already greatly excited by themselves, were heated to excess by the reading of those foreign writings of a colouring so rich, of a fancy so free and so strong.

Enthusiasm mounted to delirium. It seemed as if we had discovered poetry, and that was indeed the truth. Now that this fine flame has cooled and that the positive-minded generation which possesses the world is preoccupied with other ideas, one cannot imagine what dizziness, what _eblouiss.e.m.e.nt_ was produced in us by such and such a picture or poem, which people nowadays are satisfied to approve by a slight nod of the head. It was so new, so unexpected, so lively, so glowing!" [5]

The romantic school in France had not only its poets, dramatists, and critics, but its painters, architects, sculptors, musical composers, and actors. The romantic artist _par excellence_ was Eugene Delacroix, the painter of "The Crusaders Entering Jerusalem." "The Greeks and Romans had been so abused by the decadent school of David that they fell into complete disrepute at this time. Delacroix's first manner was purely romantic, that is to say, he borrowed nothing from the recollections or the forms of the antique. The subjects that he treated were relatively modern, taken from the history of the Middle Ages, from Dante, Shakspere, Goethe, Lord Byron, or Walter Scott." He painted "Hamlet," "The Boat of Dante," "Ta.s.so in Bedlam," "Marino Faliero," "The Death of Sardanapalus,"

"The Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha," "The Ma.s.sacre of the Bishop of Liege," and similar subjects. Goethe in his conversations with Eckerman expressed great admiration of Delacroix's interpretations of scenes in "Faust" (the brawl in Auerbach's cellar, and the midnight ride of Faust and Mephistopheles to deliver Margaret from prison). Goethe hoped that the French artist would go on and reproduce the whole of "Faust," and especially the sorceress' kitchen and the scenes on the Brocken. Other painters of the romantic school were Camille Roqueplan, who treated motives drawn from "The Antiquary" and other novels of Walter Scott;[6]

and Eugene Deveria, whose "Birth of Henry IV.," executed in 1827, when the artist was only twenty-two years of age, was a masterpiece of colouring and composition. The house of the Deveria brothers was one of the rallying points of the Parisian romanticists. And then there was Louis Boulanger, who painted "Mazeppa" and "The Witches' Sabbath" ("La Ronde du Sabbat" [7]); and the water-colour painter and engraver, Celestin Nanteuil, who furnished innumerable designs for vignettes, frontispieces, and book ill.u.s.trations to the writers of the romantic school.

"Of all the arts," says Gautier, "the one that lends itself least to the expression of the romantic idea is certainly sculpture. It seems to have received from antiquity its definitive form. . . . What can the statuary art do without the G.o.ds and heroes of mythology who furnish it with plausible pretexts for the nude, and for such drapery as it needs; things which romanticism prescribes, or did at least prescribe at that time of its first fervour? Every sculptor is of necessity a cla.s.sic." [8]

Nevertheless, he says that the romantic school was not quite unprovided of sculptors. "In our inner circle (_cenacle_), Jehan du Seigneur represented this art, austere and rebellious to the fancy. . . . Jehan du Seigneur--let us leave in his name of Jean this mediaeval _h_ which made him so happy and made him believe that he wore the ap.r.o.n of Ervein of Steinbach at work on the sculptures of Strasburg minster." Gautier mentions among the productions of this Gothic-minded statuary an "Orlando Furioso," a bust of Victor Hugo, and a group from the latter's romance, "Notre Dame de Paris," the gipsy girl Esmeralda giving a drink to the humpback Quasimodo. It was the endeavour of the new school, in the arts of design as well as in literature, to introduce colour, novelty, picturesqueness, character. They studied the great Venetian and Flemish colourists, neglected under the reign of David, and "in the first moments of their fury against _le poncif cla.s.sique_, they seemed to have adopted the theory of art of the witches in 'Macbeth'--Fair is foul and foul is fair",[9] _i.e._, they neglected a traditional beauty in favour of the _characteristic_. "They sought the true, the new, the picturesque perhaps more than the ideal; but this reaction was certainly permissible after so many Ajaxes, Achilleses, and Philocteteses."

It is not quite so easy to understand what is meant by romanticism in music as in literature. But Gautier names a number of composers as adhering to the romantic school, among others, Hippolyte Monpon, who set to music "the leaping metres, the echo-rimes, the Gothic counter-points of Hugo's 'Odes et Ballades' and songs like Musset's 'L'Andalouse'--