Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders (Comparative History of Literature in European Languages)

NONFICTIONAL ROMANTIC PROSE

A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES SPONSORED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES LITTÉRATURES DE LANGUES EUROPÉENNES SOUS LES AUSPICES DE L’ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL DE LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE IN THE SAME SERIES

I. Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon (Ed. Ulrich Weisstein) II. The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages (Ed. Anna Balakian) III. le tournant du siècle des lumières 1760–1820. les genres en vers des lumières au romantisme (Dir. György M. Vajda) IV. les avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Histoire (Dir. Jean Weisgerber) V. les avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Théorie (Dir. Jean Weisgerber) VI. European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ed. Albert Gérard) VII. L’époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600) I. l’avènement de l’esprit nouveau (1400–1480) (Dir. Tibor Klaniczay, Eva Kushner, André Stegmann) VIII. Romantic Irony (Ed. Frederick Garber) IX. Romantic Drama (Ed. Gerald Gillespie) X. A History of Literature in the Caribbean (Vol. 1) (Ed. A. James Arnold) XI. International Postmodernism (Eds. Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema) XII. A History of Literature in the Caribbean (Vol. 3) (Ed. A. James Arnold) XIII. L’Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600). IV: Crise et essors nouveaux (1560–1610) (Eds. Tibor Klaniczay, Eva Kushner and Paul Chavy) XIV. Die Wende von der Aufklärung zur Romantik 1760–1820. Epoche im Überblick (Ed. Horst Albert Glaser and György M. Vajda) XV. A History of Literature in the Caribbean (Vol. 2) (Ed. A. James Arnold) XVI. L'aube de la modernité. 1680–1760 (Eds. Peter-Eckhard Knabe, Roland Mortier and François Moureau) XVII. Romantic Poetry (Ed. Angela Esterhammer) XVIII. Nonfictional Romantic Prose. Expanding Borders. (Eds. Steven P. Sondrup and Virgil Nemoianu)

NONFICTIONAL ROMANTIC PROSE EXPANDING BORDERS

Edited by STEVEN P. SONDRUP VIRGIL NEMOIANU in collaboration with Gerald Gillespie

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

Coordinating Committee for A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Comité de Coordination de l’Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes 2001–2005 President/Président Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (Indiana University) Vice-President/Vice-Président Randolph Pope (University of Virginia) Secretary Treasurer/Secrétaire Trésorier Daniel F. Chamberlain (Queen’s University, Kingston) Committee Liaison Eugene Chen Eoyang (Lingnan University) Members/Membres assesseurs Richard Aczel, Jean Bessière, Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Eugene Chen Eoyang, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Eduardo de Faria Coutinho, Elrud Ibsch, Margaret Higonnet, Eva Kushner, John Neubauer, Luz Aurora Pimentel, Ann Rigney Past Presidents Mario J. Valdés (Toronto), Jacques Voisine (Paris), Henry H.H. Remak (Indiana), Jean Weisgerber (Bruxelles) Past Secretaries György M. Vajda† (Budapest), Milan V. Dimi´c (Edmonton) Published on the recommendation of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies with the financial assistance of UNESCO

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nonfictional romantic prose: Expanding borders / edited by Steven P. Sondrup, Virgil Nemoianu in collaboration with Gerald Gillespie. p. cm. -- (Comparative history of literatures in European languages = Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes, ISSN 0238-0668 ; v. 18) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Romanticism. 2. European prose literature--18th century--History and criticism. 3. European prose literature--19th century--History and criticism. I. Sondrup, Steven P. II. Nemoianu, Virgil. III. Gillespie, Gerald Ernest Paul, 1933- IV. Series. PN603.E98 2004 809.1’9145.--dc22 2003055679 ISBN 90 272 3451 5 (Eur.) / 1 58811 452 X (US) (alk. paper) CIP © 2004 - John Benjamins B.V./Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 36224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA



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Table of contents

Preface I. General Introduction Virgil Nemoianu

vii 1

II. Romantic Theoretical and Critical Writing

11

Theories of Romanticism: The First Two Hundred Years Monika Schmitz-Emans

13

Romantic Disavowals of Romanticism, 1800–1830 John Isbell

37

Hegel and Hegelianism in European Romanticism Gerhart Hoffmeister

57

The Aesthetics of German Idealism and Its Reception in European Romanticism Manfred Engel and Jürgen Lehmann

69

Romantic Theories of National Literature and Language in Germany, England, and France Mary Anne Perkins

97

Sir Walter Scott and the Beginnings of Ethnology Carolyn Buckley-Fletcher

107

III. Expansions in Time

115

Burke’s Conservatism and Its Echoes on the Continent and in the United States Michael Gassenmeier and Jens Martin Gurr

117

Distorted Echoes: The Mythologies of Nordic Nationalism Steven P. Sondrup

141

IV. Expansions in Space

163

Romantic Travel Narratives Mircea Anghelescu

165

Romanticism and Nonfictional Prose in Spanish America, 1780–1850 Joselyn M. Almeida

181

V. Expansions of the Self

195

Allegories of Address: The Poetics of the Romantic Diary Frederick Garber

197


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Table of contents

The Romantic Subject in Autobiography Eugene Stelzig

223

Educating for Women’s Future: Thinking New Forms Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos and Margaret R. Higonnet

241

VI. Generic Expansions

265

The Romantic Familiar Essay Frederick Garber

267

The Unending Conversation: The Role of Periodicals in England and on the Continent during the Romantic Age John Boening

285

Almanacs and Romantic Nonfictional Prose Madison U. Sowell

303

The Romantic Pamphlet: Stylistic and Thematic Impurity of a Double-Edged Genre Monica Spiridon

317

Costumbrismo in Spanish Literature and Its European Analogues José Manuel Losada

333

VII. Intersections: Scientific and Artistic Discourses in the Romantic Age

347

Romanticism, the Unconscious, and the Brain Alan Richardson

349

Literary Sources of Romantic Psychology Joel Black

365

Romantic Discourse on the Visual Arts Gerald Gillespie

377

Aspects of German Romantic Musical Discourse Steven P. Sondrup

403

VIII. Intimations of Transcendence

421

Sacrality as Aesthetic in the Early Nineteenth Century: A Network Approach Virgil Nemoianu

423

The Myth of the Fallen Angel: Its Theosophy in Scandinavian, English, and French Literature José Manuel Losada

433

IX. Conclusion: Romanticism as Explosion and Epidemic Virgil Nemoianu

459

Index

467

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Preface

As part of the series devoted to romanticism within the framework of the International Comparative Literature Association’s history of literatures in European languages, this volume has profited from the pioneering work of colleagues who have seen previous volumes to press. Gerald Gillespie has been unstinting in generously sharing his broadly encompassing knowledge of romanticism and his experience with the practical demands of preparing this kind of volume for publication. The encouragement and guidance of Mario J. Valdés at important junctures proved most valuable. The two readers who vetted this volume for the Coordinating Committee offered insightful and critical comments that ultimately led to important improvements in both substance and style. Appreciation is offered to all. In more practical terms, the bibliographic assistance of several graduate students during the early phases of manuscript preparation was most beneficial. Maria Petrova Ilieva, James Rasmussen, and Jonathan Penny helped with various tasks, and thanks is expressed to them for their efforts. Jason R. Francis and Jennifer Webb made significant contributions toward seeing this volume to completion over an extended period, and my sincere appreciation goes to them for their imaginative help and gracious generosity. The College of Humanities and the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies at Brigham Young University provided logistic and financial support for which I am most grateful.

Steven P. Sondrup



I. General Introduction VIRGIL NEMOIANU Catholic University of America

The present volume is predicated, let me say openly and from the very beginning, upon some assumptions and prejudgments. It will be easier and more practical to read it if I enumerate these here. Obviously, one assumption is that the word romanticism sends us to a full and real referent, even when there is no comprehensive agreement as to the flawless definition of this signified. That, on the other hand, a tentative map of this referential level is both desirable and possible will come out, one hopes, at the end of the volume, and as a result of reading it. Romanticism, as used by most (not all) of the contributors to the volume, and certainly by its editors, is the prevailing discourse and mode of writing (or even thinking) in Europe and North America during the half-century 1780–1830. Later impacts can be recognized, wave after wave, until the end of the twentieth century, not only in literature proper, but also in adjoining fields of writing, in the arts and in music, in philosophy and religion, and above all perhaps in the popular levels of entertainment, instruction, and media communication, which reached the widest strata of population available in the nineteenth and (at least indirectly) the twentieth century. It seems to me that neither the broad and comprehensive concept of romanticism (as promoted by Lovejoy and numerous others) — one of repeated and pendular categories — nor the “holistic” one (Wellek’s might be a good example, though not by far the only one) are preferred by the participants in this volume. Personally, I regard both these approaches as credible and serious, but I hesitate to identify with either of them. In our volume the tentative definition of the phenomenon coincides with an attempt to disclose its causes. The romantic discourse and state of mind at the turn of the nineteenth century is based on a dramatic expansion of human consciousness and knowledge in the West, and this in turn is justified by the attempt, no, the need, to account for the beginning globalization of the human society and of human experiences then taking place. While it is true that random or deliberate engagements with cultural and ethnic otherness can be detected throughout human history and in all societies, it was not until around and after 1500 that such an engagement becomes a systematic, a planet-wide project radiating from multiple centers and procedures and pursued by one culture for gain (of wealth, of power, of knowledge, of Salvation) no less than for the earnest pursuit of the good and of progress. It should not be difficult to admit that by or just before 1800 this project reaches fruition and that indeed the first shape of globalization (still uncertain in outline and in foundations) was facing human consciousness, first in the case of a few wide-looking or lucid individuals, but soon spreading to a growing number of diverse people. Simultaneously we can speak about an awareness of globalization as process: that is to say of a recognition (or impression) of a modified dynamics of human history. Again, this awareness belonged perhaps to a relatively small number of individuals first, but these were followed

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quickly, almost immediately, by an amazingly large number of other persons, who acquired the impression that they witnessed an unheard-of acceleration of human affairs going hand-in-hand with the expansion of these affairs: urbanization, industrialization, alienation, informational explosions, tendencies toward egalitarian democracy, individualist emancipation, rationalism and empiricism, a contractual and negotiated relationship, and the gradual ending of organic or tribal interactions. Romanticism is, I would maintain, the attempt of human subjectivity to come to terms with these twin phenomena of the expansion of human scope and the quickening pace of historical dynamics. As might have been easily expected, the reactions of the human mind in adjusting to events that radically modify human behavior and the very existential foundations of the species had to be in turn very broad and highly diverse. It should not have been hard to predict (and it is even easier to demonstrate) that some of these reactions were violently hostile and/or fearfilled: the process and its pace were seen as categorically adverse to the human state of affairs until then. This adversarial attitude emerged quite naturally in zones of the planet that were often the passive object of modernization, but they can also be recognized in Europe and North America themselves which were supposed to be the motors of the process. Philosophers, poets, political leaders, and fairly large and diverse strata of the population responded with sullen or brutal enmity to all that was happening and tried more than once to stop and reverse the trends of history. In all fairness, it must be said that the events themselves had a harshness that encouraged such hostility. Counter-revolutionaries were not exclusively, and I would go so far as to say not even primarily, part of the upper and privileged classes, but more often and in larger numbers the members of poor peasant societies who felt threatened in their traditions and identities by the newly emerging order of things. Simultaneously, of course, we notice (and sometimes celebrate) all those who acted as carriers and energetic forces pushing the movement forward : revolutionaries, visionaries, inventors, and creators of all kinds. As with the revolutionaries, such individuals are not confined to a single continent: Simón Bolívar is a typical symbol of all those who deeply modified South America, the revolutionary Framers of the constitution of the United States did something similar in North America, and the beginnings of urbanization and technological advance can be observed early in sundry parts of Asia. In Europe the movers of the English technological revolution and the leaders of the French political revolution, along with their admirers throughout the Continent, provide even more obvious cases. In between these two strong extremes, a bewildering multitude of combinations, of intermediate solutions and proposals and explanations, and of attempts to mediate arose. The mediations were addressed to the extremes themselves, those of enthusiasm and of recoil, but equally so to the relationship between the older state of affairs of mankind and the newer one that seemed to arise now. These mediations aspired to smooth over the asperity of emancipatory change and to inject kindness or graduality into the pace of progress, while not actually denying its validity. As a matter of fact, for what statistics are worth in situations of this kind, it is striking to notice that the number of variegated mediators is considerably larger than that of the defenders of more extreme attitudes, at least among intellectuals. In any case, the consequence of this agitated and multifaceted universe of responses — the consequence of this state of ferment (anxiety, joy, rational judgments, and so forth) — was an

I. General Introduction

3

unusual productivity. The decades before and after 1800 brought a wealth of images, concepts, projects, and ingenious plans such as we have rarely seen at any time in history. Even today, over 150 years later, we still hark back to this world, we still use it as a reservoir to refresh our own ideas, to solve dilemmas, to draw analogies, to shape concepts, and so forth. Naturally, this reservoir, or, to switch metaphors, this arsenal, can be found in imaginative writing above all: in poems, in novels, in dramatic plays, in short stories. I say naturally, because such literary vehicles are admirably suited to enacting scenarios of possibility good or bad. And, of course, the above-mentioned agitation had to do in decisive ways with future possibilities. The literary vehicles and genres could provide the widest freedom for options and for experimenting with what might be or what might have been. In fact, a quick look suffices to classify the romantic age among the most experimental literary ages of the world. Nevertheless, more pedestrian prose could also be yoked to the common endeavor. As a matter of fact, different kinds of non-imaginative or nonliterary writing could be at least as useful as the traditional genres in coming to terms with the rapidly transforming world outside. The writing of history and geography, for instance, was supposed to be a more objective exercise than the writing of a Gothic novel. Undoubtedly this is true up to a point. Historical and geographical description, when honestly pursued, endeavor to provide us with accurate images of zones in space and in time, to present correct and abundant raw information. Yet it cannot be denied that in the process of writing history and geography, elements of narrative and rhetoric become necessary. A structuring and ordering of the information must be devised according to rules that have much in common with those of poetry and novelistic fiction. At this point paraliterary genres become of great interest to literature. Precisely because they are more immediately involved with levels and angles of the signified, nonfictional prose genres can in their turn play with a vast array of possibilities. At the same time these margins of the literary must deal with the threatening (or surprising, or hopeful) facts themselves; they cannot claim to relegate them to the world of the merely potential (but not actual). In a word, a very good part of the writing activity of the period that we have chosen for examination is itself an attempt to examine the state of affairs of mankind at the given period, much as poetry or imaginative prose are. From all that was said before, it follows that the area is simply huge, and one single volume would never be able to begin to do justice to this enormity. However, the project can try to set itself up as a kind of road-indicator — it can give us a general survey of what is, or was, going on during the decades in question. It can try to suggest the approximate directions for further research, no less than some of the ways in which this research was, is, or might be undertaken. Hence this introductory material, which aspires to explain some of the intentions in the volume and some of the gaps. I will now try to review the main sections and to indicate what their purpose is, as well as what else might be done in connection with them. The volume begins with a section on romantic theoretical and critical writings. Obviously, this is one of the most momentous contributions of the romantic age to the intellectual tradition. It is the kind of writing that most unabashedly tackles the issues of the age and tries to explain them, to justify them, to qualify them, to critique them. Romantic literature simply cannot be understood without romantic criticism. It could even plausibly be argued that “criticism” (as we understand it nowadays) emerges during and through

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romanticism. If we look closely at the criticism of earlier ages, we are sometimes inclined to regard it as a different kind of enterprise altogether. Classical and neoclassical criticism resembled rhetoric more than modern criticism. Often they were just exercises in comparing a piece of literature to a table of rules. Literary history was all but unknown. In England for instance, we have to wait until the middle of the eighteenth century (with Dr. Samuel Johnson, with Thomas Warton, with Richard Hurd) to witness at least the beginnings of literary history. In Germany, the romantics themselves began to sketch the outlines of a history of literature. In France, Germaine de Staël’s groundbreaking works influenced the whole of Europe. East European literatures tried their hand at the same thing well after 1800. It is also interesting to note that major works of “Romance comparatism” (such as those of Sismondi or Ampère) in fact preceded histories of national Spanish, Italian, even French literature. By contrast, the studies of Coleridge and Hazlitt on Shakespeare are immediately recognizable as literary criticism on the same level with late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century writing. Likewise, the studies of Coleridge or Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel are literary theory in the same sense as the writings of Bakhtin or Croce. What is more, literary criticism and history as reinvented by the romantics accompany faithfully and indispensably the writings of the romantic poets and novelists. Even before romanticism “proper” may be said to begin, Diderot freely mixed criticism and literature, while Dr. Johnson and Lessing equally freely mixed neoclassical and romantic tenets. The Biographia Literaria was supposed to be a kind of companion piece to Wordsworth’s Prelude; the fragments of the Athenaeum were justifications of the mode of writing chosen by the Schlegel brothers themselves and by their friends or allies. Victor Hugo’s preface to Cromwell was at least as important as the play itself and as challenging to the audiences. Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is a piece of satirical literature no less than a piece of criticism. Shelley did not write just a defense of poetry in general, but, implicitly, an explanation of what his own poetry (and that of his friends) was trying to do. The great Scottish and London journals and reviews (the Edinburgh, its adversary the Quarterly, the London Magazine, and the Westminster a little later) became literally indispensable, while the initiatives of the Schlegels, Goethe, and Schiller, as well as sundry French initiatives were equally important as the vehicles for information and judgment responding to the Zeitgeist, as well as expressing it. Chateaubriand wrote with great competence and erudition about English literature. The Hungarian János Földi vindicated the writings of his friend Mihály Csokonai. The Romanians Asachi and Eliade-Ra˘dulescu were simultaneously poets and critics. In Italy Muratori, Gravina, Beccaria, Berchet, and a host of others almost supersede numerically the poets and in any case precede them. In Portugal, as early as the middle of the eighteenth century Luís Verney and F. J. Freire theorized a pre-romantic mode of writing. Folklore, in the wake of Herder’s pioneering works was extolled as the foundation for canonical literary writing in Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Slovakia, Russia, and elsewhere. The common denominator of romantic criticism, if we dare make such a broad generalization, is precisely that the right and the duty of the literary creator is to engage in visions that might help solve the conundrums and the uncertainties of the surrounding world. The more phantasmagoric or outlandish these huge images, the better chances they have of being right and helpful. Even more direct was romantic philosophy. We are usually faced with a kind of writing that wanted to provide an explanation of the world in which the religious values of the past could be

I. General Introduction

5

preserved in secular translation. This écriture could thereafter stand as an example of the best way of mediating between past and (post-religious) future. Yes, certainly, many philosophers, including Hegel and Schelling, also wanted to compose a historical explanation of why things unfold as they do. Still, I would maintain that the more general (though more hidden) purpose was the writing of idealist philosophy itself, through whose very existence a smooth continuity in the historical existence could be re-established. The ominous rift between the “contractual” modes of alienated existence and the “organic” (or biological) ways of organizing human society (which had persisted in various shapes over several millennia, had been common to virtually all the planet’s cultures, and perhaps could be traced to the earliest forms of tribal organization of hominids) might, philosophers believed, be bridged by an appropriate theory. The search for a common denominator uniting God, nature, and humanity could easily lead to indeterminacy and skepticism, and even above these to irony which was early on seen (particularly by the German romantics) as the key to any kind of valid thinking. Perhaps this was the remote cause for the explosive spread of aesthetics, a branch of human speculation that was to maintain a high profile for well over 150 years. Let us remember that the very term “aesthetics” (not to speak of the recognition of aesthetics as an autonomous discipline) dates only from the middle of the eighteenth century, even though activities that can be retrospectively annexed to the aesthetic are considerably older. However, the central role assigned to the beautiful by people as different as Chateaubriand, Shelley, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Kant, Coleridge, and Schiller, to name just a very few, must give us pause. What these and others have in common is the pacifying power that they attribute to the Beautiful. According to this theory, in the realm of aesthetics, progress and tradition, creativity and stability can coexist and collaborate. The very education of mankind hinges on the cultivation of the Beautiful, and somehow the Good and the True can be seen as its consequences. This theory may sound odd at the end of the twentieth century, but it was passionately believed and defended in the period we are talking about. In fact it was seen by many as an excellent and judicious substitute for revolution, violence, and action. There are many authors in whose texts the aesthetic, the theoretical, and the theological are so closely connected as to be virtually inseparable: Schleiermacher, Coleridge, Schopenhauer, and perhaps Solger might be numbered among them. It is also the case that the major philosophers of the age felt that it was part of their systematic duty to write on aesthetics or even to elaborate a systematic aesthetics: Kant, Hegel, Schelling come immediately to mind. It is only fair to add here that the growth and the development of other sciences occurs during the very same decades: linguistics, sociology, psychology, child pedagogy, ethnology, zoology and botany, different branches of medicine, and others yet could be adduced as examples. From Buffon to Lamarck and Cuvier is a long distance. Carl von Linné, Stephen Hales, and Joseph Priestley preceded by very few years the decades of romanticism. Close contemporaries like Sir William Jones, the Grimm brothers, Franz Bopp, and Rasmus Rask effected a true revolution in philology. Görres, Creuzer, and Benjamin Constant were just a few among those who laid the foundation for a comparatist examination of religions, myths, and symbols. Why did this happen? There are probably several explanations. Some of them have to do simply with the momentum of accumulating information and the desire to structure it; they need not overly concern us here. Others, however, are related, more or less closely, to the advances

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in philosophy and in literary criticism. To be more specific, such developing sciences tried to give account either of social phenomena or of individual (subjective) ones and to present them in a rational way. Indeed, we can go even a step further and speak about a certain romantic stylistic or slant in well-established hard sciences. Thus the way in which magnetism and gravity were foregrounded as expressions of the law of universal love and attraction are highly significant (by Faraday, Ampère, Arago, and so many others). The transformation of geology into a system of symbols by Goethe, Novalis, Hoffmann, and others is equally interesting. The foundations of psychology by Oken, Carus, even Mesmer, and the innovations in physics by Volta and Galvani have often been studied in great detail. Ørsted, Berzelius, Liebig, Ohm, and Gay-Lussac are figures characteristic of the age as much as any poet or king. Together they indicate how a certain (Foucauldian? Spenglerian?) episteme pervaded the discourses of the world at the time in most sections of intellectual endeavor, or at least reverberated in a multiplicity of forms. Among these multiplicities one that ought not to be forgotten because it was much visited by writers and because it was placed almost exactly at the borderline between the fictional and the nonfictional was the familiar or conversational essay, revived from what had once been its glorious age in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This vehicle was extremely convenient for authors of the romantic age, because it was flexible, it did not oblige them to definitive and disciplined statements, and yet it opened up a field of speculation in which all kinds of values could be played out one against the other. England saw a veritable explosion: Lamb, De Quincey, Hunt, Hazlitt, Landor, and Cobbett; the Spanish costumbristas added their own stylistics, and the “physiognomies” of Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, and south Slavic authors are their close correspondent. Many of these authors, English and Continental, resorted to old-fashioned methodologies but often in an ironic way. The expansions of a consciousness that tended to merge with natural reality could be seen in numerous ways at the time (and later) and have been observed by many students of the age (M. H. Abrams, H. Grierson, Harold Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, G. Hartman, Marshall Brown, and others yet). Probably historicity can be singled out as the most typical aspect. This is not to say that history as such was ignored until then: interest in the values and events of the past had been strong and frequent since Herodotus and Plutarch in Greece, as well as others in virtually all cultures that we can think of. However, recognizing the validity of the past as an extension of and as a continuing impact on the present had been much less frequent. What the romantic age was able to bring was an awareness of the presentness of the past, of its equality of rights with the present, or even with the future. Imagination, of course, played a central role here. The historical novel, as inaugurated by Walter Scott and continued by Manzoni, Cooper, Pushkin, Balzac, Willibald Alexis, Arnim, and dozens of others, aspired to be closely related with historiography itself, indeed, perhaps to be one of its branches. In turn history, as written by Thierry, Michelet, Carlyle, the Czech Palacky, the Romanian Balcescu, the Lithuanian Daukantas, the Russians Karamzin and Solovyov, openly resorted to “artistic” devices in its efforts to “bring back” the past. Rhetorical techniques, psychological inroads, pictorial modes, and imaginative completions of information gaps all became part of historical writing. Even more important, a passionate love of different periods of the past conferred upon them a certain dignity well over the mere “precursor” role to which it had been usually confined.

I. General Introduction

7

Among the most notable are naturally the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, the Elizabethan Age, or other such more or less familiar historical episodes. However, the circle gradually expanded to include less familiar ages and even categorical otherness in the form of cultures that could not be seen as directly related to or paving the way for the current world. Dealing with the northern antiquity (Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian) was one step in this direction. Placing Hebrew first, Sanskrit thereafter among the sacred and inspiring “originary” languages on the same level as Greek and Latin was another. Valuing Polynesian (Diderot), Mesoamerican (Southey), Chinese, Indian (Hölderlin, Southey), Arabic (Shelley), Persian (Goethe), and other cultures or even religions had to follow logically. Here expansion in time and space combined with each other. The otherwise strange fad of “Ossianism” can serve as the foremost example. However the Finnish Kalevala might also be enumerated here, along with quasi-historical works by Scott and Southey, or with the numerous Hungarian poets and prose writers speculating on the historical-geographical status of their nation. The image of man underwent significant changes. The eighteenth century, the Enlightenment opinion leaders, the neoclassical spokesmen looked toward the masculine shape, the adult age, the white race, and the socially active and useful individual as models of which other forms of human existence were merely variants or perhaps exceptions. The romantic writers found that it was at least equally fascinating to turn toward women, children, advanced old age, nonWestern races and cultures, socially atypical and marginal figures, occasionally the mentally deranged, or at least individualistic and eccentric specimens. In other words, we can observe a certain turn from the typical toward the extremes of human imagery. The sphere of what can be accepted as human expanded considerably. This procedure is not merely decorative. On the contrary, I postulate that the actual carriers of romantic transformations were these models of men and society, that is clusters of values, attitudes, and collective constructs — partly deliberate, partly spontaneous — functioning as transmissible macro images, responding to historical needs, and able to determine isomorphic areas ranging from politics and economics to literature and the arts. At the same time, the decades of romantic preoccupation witnessed a marked increase in the field of cultural activities in which two or more fields of endeavor went hand in hand. Some of these were not more than cross-generic activities. The sharp separation between genres (tragedy and comedy, prose and poetry, and so forth) on which the stricter neoclassicist critics used to insist became a pleasurable game of transgression. The novels of Scott and of the German romantics are, as we know, riddled with short lyrics. Tieck, Grabbe, Słowacki, and Büchner show a marked preference for the tragicomic. New genres (the historical novel, sciencefiction) emerged. The idyllic and the didactic were interwoven already in the eighteenth century in literatures as different as Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian, or Lithuanian (Donelaitis). In other cases whole fields (the arts, music, philosophy) are combined with literature. Delacroix, Géricault, Bryulov, and Haydon are among the many who took subjects from literature for painting; Berlioz, Weber, Schumann, Schubert, and (slightly later) Liszt, for music. In the same way, descriptive literature tried to approach painting, while music was for the first time in the history of aesthetics proclaimed as the model for and the target of all other creative arts. E. T. A. Hoffmann was not the only figure to exercise himself creatively in both music and literature. Such efforts had not been unknown until then (let us remember that in the Renaissance they had

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been quite frequent), but the practice of combination became much better established and, in a sense, represented itself as an expansionary activity in literature. The depiction and theoretical representation of God also changes. Thus, for instance, deism had been the common denominator for many of the leading the eighteenth-century figures: God was seen as a somewhat cold technical creator — the famous clockmaker of the universe — situated high above the ecclesiastical complications and conflicts of benighted earthlings. Not so the deity of the romantics. In a good majority of typical philosophical and literary writing, God became deeply involved with the universe itself, with His creation, and this involvement more than once goes all the way to identification. Perhaps under the influence of Shaftesbury and Rousseau, we can notice a renewal of neo-Platonism and pantheism. The God imagined by romantic poets is wet, wild, and wooly and speaks to us out of thunderstorms, cascades, and deep dark forests. The “enthusiastic” movements (Christian and Judaic) that emerged or started spreading as early as the middle of the eighteenth century seemed to gain the upper hand. They are helped by the widely shared conviction that in the Beautiful, rather than in the True and the Good, sacrality expresses itself. Chateaubriand preached this position with tremendous success, but Coleridge, Schelling, and Mörike, preceded by Hamann and Blake were equally committed to it. Let us not forget that some of the earliest spokesmen for aesthetic (romantic) religiosity were precisely figures such as Hamann, Klopstock, Wackenroder, and even Rousseau. The questions that emerge in the face of such ambitious growth and inflation are: When did it all begin? How did it all develop? Like all categories associated with literary or even historical periodization, romanticism has its own difficulties and unpleasantries. Sharp borders are impossible to trace; absolute command and control can never be demonstrated inside a literary historical narrative. Similarities occurring in remote earlier or later periods can be adduced all the time with relative ease. Nevertheless, it would be unjust to close one’s eyes in the face of obvious phenomena. I refer to the manner in which throughout the eighteenth century many things that had barely survived on the margins of social and intellectual life tended to grow and to become central. Moreover, such growing trends reach a point where they merge and seek alliances with each other; they find themselves ready to occupy the center of the scene from which they had been banned until very recently. The growth of historical interest (“expansion in time”) begins early on: taste for popular sagas and ballads and for alternative mythologies can be noted in the early eighteenth century. Not only Richard Hurd, but even Addison and Steele showed an interest in ballads and other forms of popular literature. Perrault (or, arguably, La Fontaine) provided examples of folk creation. Robert Burns was lionized in Enlightenment London as the genuine and spontaneous voice of nature. It was not difficult to graft authentically surviving kinds of literary narrative and forms of versification onto the millennia-old pastoral tradition of versification. Each nation tried to discover (and sometimes actually invent) its own national epics: the Nibelungenlied, The Song of Igor’s Host (much debated as to authorship and age), El Cantar del mio Cid, the imaginatively fabricated manuscript collections of Králóve Dvur and Zelená Hora, and the Ossianistic fad all had as their purpose the validation of the vernaculars and their elevation to the level of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Travel literature existed during the seventeenth century (and much earlier), albeit sometimes in standard or predictable forms. During the eighteenth century, it swelled significantly: travel

I. General Introduction

9

inside Europe, at the margins of Europe, outside Europe (“expansion in space”). Fictional studies of the paranormal do not have to await the romantic decades: the Gothic novel and the Schauerroman put in appearances (and gain fans) by the middle of the eighteenth century. The same can be said about the alterities of culture: if Rasselas, the Lettres Persanes, and sundry plays by Racine and Lessing still evoke non-Western cultures as mere moral, psychological, or political lessons, we also observe how decade after decade otherness gains more respect and interest in itself, not as mere masks or contrastive backgrounds for Western dilemmas. The literature of the feminine (written by men or women) similarly gains in maturity decade after decade: Jane Austen and Germaine de Staël represent a culmination. The pure preference for an urban environment was shaken by a growing preference for nature or by rejections of the rationalized, civilization-controlled technologies. At the very least we can speak about doubts, debates, and uncertainties with regard to the balance between the natural and the artificial. The romantic view of sacrality would not have been possible without prior preparation by other subterranean mystical trends (from Böhme to Swedenborg, but now renewed by Ballanche, Saint-Martin, Baader, and so many others, men and women alike) or by the horizontally egalitarian movements of piety and religious enthusiasm in both western as well as eastern Europe: Protestant (Methodism, Herrnhuter movement, Pietism), Catholicism (soon thereafter), Hassidism in terms of both organization and recognition, but also the emergence of conservative Judaism. Both of these oppositional modes of religiosity were fundamentally protest movements against the rationalist structures of religion; interestingly, they found eloquent and passionate supporters among women to at least the same extent as men. The flowering of utopian visions (conservative, radical, revolutionary, national, idyllic) can be fully understood only in its connection with shifts in the perception and definition of sacrality. Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte would be prime examples: their theories are “hungry” in as far as they “swallow,” “digest,” and thus modify religion (though keeping it still recognizable). Coleridge created the outlines of a whole political sociology based on the symbiosis of church and state. Mme. de Krudener, Ballanche, and others who were passionate mystical apologists do not entirely avoid socio-political matters. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, which is often described as a series of approaches to utopia, contains in its imaginative projects rather meticulous indications of religious behavior and practice. Virtually every east European literature contains one or several attempts at an originary national (pre-Christian) mythology. Revolutionary figures such as Robespierre and others felt the need to outline an alternative kind of religious ritual, once the traditional one was overthrown or forbidden. The popularity of movements such as that of the Free Masons (among the upper classes) is due largely to the fact that it provided a utopianreligious substitute to older forms of religious expression. Criticism threw in its weight by admitting theoretically a multitude of additional discourses that had not been seen as strictly literary until that time. Even more important, it created supplementary or adversarial canons that confronted the classical and neoclassical traditions. The romantics managed to establish for themselves an impressive pedigree (Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Calderón) that could be placed proudly in the face of the Greco-Roman tradition. The increasing emphasis on music as the central artistic mode was also much more revolutionary at the time than we think nowadays: in earlier centuries music was generally regarded as mere amusement.



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While it is true that all these developments — and others yet — cannot be coordinated mechanically, and while it is also true that they found expression most often as contradictions, we can say that a general figura can be distinguished at least as intention and desire. The central human model of romanticism emerged with explosive force in the 1780s and 1790s in England and Germany and, in a different way, in France also. Until then, all the tendencies listed above were somehow sectional and thereby had a limited impact. Only when enough of these separate changes connected and found kinship among themselves does an alternative model of great appeal and energy come to life. At least in its first phase (revolutionary, political, and visionary), romanticism was full of absolute claims and explosive in its purposes. Such a pattern, subsuming the different trends, suggests the hope of a certain regeneration of the human race as a whole, a renewed beginning, and a secular salvation. Yes, the progress of the Western world would and did remain central in this general outline, and there was no serious intention to abandon entirely the accumulations, gains, and accomplishments of the past. Nevertheless, there was enough doubt and anguish about future advancements in the same direction that the call for a renewed memorization of the roots — of the earliest origins of humanity — could find a sympathetic hearing. This, I believe, may be said to be accepted by most of the contributors to this volume. Some of them obviously prefer to concentrate upon the unifying elements of the age, others upon its contradictions, but this seems to me somewhat less important: both exist. What remains a fact is that romanticism as such showed itself incapable of sustained growth and to be basically unstable. It is its later phases that proved more fertile. I will explain how in my conclusions to this volume.



II. Romantic Theoretical and Critical Writing

Among the various periods literary historians have been traditionally wont to discuss, none has been more self-consciously theoretical, more prone to efface the boundaries between its theory and its praxis, and more hospitable to subsequent theoretical elaboration than romanticism. Its congeniality to theoretical and philosophical examination notwithstanding, it has been famously difficult to define and has given rise to a considerable body of scholarship dealing centrally with the question of whether any meaningful definition is even possible. It is thus appropriate that a volume devoted to romantic nonfictional prose should begin with a section dedicated to the theoretical and critical writing of the period. Monika Schmitz-Emans’s essay offers a historical survey of the contrasting and sometimes contradictory efforts to define romanticism with regard to the literary traditions of several European countries and against the background of similar efforts in other arts, most notably the visual arts and music. Whereas her principal concern has been the ways in which various writers, philosophers, and artists associated themselves with romanticism as they understood it, John Isbell by contrast explores the complementary trajectory of the largely heretofore neglected means whereby writers have sought to disassociate or distance themselves from romanticism in one or more of its many and varied manifestations. The essay lays the foundation for a conceptualization of romanticism that envisions construing many elements that have traditionally been understood as the dialectical contrast to romanticism — Enlightenment and Klassik, for example — in a more complex relationship of mutual support and interfluence. The proximity of romantic theory and practice is also indicative of the importance of philosophical inquiry for romantic literature. Not only were some writers and theorists on close personal terms with important philosophers, they were also addressing many of the same questions. Manfred Engel and Jürgen Lehmann offer a view of one strand of the complex relationship between literature and philosophy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in their survey of the aesthetics of German Idealism — as articulated in thinking of Kant, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, and Hegel — and some of the main features of its reception in Germany, France, Great Britain, and Russia. Taking a narrower and more focused view of romanticism’s relationship to philosophy, Gerhart Hoffmeister invites attention to the aspects of Hegel’s thinking that had an important bearing on literature and discusses the intricacies of the reception of Hegel’s thought throughout Europe with particular attention given to the complex dynamics of its dissemination and influence in Russia. One of the earliest as well as most pervasive aspects of romantic theory and cultural politics was the heady endorsement it gave to the need for cultural communities throughout Europe to build their sense of national or ethnic identity on indigenous social and aesthetic norms rather than assimilated foreign models or ostensibly universal practices. This call to ethnic authenticity was sounded early in the history of romantic thought, continued well into the nineteenth century, and impinged on various aspects of national identity in countries that had long since emerged as modern nation-states — France, Great Britain, and Spain, for example — as well as in areas where a sense of nationalism was just beginning to emerge — Germany, Italy, many parts of



12 eastern Europe, as well as the Nordic region. Mary Anne Perkins reviews the thinking of Hamann and Herder with regard to the necessity of fostering distinctly national linguistic and literary traditions and traces the ramifications of their thought into subsequent writers. Carolyn Buckley-Fletcher invites attention to the efforts of Sir Walter Scott to capture aspects of traditional Scotch culture as examples of early ethnological research. Born in Edinburgh, Scott grew up in an area in which ancient practices and time-honored loyalties persisted to a degree paralleled in few other places in Europe. The way in which Scott was successful in collecting and recording these distinctive local practices that found such colorful exposition in his novels contributed to the nascent disciplines of ethnology and archaeology. Ranging from the complex challenge of defining romanticism and accounting for the telling ways in which nineteenth-century writers endeavored to dissociate themselves from inadequately narrow definitions of the tradition through the clearly philosophical foundations and implications of romanticism to the endorsement of an authentic sense of the national soul by the retrieval and preservation of the rapidly vanishing vestiges of a cultural patrimony, these essays suggest the breadth of romanticism’s critical discourse and the richly varied means it used in constructing a critical framework within which it could be understood. S. P. S.



Theories of Romanticism The First Two Hundred Years MONIKA SCHMITZ-EMANS University of Bochum

1.

What are we actually talking about when we talk about theories of romanticism?

Varying approaches to literary history use period designations of different kinds, origins, and suggestive power. Although they should serve to orient the reader, their breadth and lack of precision often lead to precisely the opposite result. Of all customary period designations, romanticism is among the most common. Recent studies and monographs on romanticism have typically begun with the confession that this term occasions grave problems of definition. The present brief survey neither can nor desires to avoid this stock topos. A presentation of theories of romanticism certainly cannot take that most elusive term as a universally understood and accepted point of reference. In spite of the problems accompanying the use of the noun romanticism and the corresponding adjectives (e.g. romantic) in a scholarly context, both expressions are frequently unavoidable and indispensable. Rather than avoiding the offending term in specifically literary as well as more broadly historical contexts, contemporary usage on the contrary often manifests a tendency toward excessive use. Scarcely any other period designation — be it a largely fictive construct or a product of more or less reflective formulation — seems so imperiled. The definition of romanticism as a concept in its ever-changing contexts has long been among the major problems at the heart of research on the topic. One the one hand, its historical development has involved such a wide-ranging polyvalence that a precise and rigorous conceptual-semantic determination is scarcely imaginable. On the other hand, it also involves for many a programmatic sense expressing their own aesthetic position that must accordingly be taken seriously. The polyvalence and diffuseness of the concept are often taken as reasons for distinguishing different “romanticisms” and have in the end led to the emergence of a separate branch of research — a kind of meta-scholarship — concerned with concepts of romanticism. The term romanticism, thus, would be an entirely plausible topic for discussion in the on-going debate between the conceptual nominalists and the realists. Although the term is highly connotative and in many respects a question of value judgments, its denotative character can be discussed. Is there something, for example, like a fundamental notion or an area of considerable conceptual overlap encompassing the many varied manifestations of what is usually termed romantic — something that can be called romanticism or the romantic? Both scholarly as well as colloquial usage claim the semantic field surrounding romantic even though the former is just as lacking in precision and is as value laden as the latter. The wide-spread encumberment of

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what is often designated romantic with the connotation of irrational may, as Gerhard Schulz presumes, have led to a judgmental attitude toward the very essence of romanticism. Cannot indeed virtually anything be called “romantic” and if so, what a powerful denunciation the appellation “romantic” becomes. What cannot be systematically grounded, though, can be narratively described. In this regard, the pragmatic approach proves just as effective as the well known and often used strategy of tracing the history of the idea. Such a recounting, though, will necessarily have to follow a tortuous path, among which the etymological is but one. Romanticism and the romantic, moreover, do not have the same history, to say nothing of the German Romantizistische. To discuss theories of romanticism in this way implies that problematic preliminary decisions — which are clearly in need of grounding but just as plainly can never be vigorously delimited — must be made about what romanticism involves. Whatever romanticism is taken to be is a result of implicit or explicit theoretical orientations, not the other way around. In a kind of performative process, the theory creates itself out of its own subject. Among a variety of other concerns, it must also be borne in mind that theories of romanticism may well also designate literary, aesthetic, or theoretical constructs in which the word per se does not appear, but they nonetheless have the character of romantic, programmatic texts whether they have been read as such or not. Specific historical disciplines — in their own unique but nonetheless often comparable ways — have monopolized the term romanticism. It is customarily used in the scholarly study of literature, art, and music, even though its meaning in musicology and art history is, perhaps, even less precise. Although literary and music history use the term in roughly parallel ways, art historians are still debating the utility of the word to denote a stylistic concept even though it has long since established itself as a period designation. Difficulties analogous to those in literary history have arisen in music history as well, notably in conjunction with the corollary concepts of classical and romantic. In music history, moreover, the importance of attention to reception in examining the complementary concepts of Romantik and Klassik is particularly marked. According to general consensus, Hoffmann “romanticized” classical instrumental music by his interpretations. Analogous claims can be made with regard to Goethe, who throughout Europe — outside of Germany — is considered a romantic. Curiously it has become customary to associate the works of late French literary romanticism (those appearing after 1830) with the aspirations of Young Germany and to contrast them with German romanticism, but musical manifestos as well as individual works were categorized as romantic to the extent that they were allied with Young Germany. Even in recent music scholarship, the use of the term Romantik as the designation of a style has occasioned confusing attempts to establish consistent terminology. Just as in literary history, however, tendencies and characteristics of what is typically labeled romantisch can be distinguished. What in literary research can command a certain thematological interest in music is attributed to a taste for the popular, nationalistic, or the exotic, a fact that complicates the formulation of a clearly contoured conception of the Romantik. To label an individual composer a Romantiker (romantic) is correspondingly problematic since there was no movement or school that conceived of itself as romantic. Just as in literature, the idea of a romantic school is the invention of historians. For those who inquire about the literary-aesthetic meaning of the word Romantik, the vagueness of the musical

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concept is even more lamentable. Since precisely music has traditionally been accorded a central position in the discussion of the movements popularly labeled romantic — particularly with reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann — a more precise specification of the nature of the musical Romantik might have been expected to provide insight into what the literary Romantik is. Even though Hoffmann developed some engaging ideas, this expectation will inevitably meet with disappointment on several counts, not just in terms of its inherent polyvalence in a music-historical context, but also because — even if any circumstantial evidence existed — the term applies principally to instrumental music in which the comparison between musical and literary works is a fundamentally problematic undertaking: concepts like theme, content, and reference have emerged as possible tertium comparationis. Warnings against the careless use of the word romantisch as a collective designation embracing connotations of all manner of imprecise ideas are appropriate not only in the context of music history and aesthetics, but also in terms of the work of the literary historians. The initial consequence of this caveat is that the object of scholarly research — both in music as well as literary history — cannot actually be die Romantik, but rather must be the question of what this concept is understood to mean. In their seminal Theory of Literature, René Wellek and Austin Warren invoke romanticism as an illustration of the problematic nature of period designations. The suggestion they advance for using period designations is based on the Kantian concept of a “regulative idea,” which asserts on the one hand the need of consciously maintaining the character of such concepts as heuristic constructs but on the other of working with them even where access to the object of investigation is not possible either in terms of or beyond theoretical constructs. Thus, Romantik — however interpreted — is not just a period designation, but is also a stylistic concept or psychological description of a typology. It is precisely in this context that Fritz Strich — following in Wöfflin’s footsteps — juxtaposes classical and romantic on the one hand with completion and infinity. This superimposition of the historical on a (constructed) systematic paradigm, however, leads to further ambivalence.

2.

The History of the Concept of the Romantik

The idea might arise of systematically tracing the history of the word Romantik as a means of finding a path through the history of the concept. The history of a word and the history of its meanings, however, run parallel to one another only in certain segments of their individual trajectories. Moreover, broader parameters come into play with regard to the history of words: the history of the novel (Roman) as a genre is not by chance related etymologically to Romantik. Both derive from the name of the city, Rome. The lexical history of Romantik begins with the Old French root romanz, which designates the romance — i.e. vernacular — languages of the people as opposed to the scholarly language, Latin. As prime examples of literature in the language of the people, Provençal verse and prose narratives are called romances; their subject is for the most part knightly stories of adventure. The word Roman was later derived from romance. In 1650, Thomas Bailey used the adjective romantick for the first time in the sense of novel-like, fabulous, adventurous, fantastic, or unrealistic, and thus in a critical sense. The history of the concept of romantisch is hence linked to the history of the genre of the novel

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(Roman). Gradually stories about horror and love joined the chivalrous accounts — i.e. the gothic and sentimental genres — such that the concept of romantisch is charged with connotations of the uncanny, the horrible, the extraordinary, and the latently pathological. A strong connection also exists with the concept of sublime nature. In 1790, at the beginning of his epic poem, Oberon, Wieland challenges the muses to saddle the Hippogriff for his ride into the ancient romantic land, and therewith, he means a ride into the land of medieval knights. What is conjured up here in a programmatic way is the epoch of romances, the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. During the seventeenth century, the concept of the Romantische was used to embrace the typical characteristics of landscape painting — particularly the works of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa — in order to point out their emotive qualities. The Romantische and the painterly were to some extent synonyms. Romantisch meant near to nature and thus by simple extension turned away from the world of social constructs and reality. In distinction to its use in critical contexts, the term romantisch gradually established itself as a historical category, and therein begins the actual history of the word Romantik as a scholarly concept. In eighteenth-century literature, which contributed to the acceptance of the semantic field around this term, the adjective romantisch is used in the sense of novel-like, i.e. having the qualities of a narrative. Early on, the connotations were always of fairy tale-like, remarkable, old fashioned, ancient, popular, childlike, rare and exotic, knightly, chivalrous, and finally even nocturnally dark, ghostly, dreadful, and horrible. The content or general mood of a work, thus, could at that times be called romantisch without any recourse to historical considerations. In a letter to Goethe of June 28, 1796, for example, Schiller characterized Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as romantisch with reference to characters like Mignon and the harp player, i.e. with reference to the notable events of the novel. In yet another letter of June 26, 1797, Schiller called Goethe’s outline for an epic hunting poem romantisch but in this case with reference to the rare and surprising elements. The concept of the Romantische, which temporally preceded romanticism proper, is for the whole of the eighteenth century a rather vague and diffuse label for all manner of things. All of these diverse tendencies, however, share several common points of departure: first, Rousseau’s concept of nature and of natural manifestations themselves, i.e. that which in a Rousseauistic sense qualifies as primal, natural, or wild. The adjective, however, also acquired the secondary meaning of critical of civilization and even occasionally of society. Secondly, the career of the word romantisch is also closely associated with the development of late eighteenth-century historical consciousness. Authors like Herder voiced the demands of the succeeding generation to transform adjectives like romantic into historical-philosophical categories. The concept of the romantic functions during the romantic period — as Goethe’s Reflexionen show — primarily as a counterexample to the classical, particularly to classical antiquity. This perception does not, however, ultimately mean that the history of the concept of romantic literature, of a romantic genre, or of a romantic work is intimately and inextricably bound up with the historical consciousness of the declining eighteenth century and can only be understood in the context of that historical paradigm. In marked distinction to the longstanding and predominant orientation toward classical antiquity and classical literature, the second half of the eighteenth century formulated the concept of a specifically modern culture that is characterized by Christianity,

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significantly differentiated from antiquity, and integrated into all European Christian nations. Romantic art is, thus, justifiably understood as modern art. Modern art in this sense, thus, manifested itself most prominently in the genre of the novel whose designation in many languages is etymologically linked to the Romantische. The accelerating development of the semantic field can be easily demonstrated etymologically. The noun Romantik was used for the first time in a novel by Johann Gottwerth Müller where it refers to the work of the hero of the novel, who is a writer. Novalis used the word Romantiker in 1799 as a synonym for novelist, and Friedrich Schlegel understood romantische Kultur to mean the culture of a novel (circa 1800). In his “Gespräch über die Poesie” (Conversation on Poetry) Friedrich Schlegel defines the novel as a romantisches Buch (romantic book). During the declining eighteenth as well as the first half of the nineteenth century, the adjective romantisch enjoyed the status of an utterly fashionable word as just a few examples can well illustrate. A. W. Schreiber wrote a “Romantische Erzählung” (1795); C. A. Vulpius, “Rinaldo Rinaldini, eine romantische Geschichte” (1798); A. v. Tromlitz, “Das stille Thal: Ein romantisches Gemählde” (1799); and Caroline Lessing, “Die Mexicanerin: Historisch-romantisches Heldengedicht in sechs Gesängen” (1829). Schiller called the Jungfrau von Orleans a “romantische Tragödie.” Carl Maria von Weber labeled his Freischütz a “romantische Oper” (1820). Even with its inherent ambivalence as the designation of both a style and a period, the term Romantik was widely used by authors programmatically included within its conceptual perimeter. Friedrich Schlegel identified himself as a romantic author but used the concept of the Romantische primarily in terms of his well known literary agenda linking it with the concepts of universality and progress. Universal, however, means many things: a synthesis of individual literary genres, the inclusion of philosophy, and the study of nature within the literary process, as well as the opening up toward life. In this definition lie the seeds of the problems that have subsequently arisen — even in the context of today’s critical discourse — in attempting to arrive at a definition of the concept of romantisch. That which from the beginning is not built on consistent definitions — poetry that should always be in the process of becoming — cannot be accommodated within any conceptual framework. Although Friedrich Schlegel is certainly the most influential theoretician of the new romantic art, Novalis — who conceived of romanticizing as a comprehensive activity in the spirit of an ongoing exponential expansion — provided an important fleshing out of the romantic self-consciousness. Friedrich Schlegel’s brother, August Wilhelm, also made important contributions in stressing the historical aspects of the romantic. In a series of public lectures delivered between 1798 and 1808 in Jena, Berlin, and Vienna, August Wilhelm amplified what can be called romantic discourse or romantic culture. What is particularly notable in these literary-historical lectures is Schlegel’s turn toward the modern. He no longer draws his examples, as had been the case up to this juncture, from antiquity, but rather discusses Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Milton, Rousseau, Fielding, Klopstock, Lessing, and Goethe. Romanticism here achieved its most import role as a basis for contrastive analysis: A. W. Schlegel’s lectures in Berlin, Lectures on Beautiful Literature and Art (1801– 1804; Vorlesungen über schöne Litteratur und Kunst), consist of a history of classical literature as well as a contrasting history of romantic literature. In the latter, Schlegel includes the literary histories of major European countries since the Middle Ages and thereby ushers in the concept

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of a romantic literature and culture. Schlegel wanted to demonstrate the existence of a romantic — i.e. a characteristically modern — universal, unchanging, and immortal poetry not arising from the foundation of classical antiquity. These precepts were further developed in the Viennese Lecture on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808; Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur). As a result, romanticism emerged — mistakenly but in consequence of the need for a distinction from antiquity — in a completely undifferentiated way with its definition shortcircuited by the appeal to Christianity as a defining characteristic. A. W. Schlegel saw in Christianity a cohesive potential for uniting the particular romantic movements in the individual European countries. He was less concerned with the confessional content than with the foundational, conceptual structure, particularly with the tendency toward interiorizing and psychologizing religious experience. His thinking, thus, came to link the aesthetic with the psychological — a gesture fraught with serious consequences — and spiritual concepts assumed an aesthetic-theoretical sense. With this gesture, he opened the gate for romanticism to be understood as a manifestation of a psychic sensitivity, as a longing turned toward the infinite, a concept that even in the twenty-first century still plays an important role in the conception of romanticism. Among his contemporaries, A. W. Schlegel’s lectures had a long-lasting effect. They were translated into many different languages, and their central ideas were ultimately popularized by Mme de Staël. They also ultimately gave rise to arguments about particularly distinctive national forms of romanticism that persist to this day. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the development and articulation of the idea of a romantic art and literature occurred within a narrowly circumscribed yet complex context of social-historical changes. This elaboration of romantic thought contributed to the growing complexity of bourgeois culture that was itself oriented toward the future but notably was also obsessed with reconfiguring its past. Although it has long since become common practice to speak of romantic politics, philosophy, theology, natural science, and medicine, a clear conceptual link to a central and unifying ground of romantic thought in this context is not to be taken for granted. Analogous uncertainties arise in observing the richly varied manifestations of European romanticism. From the perspective of individual national literatures and consistent with a broad consensus in specialized specific disciplines, these varied manifestation have led to the development of specific differing strains of romanticism; precisely for the sake of surveys and comparisons, though, they invite (problematic) questions concerning a common romantic substratum. Although Blake’s ground breaking work certainly cannot be overlooked, Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798) written for the 1800 edition and expanded in 1802 is often regarded as the beginning of English romanticism. Here once again poetry became the central focus, just as it had been in the case of Friedrich Schlegel. Literary historians, however, still debate whether one can legitimately speak of a French romanticism at the beginning of the century. Instead French romanticism is viewed as having commenced belatedly, not with Chateaubriand’s René (1802) and Sénancour’s Oberman (1804), but rather in 1830 with the scandal surrounding Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830) or in other words with the “Préface à Cromwell” (1827). The crucial factor in this dating is the requirement of seeing an epoch begin with a sensational event, that is to say with a manifesto. It must also be borne in mind, moreover, that in France romanticism did not become a viable antagonist to

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classicism until it drew drama — which had been particularly associated with classicism — within its sphere of influence. In music history, the significance of Hernani corresponds to that of the Symphonie fantastique by Berlioz (1830). In his novel Oberman, Sénancour, for example, differentiates between the romanesque — which he discredits — and the romantic, which he explicitly admires. With “romanesque,” he meant what had previously been called romantic, i.e. works that were principally lawless, fantastic, even untruthful, and written in the vernacular. Sénancour contrasts the romanesque novel with drama’s adherence to prescribed norms. In elevating the romantic above the romanesque, he ennobles the former, which, consequently, became a serious competitor of the classical. The beginnings of a value-laden differentiation of romanticism are also repeatedly taken up during the early nineteenth century. Right from the beginning on into contemporary colloquial usage, romantic has functioned as a convenient concept to oppose to any other competing system of thought. The precise meaning of romanticism, thus, changes, according the counter-conception, which could and still can originate in the aesthetic as well as in the ethical-social sphere. The scale of implicit values linked to the concept of the romantic extends from sympathetic to repulsive, from sublime to laughable. Goethe’s various individual pronouncements critical of romanticism are both noteworthy and notorious. He for example remarked to Eckermann on April 2, 1829 with regard to contemporary French poets who wanted to be considered romantics: The classical I call healthy and the romantic, sick, and thus the Nibelungenlied is classical like Homer, because both are healthy and diligent. Most recent literature is not romantic because it is new, but it is rather weak and sickly, and the older literature is classical not because it is old, but rather it is strong, happy, and healthy.1 2 April 1829 (19:300)

Even while the concept of a romantic culture was emanating from Germany, it served in large measure as an aesthetic-poetological construct for legitimizing the new and novel as precisely that which the literature of the period understood itself to be. “Modern” art and literature were accordingly to be grounded in their historical and most characteristic national traditions. This diachronic interpretation of romanticism became more pervasive and encompassing as a result of its interpretation as a stylistic category. This categorization of romanticism as the contemporary is as a result of certain stylistic qualities and thematic preferences. Jean Paul’s Vorschule der Ästhetik, (Elementary School of Aesthetics) whose fifth section bearing the title “Über romantische Poesie” (On Romantic Poetry) offers an exposition of the romantic agenda, owes much to these central themes. The age-old conflict between the ancients and moderns is thematized as well as the viability of the Greeks’ serving as exemplary models. Jean Paul supports the historically unique: for him contemporary poetry is fundamentally different from that of the ancients because it emerges from a different consciousness and divergent feelings. In endeavoring to describe the stylistic hallmarks of romanticism’s new contributions, he explores above all the difference between the limited and the unlimited and in so doing notably interprets the unlimited as the infinite. He understands that the romantic tendency to transgress boundaries has reference not just to a spatial context but also to the temporally remote. Indeed, the defining characteristic of the romantic era is its orientation toward the future. In the programmatic and theoretical texts by romantic writers themselves as well as in the later historical assessments of the tradition, the relationship between romanticism and Christianity

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is always thematized, which clearly merits a carefully nuanced and discriminating assessment. The idea of romantic art and literature — indeed the idea of an entire romantic culture — is closely linked to a recollection of the “Christian” Middle Ages emerging from a post-classical and in that sense Christian self-consciousness. At the same time, this historicizing of consciousness led to the recognition of the Christian era as just one period among many, as a delimited span of history whose value and cultural manifestations must therefore and in this context be considered relative and contingent. It can, moreover, by no means be decided what the romantics and theoretician of romanticism imagined “Christianity” to be. The romantic dissatisfaction with the limited and finite is in Jean Paul’s case interpreted as a consequence of the Christian condemnation of the finite, sensory world. In Vorschule der Ästhetik, he succeeded in linking romanticism’s historical-philosophical background with its aesthetic implications. The aestheticstylistic characteristics of romantic literature that he presents were motivated by ideologicalhistorical circumstances and were at once thereby legitimized. It is, therefore, immediately obvious why the relatively backward orientation of romantic culture is at the same time an alignment with the future: the Christian Middle Ages taught the romantics to ignore the present and look toward the spatially as well as temporally remote. Jean Paul’s concept of the romantic is in a representative way progressive. In this regard, the semantic field around romantic has one particularly curious aspect. Given the romantic’s supposed and actual enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, it is particularly surprising that what is perhaps the essence of their thinking is articulated in terms of the struggle to legitimize the new, which in day to day terms implied a conservative orientation toward the past. (The recent history of the concept, however, is under the influence of more modern developments.) Notably in Germany, the homeland of romanticism as a broadly encompassing cultural legacy, the critical engagement with the increasingly vague use of the term began very early. Eichendorff lamented that the word romantic had ever been coined (erfunden in the denigrating sense of an arbitrary construction). By the middle of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Tieck had already turned his critical attention to the widely circulating notion of a romantic school and disputed that romantic poetry was per se a distinguishable genre. For him, there was no difference between poetic and romantic, and he rejected the position often attributed to him as the head of the romantic school. During the post-romantic period, romanticism experienced extremely divergent assessments. Not even the question of whether romanticism would be better served by examining it in terms of polarities and the establishment of conceptual dichotomies or of synthesizing and analogizing methods elicited any consensus. Although Fritz Strich, for example, understood and interpreted classicism and romanticism as complementary concepts, Benno von Wiese deems it inappropriate to break romanticism out of its overall integration into the Age of Goethe. In the history of the concept of romanticism, different phases can be readily distinguished. A very early and subjectively engaged critique with long-lasting consequences for what the nineteenth century ultimately grouped under the heading of romanticism was offered by Heinrich Heine. His essay, Die romantische Schule, written in 1836 is a witty polemic, which does not altogether avoid over simplification in its examination of the topic: Heine identifies romanticism with Christianity and a willingness to suffer, and in turn Christianity with Catholicism, and

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Catholicism with reactionary politics. He polemically denies any connection between the Enlightenment and romanticism, which he rather regarded as antagonistic movements. Fascinated by individual authors, he took into consideration most of the writers today typically associated with romanticism, but above all sought allies in the struggle against reactionary politics whom he readily found in Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean Paul although the Schlegel brothers and their circle remained suspicious. According to Heine, Mme de Staël paid tribute to the romantic school and promoted the various positions it espoused; according to her, the school was essentially a reawakening to the poetry of the Middle Ages as manifested in songs, paintings, poetry, and architecture — indeed in life — that arose out of Christianity like a blossom that sprang from the blood of Christ. While living in Paris, his highest priority was to correct this image — formulated and propagated by Mme de Staël — that the French had of the German romantics, and he hit upon the idea of a romantic school, which, though, had never existed. Heine the polemicist, however, was searching for his own distinctive literary identity at the time he was writing the Romantische Schule and was, thus, far from a disinterested observer with historical distance. During the first post-romantic generation, the initial progressive impulses of the romantic movement lapsed into indifference and were quickly forgotten. A few years later, romanticism was also sharply criticized by Theodor Echtermeyer and Arnold Ruge writing in the Hallische Jahrbücher (1839–40). Their manifesto entitled, “Der Protestantismus und die Romantik,” is most notable for its fundamental anti-reactionary attitude. During much of the nineteenth century, other representatives of the liberal historiography also retained this critical attitude toward romanticism and the sense of history that emerged from it. Among the most important is Georg Gottfried Gervinus, author of Geschichte der poetischen Nationallitteratur der Deutschen (1835–42) and Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts seit den Wiener Verträgen (1855–66), which equate romanticism with an alienation from reality and ultimately escapism. Gervinus portrays romanticism’s reactionary nature — a combination of anti-rationalism and an aversion to progress — as its central tenet supported and sustained by an anti-classical attitude derived from an antipathy toward the French. Among the other liberal nineteenth-century critics of romanticism who aligned themselves with this point of view, Hermann Hettner, Julian Schmidt, and August Koberstein deserve mention. With greater historical distance, however, the perspective again shifted. Rudolf Haym, for example, emerged as a liberal who wanted to evaluate romanticism more objectively and in 1870 warned of a severe lack of critical discrimination in the evaluations of romanticism’s intellectual content offered up to that point. But Haym’s own evaluations resembled his more descriptive presentations: he saw a mixture of scholasticism and mysticism as the fundamental characteristic of the romanticism. Haym had a significant impact on subsequent research on romanticism, and his contributions to developing a synthesizing vision and wide-ranging perspective are substantial. His comparison of romanticism with the Enlightenment was influential and has long served as a point of departure for Marxist literary criticism. Haym himself no longer saw the reactionary attitudes as menacing because he considered himself a part of a new era of national progress. Romanticism, thus, appears for the first time as a clearly historical phenomenon, which can be evaluated from a safe distance. This development signaled the beginning of the critical and scholarly investigation of romanticism. There can be, however, no thought here of an objective

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and disinterested assessment of romantic culture. The fundamentally conservative attitude that characterized Wilhelminian Germany prompted an interest in romanticism at the expense of liberalism and Enlightenment values. Wilhelm Scherer, an important positivist, concentrated on late romanticism and its turn to the life of the fatherland, which he took to be revolutionary. Scherer also contrasted romanticism with the Enlightenment and adopted a nationalistically tinged, partisan position that anticipated many of the attitudes prevalent in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s. During the declining nineteenth century, it was particularly appealing to commentators to play romanticism’s heightened sense of the value of the past off against the present. Even Wilhelm Dilthey, a liberal-minded conservative, supported this tendency in his view of poetry as an articulation of Erlebnisse (events) and his rejection of rationalism in which he in turn grounded his interest in romanticism. Oskar Walzel, Hermann August Korff, and Fritz Strich — indeed all of the literary the scholars oriented toward ideological history (Geistesgeschichte) — followed in Dilthey’s and at the same time in the early Hegel’s footsteps. The characteristic attempt of these scholars to localize romanticism within a dialectical system is fundamentally Hegelian. Working within this hermeneutic context, Hermann August Korff traced the course that in his opinion the spirit of the Age of Goethe had taken in progressing dialectically from the Enlightenment through Sturm und Drang to classicism, early romanticism, and ultimately high romanticism. The reception of romanticism around the turn of the century was also significantly influenced by Lebensphilosophie, and against this background, the neo-romantic movement established itself during the years around 1900. Neo-romanticism was accompanied by a tendentious re-evaluation of the past that to date has for the most part only been viewed in one-sided, politically conservative — that is to say reactionary — terms, but the neo-romantics’ progressive character has been recently rediscovered and is typically seen as pointing toward new avenues of inquiry. Ricarda Huch’s well-known monograph is extremely positive vis-à-vis the topics it investigates and, thus, manifests an attitude typical of the scholarship at the end of nineteenth century. Against the background of the neo-romantic movement, the first viable scholarly editions of the works of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Kleist were also published. Since the beginning, the study of romanticism has been undertaken within the context of intersecting dynamic tensions resulting from the competing Weltanschauungen of divergent movements, which is indicative of the changing efforts to monopolize the contrasting positions associated with progress and reaction. And thus it continued. After the defeat of Germany in the First World War, German research on romanticism more than ever conceived of itself as a Germanic contribution to the national polity, and romanticism, thus, displaced classicism at the pinnacle of German intellectual life. Numerous attestations of this nationalistic derailment could be cited, even from scholarly sources like Paul Kluckhohn and Julius Petersen. In any event, anti-intellectualism — the opposite of rationalism, mechanistic thinking, and materialism — as well as the religious and metaphysical striving for eternal values were positively appraised as fundamentally romantic attitudes that expressed the contemporary individual’s elective affinity with romanticism. This kind of German scholarship developed many features that eventually became points of contact for National Socialism, as would shortly become self-evident. Since the nineteenth century, the nationalists — like other Europeans, conservatives as

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well as liberals — have sought to follow in the footsteps of romanticism’s development by using opposing concepts and dialectical methods of investigation to interpret romanticism from the point of view of a subordinated other, i.e. to conceive of romanticism as emerging as the antagonist of another position. According to the widespread consensus favoring this nonetheless controversial assessment, romanticism arose out of a process of differentiation. Oscar Walzel, almost as a surrogate for others, drew a line between “German romanticism” and classicism, and Hermann August Korff proclaimed the essence of romanticism is its perfect antithesis to the Enlightenment. Aspects of Goethe’s criticism of romanticism were resurrected anew during the twentieth century. Korff identified the primacy of fantasy as the organizing principle of romanticism in that the fundamental dichotomy distinguishing poetry from science — i.e. distinguishing fantasy from understanding — demarcates the conceptual horizon. According to Korff, romanticism is sick as a result of its limitless exaggeration of fantasy; romanticism remains, thus, profoundly suspect. Romano Guardini interpreted romanticism as a fantasy culture, which, as such, should be regarded in opposition to rationality. The old Goethean topoi concerning the pathologic nature of romantic fantasy are by no means dated or obsolete. As recently as 1951, Morse Peckham distinguished between positive and negative romanticisms, a rather dubious beginning that cannot deny its origin in the metaphor of sickness and health. In contrast, other efforts at polarizing differentiation appear more promising, for example Marcuse’s attempt to draw a line between reactionary and progressive romanticism or his endeavors in this late essays to draw distinctions among feudalistic, liberal, and socialistic romantics. At this juncture, a remark about the reasons why up to this point predominantly German theoreticians — supporters as well as detractors — of romanticism have been repeatedly mentioned would be appropriate. Scholarly discussions of romanticism in German-speaking countries have been undertaken in an especially lively and intensive manner, just as the leading role within the European romantic tradition generally must be attributed to German literature and theory. Romanticism was first conceived by Germans, who naturally made consistent reference to the comprehensive context of Western cultural history. A. W. Schlegel’s explanation of romantic culture is a pioneering accomplishment, which not only described romanticism as the insignia of a new epoch, but also — performatively — simultaneously inaugurated it. Jean Paul, indeed not often discussed as a romantic, anchored central aspects of romanticism in poetics. Hegel’s “Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik” (1816; Lectures on Aesthetics) — which express the sovereignty of the spirit over the external world — provided the first philosophical analyses of romanticism indicating the direction of future research. With the dawning of the romantic era according to Hegel’s analysis, the realm of the externalities could no longer express inwardness, but music, he argued, the medium least bound to the external world, was the ideal medium for romantic expression. The characteristically Hegelian interpretation of romanticism as strikingly modern opened the door for those critical evaluations of romanticism, which were formulated in the course of the nineteenth century. In much of western Europe outside Germany, romanticism was for a long time perceived primarily as a German phenomenon. During the period of the restoration of the French monarchy, romanticism established itself in France. The situation in Italy, though, was quite different. There in the home of classical culture, no critical concept rivaling antiquity needed to be constructed for the sake of a contrast with romanticism. Thus a

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definition of romanticism based on an opposition to a contrasting critical construct did not appear in Italy. English romanticism, moreover, did not emerge in terms of any kind of oppositional framework; indeed, the boundary dividing the classicists from partisans or precursors of romanticism can scarcely be distinguished. In German-speaking countries, however, the need for conceptual constructs that limited, differentiated, and even polemically contrasted with romanticism predominated. Modifications and reevaluations of the concept resulting from experience with it can be more clearly illustrated in Germany than in the critical literature of other countries. Historically speaking, romanticism was primarily the domain of scholars interested in German literature and culture, and it is no coincidence that the history of research on romanticism is closely allied with the history of German studies. The formulation of subcategories and organizing principles, which were supposed to record the subordinate, inner nuances of romanticism, has invited considerable ingenuity. Terms like older and younger or even early, high, and late romanticism have been employed, and they are still commonplace today in literary histories and anthologies. Furthermore, different romanticisms — those associated with Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin — have often been distinguished. Occasionally a single romanticism — usually the late one — has been declared the one actual romanticism at the expense of the others. Despite good intentions, this procedure has not gone very far in the direction of eliminating confusion. Egon Friedell, who insists on a clear line of demarcation between earlier and later romanticism, portrays the former as being exactly as rational as the French Revolution; the later, in contrast, is presented as the authentic romanticism, a highly unified, broad-based, pan-European movement that can only be characterized in negative terms. Precisely by stressing the pan-European aspects of romanticism, Friedell has effectively distinguished himself from numerous other commentators. Literary histories outside of Germany have typically favored a broadly European conception of romanticism as opposed to defining it in contrast to classicism or rationalism. These presentations typically involve a sweeping and generally inclusive concept of romanticism and focus attention on overarching concerns like romantic fantasy, basic poetological positions and categories, the psychological dimensions of romantic literature, and the development of so-called black romanticism. German literature around 1800 is generally regarded outside of Germany — if here a generalization might be allowed — as part of a supra-national literary movement characterized by a changing self-consciousness searching for new expressive possibilities and above all as a tradition asserting its own autonomy. From a European comparative perspective, German literature between circa 1770 and 1800, thus, is typically perceived as romantic, and the development of new formal and stylistic possibilities appeared as a plausible consequence of this new self-understanding. Romanticism, thus, became the object of research within the broader context of comparative literature quite naturally on the basis of its interpretation as a European phenomenon.

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Guiding Theses for Characterizing the Romantic

If one were to attempt to account in a systematic way for the efforts to define the concept of romanticism continuing after two hundred years, recurring or guiding theses may prove helpful. Thesis 1: Romanticism is the Modern. From the beginning, the term romantic circulated as a counterconcept, and it received its specific meaning primarily in the context of the discussion of a normative meaning of the so-called classical as the historical and canonical. Hegel concluded in his Ästhetik that the classical art of Greece was gone and could not simply be revived. According to Hegel, there can be nothing more beautiful than the art of ancient Greece, but something higher may emerge. By higher, he means romantic art and literature as the forms of expression of modern reality. Mme de Staël began her treatise written under the influence of A. W. Schlegel, De l’Allemagne, in an analogous manner. In France, the term classical is generally used in the sense of exemplary. Under Schlegel’s influence, Mme de Staël made recourse to the conceptual pair classicalromantic in that the past is attributed to the first, the present to the second. This attribution of meaning to classical and romantic in historical terms implies that even that which in German literary history is typically called (German) classicism is subsumed under the more general rubric of romanticism. From a French point of view, Goethe and Schiller are right down to today most likely considered romantics. Thesis 2: Romanticism Represents a Decline. G. G. Gervinus, the influential nineteenth-century German scholar and co-founder of German studies as a scholarly discipline, worked with the conceptual pair classicism-romanticism in a hierarchical and therefore contrasting sense, in which romanticism was privileged and, thus, critically elevated. In historical terms, German classicism in Weimar around 1800 could be regarded as the recovery of the classical perfection of antiquity after which, according to Gervinus, there followed a drastic decline. “Degeneration,” “vacuity,” and “romantic nihilism” defined the landscape. Since Gervinus such hierarchical contrasts of classicism and romanticism have often been repeated. It should be noted that the first thesis — romanticism as modern — and the second — romanticism as a decline — are by no means contradictory. On the contrary, in the course of the nineteenth century, a historical consciousness developed according to which history is a process of decline. The more modern, the more decadent: this basic conceptual configuration illustrates its effects temporally as well in the critical examination of romanticism. Thesis 3: The Romantic is as a Genuine Expression of a Fundamental Existential Attitude, a Valid Equivalent of the Classical. A new chapter in the history of literary periodization begins in the 1920s with the writing of literary histories oriented toward ideological history. The status of romanticism is enhanced and

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set equal to that of classicism even though, when juxtaposed, they are structurally completely different. Following Wöfflin’s lead, Fritz Strich’s work Deutsche Klassik und Romantik (1922; German Classicism and Romanticism) bears the subtitle Vollendung und Unendlichkeit (Completion and Infinity). His basic thesis is of a philosophical-anthropological nature: As a result of the fact that mortality is a continuing confrontation with temporality and death, the human being strives to overcome them and longs for eternity, immortality, and duration. Strich distinguished two fundamental and thus dichotomous possibilities for approaching this desire for immortality. He called them completion — by which he means a condition that implies eternal peace — and infinity — by which he means unending activity. In literature, this dichotomy is reflected in the dialectical relationship of classicism and romanticism. Classicism is the fully accomplished and completed work that reposes in itself; romanticism, on the other hand, is a poetry that can never come to an end but rather strives to approach the infinite in terms of an eternal progression. Romanticism is, thus, at least tendentiously speaking a trans-historical phenomenon that corresponds to a fundamental human attitude toward the world and the self. This brief interpretation of the dichotomous relation of classicism and romanticism is linked in Strich’s thinking immediately and directly to the German spirit, which in its depth and metaphysical orientation asserts an entitlement to a leading cultural role in Europe. The aesthetic discourse concerning romanticism is here clearly politicized. In terms of what Strich called the German genius, this unbounded romantic attitude is much more appropriate to Germany than classicism; he interprets the latter — as embodied by Goethe and Schiller — as the result of a synthesis of an unbounded romantic striving and the desire for form descending through Latinity into the Romance languages and cultures. This classical compromise according to Strich is interpreted in Western countries outside Germany as German romanticism. The authentic German romantics are too foreign, too German, and too un-European — and finally in Nietzschean terminology — too Dionysian to be understood at all by cultural institutions outside Germany. In Strich’s thinking, thus, a kind of national typology is linked to the concept of a classical-romantic period, in which the decisive line of demarcation is drawn between (west) European-rational attitudes and romantic inclinations toward the unbounded. German classicism appears as a kind of mediating phenomenon between the two. Approaches similar to Strich’s were developed by H. A. Korff, Karl Viëtor, and Herbert Cysarz. Here as well, the term romanticism is nationalized in what appears with hindsight to be very awkward. The elimination of limiting boundaries has remained a central aspect of efforts to define the concept of romanticism as a consequence of Strich’s theorizing, and it has had a significant impact on music history as well (Klemperer). The thematic interests of the romantic period in dark, melancholy moods as well as in the depths of the soul with their affinity to the pathological are included in the inclination to abolish boundaries.

4.

The Concept of Romanticism in a Historical Context

During the 1920s and ’30s, research on romanticism fell in general terms under the influence of politics. Mirroring the work of German researchers, scholars outside Germany began examining romanticism, and the affinities of German romanticism with National Socialism were laid out in

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stark relief. Arthur O. Lovejoy, an important representative of the American tradition of research on romanticism, took up the topic, “The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas” (1941), in an article in which the ideological-historical relationship between romanticism and National Socialism is investigated. In various works, English and French scholars sought to characterize the spirit of romanticism by means of comparisons and contrasts. Fernand Baldensperger voiced his view in “Pour une interprétation équitable du romantisme européen” (1938; Toward an Equitable Interpretation of European Romanticism), Wenwar Seillière thematized “L’Esprit prussien et le romantisme allemand” (1939; The Prussian Spirit and German Romanticism), and J. C. Blankenagel portrayed “The Dominant Characteristics of German Romanticism” (1940). Similarly in 1940, several articles on romanticism appeared in pmla under the title “Romanticism: A Symposium,” in which the perspective on the tradition was extended from Germany to Europe more generally. Indeed, while a tendency toward updating and widening the concept of romanticism can be observed generally, a gradual inclination toward a more comprehensive perspective extending beyond German national and linguistic boundaries can also occasionally be seen in German scholarship, even during and immediately after the period of National Socialism. Paul Merker, for example, penned an essay on “Deutsche and skandinavische Romantik” (1941; German and Scandinavian Romanticism); Emil Staiger published a study of “Deutsche Romantik in Dichtung und Musik” (1947; German Romanticism in Literature and Music); and Josef Matl authored an essay on “Slawische und deutsche Romantik” (1965: Slavic and German Romanticism). In a wide ranging essay, Paul Kluckhohn again sought to portray “Voraussetzungen und Verlauf der deutschen Romantik” (1948; The Presumpositions and Outcome of German Romanticism), and Romano Guardini meditated on the “Erscheinung und Wesen der Romantik” (Appearance and Essence of Romanticism). Although addressing different issues, both essays present themselves as attempts at a synthesis, and although under the influence of efforts to equate romanticism with irrationalism — in a positive sense — they both succeed in distinguishing scholarship from politics, albeit in a problematic way. This line of inquiry, though, had to come to terms with the challenge of situating itself with regard to prewar research on German literary history. This resumption of ideological-historical lines of inquiry, as critics have justifiably noted, lacks sound and scholarly examinations of romanticism in terms suggested by the most recent reception studies as well as a critical reflection on the political implications of writing literary history. Precisely this research whose subject was nationalistically politicized in the most reprehensible ways certainly requires at least this much. Research on romanticism also has been enlivened by new input from diverse perspectives and varied areas of inquiry: the modernity and currency of romantic literature, for example, were suggested by Werner Kohlschmidt in his analysis of the “Nihilismus der Romantik” (1953; Nihilism of Romanticism), an examination of the negative side of romanticism that simultaneously points out connections to the present. Critics associated with work-immanent interpretation have also been very interested in romantic authors like, for example, in Staiger’s reading of Brentano. Those associated with this often misleadingly labeled critical position espousing as well an anthropological or existentialontological orientation were also ultimately influenced by Heidegger. All of the important scholars working on romanticism during the 1950s and ’60s — among others Richard Alewyn, Paul Stöcklein, Oskar Seidlin, and Wilhelm Emrich — established their critical positions against

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this background. In additions to books and articles, a wide range of editorial projects undertaken during the years immediately following the war are widely recognized as seminal new contributions to the scholarly appraisal of romanticism, notably the critical edition of the works of Friedrich Schlegel edited by Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner among others as well as Hans Eichner’s edition of Friedrich Schlegel’s literary notebooks. The wide range of perspectives from which romanticism was interpreted both diachronically and synchronically continued to attest to the need for a comprehensive point of view for historical as well as critical studies. To this end, René Wellek published a valuable and highly relevant investigation of scholarly examinations of romanticism in “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History” (1949). Morse Peckham offered additional material for discussion in his essay, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism” (1951). In contrast, Klaus Doderer published a highly original presentation of the development of theories of romanticism in “Das englische und französische Bild von der deutschen Romantik” (1955; The English and French Image of German Romanticism). As in so many other areas of scholarly and literary research, the end of the Second World War constituted a decisive turning point in German research on romanticism, more decisive with regard to the study of romanticism than of other literary topics precisely because National Socialistic scholarship in Germany had shamelessly appropriated romanticism as its own unique inheritance. During the post-war period, the question of a connection between romanticism and a historical self-consciousness — whether highly or only marginally developed — became significantly more complex. Since National Socialistic German literary scholarship had been so intensely interested in romanticism, it became obsolete for a time. Ferdinand Lion’s book Romanik als Deutsches Schicksal (Romanticism as German Destiny) appeared in 1947. While the awareness of the National Socialist period remained fresh, the relationship between the fundamental essence of romanticism and the German mentality was diagnosed. The assertion of a intimate connection was not new: it had been proposed by German scholars during the Third Reich, as for example by Julius Petersen in his volume entitled Die Sehnsucht nach dem Dritten Reich in deutscher Sage and Dichtung (1934; The Longing for the Third Reich in German Sagas and Literature). Lion provided the then-current conception of the relationship between the German mentality and the romantic conception of reality with new nuances. In his opinion, romanticism had been allowed to proliferate too widely and had, thus, established itself too deeply in the political and cultural life of the Germans. His final summary argues for a rediscovery of the primal purity and intellectual dimension of romanticism, a suggestion that literary scholars have since taken very seriously. Other scholars, however, have turned away from the conception of an inner connection between the Germans and romanticism and stress rather the European character of romantic culture. In 1982, the American Gordon Craig published a widely read study, The Germans, in which the relationship of the fundamental German essence and the spirit of romanticism is taken up in a curious way. As signature traits of romanticism, he catalogues being out of touch with reality, wistful nostalgia, rapturous enthusiasm, obsession with death, a fundamental pessimism, and even apocalyptic tendencies; he moreover proffers a pointed paraphrase of Gerhard Schulz evoking special fondness for wonder, fantasy, power, instinct, conservatism, the apolitical, and the forest. Much of Craig’s presentation is oversimplified and distorted, not the least of which is a misrepresented quotation of Goethe

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based on the old thesis of morbidly pathological tendencies within romanticism, an illustrative though not particularly felicitous indication of the vitality of certain topoi. Few literary theoreticians stressed the necessity of understanding that the study of romantic authors and works was relevant for the current cultural and political situation as early and as explicitly as Theodor W. Adorno, who in a radio address, “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs” (1957; In Memory of Eichendorff), raised the seminal question of what tradition can possibly mean. In clearly critical tones, he observes that the relationship to the intellectual past is poisoned in the falsely reawakened culture. Adorno’s subtle analysis of Eichendorff stresses on the one hand his conservative inclination and his reactionary affinities and on the other hand, however, those elements in the poet’s work that can be read as an anticipation of modernity. Since the 1950s, romantic literature has seemed modern to precisely that extent that its central themes have been clearly identified, among which some of the more important are the preconscious and the unconscious, the pertinence dreams (which E. T. A. Hoffmann recognized well in advance of Freud), the dubious nature of identity, the centrality of language in human experience, and the problematic nature of individuality. Werner Vordtriede also inquired about the anticipatory character of romantic literature in his monograph Novalis und die französischen Symbolisten (1963; Novalis and the French Symbolists). Marianne Thalmann (Romantik und Manierismus [1963; Romanticism and Mannerism]), Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs (Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung [1960; Romantic Irony in Theory and Form]), and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Brentanos Poetik [Diss. 1955; Pub. 1961; Brentano’s Poetics]) pursue similar paths. At the heart of these projects lies the inscrutability of romantic literature, its ambiguity, its thematization of its own esoteric remoteness, its hidden, uncanny, incomprehensibility, and its subversive tendencies. The scholarly work on individual authors — like Tieck and Hoffmann — had already made significant strides. In his two-volume study of the poetic nihilism of romanticism in 1972, Dieter Arendt presented an impressive survey. The historical, political situation after the Second World War led, moreover, to a parting of the way for two scholarly traditions devoted to the study of German culture, that of the German Federal Republic and that of the German Democratic Republic. An unprejudiced and ideologically impartial examination of romanticism is in the west, as has long been the case in the east, scarcely possible. Naturally the interests of East German scholars have been of distinctive. The early Marxist literary histories were in their way just as much under the influence of a politicization of romanticism as those that were liberal and nationalistic. The conceptual dichotomy of classicism as opposed to romanticism was furnished with a value judgment wherein romanticism appeared decadent and subjective if not reactionary; classicism, an anticipation of socialist humanism or even realism. This view had a notable impact on the image of romanticism in East German literary studies. Marxist literary scholarship, though, had long assumed a critical attitude toward romanticism; it interprets romanticism as a conservative movement, which annihilated the accomplishments of the progressive Enlightenment. With reference to Heinrich Heine and Franz Mehring, Georg Lukács wrote an essay characteristic of this interpretive strategy under the title “Die Romantik als Wendung in der deutschen Literatur” (1945: Romanticism as a Turning Point in German Literature). He dismisses the efforts of literary historians to see a continuation of the heritage of Enlightenment in romanticism as a falsification of history. In 1980 — even before the reunification of Germany — Klaus Peter

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contrasted the relevance of romanticism on both sides of the border but stressed that the differences were not self-evident. In both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, romanticism was long stigmatized as a result above all of its uncanny affinity with National Socialism, German studies, and German research on romanticism during the Third Reich. A possible guiding principle for presenting the history of research on romanticism can — and in so far as Germany is concerned must — be a political, ideological, and ideologically-critical view of romanticism. This critical view, however, is by no means a homogeneous complex of cultural phenomena into which the mostly political and social aspects also flow, as the still customary differentiation between early and late romanticism illustrates. Until well into the 1970s, German romanticism was for the most part perceived by East German scholars as the negatively conceived antagonist to the Enlightenment and classicism. Individual authors like Eichendorff, however, enjoyed a positive assessment on the basis of a differentiation between the poet and homo politicus. E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose œuvre was generally perceived as critical of his society, also emerged with positive valuations as a result of what was understood from a Marxist point of view as his “progressiveness.” Around the middle of the 1970s, a change of course took place in East German literary scholarship, which prepared the way for a more nuanced assessments of romantic authors. Scholars like Claus Träger stressed the continuity of the Enlightenment and tended to regard romanticism as a European phenomenon. The 1960s in West Germany, however, experienced a politicization of literary scholarship. Especially those strains of scholarship devoted specifically to German literature began to examine their own past, and in this context, the conference of German scholars held in Munich in 1966 was an important event. Instead of the highly influential topics dealing with various metaphysical concerns that had been prominent in the research of the ’50s, issues pertaining to the history of the romantic period and an extremely sober conception of the historical-philological condition predominated. Not only the nationalistic dimensions of previous of German literary scholarship but also its liberal inclinations came into question. Ideological critiques were from that point on included in the curriculum, and research on romanticism oriented itself toward a new positivism. The results of this self-disciplinary effort are on the one hand popular study editions as well as philologically critical editions of important romantic authors, which together put research on romanticism on a more solid footing, and on the other hand arresting advancements in the appraisal of romantic literature associated with new kinds of contextualization of literary-cultural artifacts themselves. As an example, Hans-Joachim Mähl’s dissertation, Die Idee des golden Zeitalters im Werk des Novalis (1965; The Concept of a Golden Age in the Work of Novalis) can be mentioned. Mähl sees Novalis as standing in the tradition of utopian fantasies beginning in antiquity and extending to Arcadian pastorals and conceptions of the ideal political state. A few additional examples of the new tendency can also profitably be mentioned. Wilfried Malsch’s study of the poet’s conception of Europe (1965; “Europa”: Poetische Rede des Novalis: Deutung der französischen Revolution und Reflexion auf die Poesie in der Geschichte [“Europe”: Novalis’s Poetic Discourse: An Interpretation of the French Revolution and a Reflection on Poetry in History]) counts as a counterpoint to the conservative ways of reading the progressive Novalis. Helmut Schanze (1966; Romantik und Aufklärung: Untersuchung zu Friedrich Schlegel und Novalis [Romanticism and Enlightenment: An Investigation of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis]) clarifies the relationship of the two important early romantics to the Enlightenment, a

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further important contribution to the new conception of romanticism. What emerges as the cumulative impact of these various research initiatives is a new awareness of the romantics as politically engaged writers. Authors who had long been suspected of harboring Biedermeier inclinations suddenly gained a new currency as Jacobins, and their works were seen as embodying revolutionary tendencies. Jean Paul is certainly a prime example of this revaluation.

5.

Romanticism and Europe

Discussions concerning whether and in what ways romanticism is a trans-national phenomenon have been part of the research on the topic since the controversies of the 1920s. Max Deutschbein maintained in 1922 that romanticism in France was basically a foreign import. Viktor Klemperer by contrast argues that it is historically incorrect to call romanticism a foreign import in an area that nurtured one of its most prominent sources: without Rousseau the works of the romantics are scarcely conceivable. He notes as well that the French literary historians themselves manifest a tendency to evaluate romanticism as a foreign import and do so rather critically and skeptically. Carl Schmitt, who was primarily interested in the political implications of romanticism as early as the 1920s, emphatically rejected Josef Nadler’s nationalistic hypothesis of an inner connection between romanticism and Germanness by referring to the European character of the complex of phenomena associated with romanticism. Schmitt views the growing strength of the bourgeoisie, whose prominence first emerged during the eighteenth century, as a founder and promoter of the romantic movement and stresses the importance of the French Revolution. Fritz Strich considered “Die Romantik als europäische Bewegung” (Romanticism as a European Movement) in an essay published in 1924. He bases his analysis on representative works from English, French, Italian, Danish, and Scandinavian romanticism as well as the Russian and Polish manifestations. Instead of stressing one-sidedly the elements that link the various national romanticisms, Strich remains throughout concerned with drawing distinctions. He thus considers French romanticism to be the creator of the modern realistic novel in that he aligns Stendhal and Balzac with the romantic movement in France. The theme of disillusionment, which was so central to the French novel in the middle of the nineteenth century, he credits to romanticism in that the effects of the fully irrational drives and powers of life are shown. He further maintains that French romanticism in the form of realism had an impact on German literature and was particularly consequential in stimulating the development of prose fiction. This kind of comparative investigation of individual romanticisms has in the meantime proven itself to be an important if not the preeminent line of research on the complex phenomenon of romanticism. For example, two essays by the American, Henry H. H. Remak stand out: “West European Romanticism Definition and Scope” (1961) and “Ein Schlüssel zur westeuropäischen Romantik” (1968; A Key to West European Romanticism). On the basis of a parade of the most varied definitions of European romanticism during the nineteenth century — among which monistic, dualistic, three- and four-fold definitions are distinguished — followed by an inspection of what by general consensus counts as examples of romantic culture, and with a sigh but not without humor, Remak admits that the sum effect of the well established characteristics of romanticism from the perspective of national points of view constitutes a

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jungle of ideas and concepts. He nonetheless lists is series of characteristics and criteria, which can be attributed to the individual manifestations of romantic culture in Europe, though certainly not on an overall and universal basis. He concludes that it is, thus, valid to retain the concept of European romanticism and therewith oppose clichéed conceptions. His suggestion is to bring a handful of the elements of European romanticism together and then see if the different branches do not have a common origin. As a potential common denominator of the individual romantic movements, Remak mentions primitivism and introversion. Regardless of what the specific common denominators for romanticism in Europe may prove to be, it doubtlessly needs such an abstract construct to constitute European romanticism as an object of literary and broadly cultural scholarship. Fruitful points of departure for a synthesizing investigations of European romanticism are found in many different areas, among them the history of motifs, thematology, and ideological history as well as interdisciplinary research. How fruitful research into the history of motifs can be is shown in an exemplary way by Mario Praz’s volume, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (1930; The Flesh, Death, and the Devil in Romantic Literature). Illustrating recent developments in research on romanticism, Ernst Ribbat’s Romantik: Ein literaturwissenschaftliches Studienbuch (1979; Romanticism: A Critical Guide) pleads for interdisciplinary exchanges and methodological pluralism. But such methodological pluralism has its own inherent problems, above all the question of whether this path admits of the assumption of a unified object of research. Such an approach could amount to a continuing re-invention of romanticism, which at any rate approaches what Friedrich Schlegel meant by romanticism. Different research initiatives on romanticism are described and characterized in the survey by Klaus Peter: the historical-philological tendency, which emerged from — among others — the (re)discovery as a result of the student movements of progressive romanticism, the perspective associated with reception theory, as well as the interpretation influenced at the end of the 1970s by post-structural considerations. In this case, the question of authorship is problematized. If it proves possible to extrapolate a master plan from the complex array of phenomena associated with romanticism from the relative intellectual distance of this survey, the comparison of individual aspects of research dealing with a common, unified subject would certainly have a sobering effect. In 1955, Klaus Doderer observed that at no time during the last 150 years has the general west European view of romanticism fully accorded with that held by German scholars. Whether the validity of that conclusion has significantly changed is doubtful. In contrast to early interpretive models, the compatibility of romanticism with reason and intellectual analysis is presupposed. Romanticism now emerges not as the antagonist of the Enlightenment, but rather as its continuation, as an expression of interest in what eludes conceptualization and, thus, constitutes its counterpart as an articulation of the cognitive inclination that attempts reflectively to ascertain its own boundaries. In spite of all of the problems resulting from the polyvalence of the term romanticism, one eventuality remains resolutely untenable: the retirement from the terminological repertory of concepts available to the literary historian and critic on the basis of its being utterly unserviceable. This term, perhaps even more than other period designations, seems worth maintaining and honing. In “Epochen moderner Literatur” (Periods of Modern Literature), Gerhard Plumpe strives for a definition of the concept of romanticism as a period designation in a theoretically systematic context.

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Discussions about contemporary and anticipatory character of romantic literature continue. The modernity of romanticism is proclaimed from diverse points of view, in which the concept of modernity is scarcely in any less need of interpretation. The ways of emphasizing the modernity of romanticism, moreover, also diverge. In recent years, this modernity has been above all understood with regard to romanticism’s characteristic transformation of philosophy into literature, within which romanticism seems to be characterized by an anti-systematic inclination. If the contemporary continuation of the romantic literary transformation of philosophy is considered foundational for romanticism, it can be — although at the expense of the specificity of the particular concept — subsumed under various theoretical constructs: that of a broader phenomenon lying between scholarly and literary-poetic texts, for example, or of an extension of the theoretical notion of non-conceptual knowledge, of perceptions of a poetically articulatable truth, or of points of contact of all kinds between poetry and thought. Given this working hypothesis, the authoritative characteristic of romanticism might be the close connection of thought and language to the non-conceptual, even to the unspeakable, a particularly relevant area of investigation that will doubtless become important in future research on romanticism. The primary mode of expression of romanticism understood in this way is irony conceived as a striving to live between polarities and, thus, achieve its own freedom. Respected philosophers and literary scholars consider romanticism to be a period of shifting paradigms of what truth is, how it manifests itself, and how it can be mediated. In this regard, the work of Manfred Frank deserves particular mention. Frank stresses that this paradigm shift in the understanding of the essence of truth freed aesthetics from its role as a handmaiden and as an imitator of reality. He emphasizes the meaning that art achieved as a means of understanding in an early romantic context and underscores the suggestive character of this initiative with regard to the selfunderstanding of the subject. By way of conclusion, a curiosity that is not all too distant from a paradox may be noted. Precisely the presentation of the problems that result from dealing with the semantic field associated with romanticism leads to some understanding in spite of all the vagaries and diffuseness inherent in the term, not concerning what romanticism is from the point of view of the many poetic, poetological-aesthetic, and historical statements about romanticism, but rather in terms of the self-understanding of the writers and the organizing schema according to which the abundance of literary and cultural details is arranged and interpreted. Romanticism may be incomprehensible because it is unclassifiable, but those texts that express themselves about romanticism become more expressive when they are compared with one another. The time during which romanticism was primarily the domain of scholars specializing in German literature has without doubt passed. Comparative literature has recognized its competence and jurisdiction.

Translated from German by Steven P. Sondrup

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Notes 1. Das Classische nenne ich das Gesunde, und das Romantische das Kranke, und da sind die Nibelungen classisch wie der Homer, denn beyde sind gesund und tüchtig. Das meiste ist nicht romantisch, weil es neu sondern weil es schwach, kränklich und krank ist, und das Alte ist nicht classisch weil es alt, sondern weil es stark, frisch, froh und gesund ist. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. 2. April 1829. (19:300)

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1958. Noten zur Literatur I. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1997. “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs.” Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. 20 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 11:69–94. Arendt, Dieter. 1972. Der poetische Nihilismus in der Romantik. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Blankenagel, J. C. 1940. “The Dominant Characteristics of German Romanticism.” PMLA 60.1:1–10. Blanchot, Maurice. “Das Athenäum” in Bohn: 107–20. Bohn, Volker. 1987. Romantik: Literatur und Philosophie. Internationale Beiträge zur Poetik 1. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Blume, Friedrich, ed. 1949–86. “Romantik.” Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik. Kassel: Bärenreiter. 786–864. Craig, Gordon. 1982. The Germans. New York: Putnam. Cysarz, Herbert. 1942. Das Deutsche Schicksal im Deutschen Schrifttum, Leipzig: Reclam. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1988. Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik. Laaber: Laaber Verlag. Deutschbein, Max. 1921. Das Wesen des Romantischen. Cöthen: O. Schulze. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1965. Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung. 14th ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ———. 1922. Leben Schleiermachers. 2 ed. Ed. Hermann Mulert. Berlin: de Gruyter. Doderer, Klaus. 1955. “Das englische und französische Bild von der deutschen Romantk.” GermanischRomanische Monatshefte N. F. 5: 128–47. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. 1961. Brentanos Poetik. München: C. Hanser. Frank, Manfred. 1989. Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Friedell, Egon. 1965 (1927–31). Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit. München: Beck. Gervinus, Georg Gottfried. 1962. Schriften zur Literatur. Ed. Gotthard Erler. Berlin: Aufbau. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1985–98. Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens. Münchner Ausgabe. Ed. Karl Richter et al. 20 vols. München: Hanser. Geismeier, Willi. 1984. Die Malerei der deutschen Romantik. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Guardini, Romano. 1948. “Erscheinung und Wesen der Romantik” in Prang: 337–48. Haym, Rudolf. 1870. Die romantische Schule: Ein Beitrag zur Geschchte des deutschen Geistes. Berlin: Gaertner. Hegel, G. W. F. 1970. Theorie in Werkausgabe. Vol. 14. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Heine, Heinrich. 1976. Schriften in 12 Bänden. Ed. Klaus Briegleb. München: Hanser. Herzog, Reinhart and Reinhart Koselleck, eds. 1987. Epochenschwelle. Poetik und Hermeneutik 12. München: Fink. Hettner, Hermann. 1850. Die romantische Schule in ihrem inneren Zusammenhange mit Goethe und Schiller. Braunschweig: Vieweg. Huch, Ricarda. 1911–12. Die Romantik. 2 vols. Leipzig: H. Haessel. Jean Paul. 1959ff. Vorschule der Ästhetik. Vol. 5 of Werke. Ed. Norbert Miller. München: Hanser. Kohlschmidt, Werner. 1955. Form und Innerlichkeit. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Wirkung der deutschen Klassik und Romantik. Bern: Francke. ———.1955. “Nihilismus der Romantik.” Form und Innerlichkeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Wirkung der deutschen Klassik and Romantik. Bern: Francke. 157–76. Klemperer, Victor. 1922. “Romantik und französische Romnatik.” Idealistische Neuphilologie: Festschrift für Karl Vossler. Eds. Victor Klemperer and Eugen Lerch. Heidleberg: Winter. 10–32.

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Korff, H. A. 1923–47. Der Geist der Goethezeit: Versuch einer Ideellen Entwicklung der klassisch-romantischen Literaturgeschichte. 4 vols. Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang. ———. “Das Wesen der Romantik” in Prang: 195–215. Lion, Ferdinand. 1947. Romanik als Deutsches Schicksal. Stuttgart: Rowohlt. Lovejoy, Arthur. 1941. “The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 2: 257–78. Lukács, Georg. 1963. Schriften zur Literatursoziologie. Neuwied: Luchterhand. ———. 1945. “Die Romantik als Wendung in der deutschen Literatur.” Fortschritt und Reaktion in der deutschen Literatur. Berlin: Aufbau. 51–73. Mähl, Hans-Joachim. 1965. Die Idee des golden Zeitalters im Werk des Novalis. Studien zur Wesensbestimmung der frühromantischen Utopie und zu ihren ideengeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen. Heidelberg: Winter. Malsch, Wilfried. 1965. “Europa”: Poetische Rede des Novalis: Deutung der französischen Revolution und Reflexion auf die Poesie in der Geschichte. Stuttgart: Metzler. Matl, Josef. 1965. “Slawische und deutsche Romantik: Gemeinsamkeiten — Beziehungen — Verschiedenheiten” in Prang 413–26. Nadler, Josef. 1939. Literaturgeschichte des Deutschen Volkes: Dichtung und Schriftum der deutschen Stämme und Landschaften. 4 vols. Berlin: Propyläen Verlag. Nemoianu, Virgil. 1984. The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Peckham, Morse. 1951.“Toward a Theory of Romanticism.” PMLA 46.2: 5–23. Peter, Klaus. ed. 1980. Romantikforschung seit 1945. Königstein: Athenäum. Petersen, Julius. 1926. Die Wesensbestimmung der deutschen Romantik: Eine Einführung in die moderne Literaturwissenschaft. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer. ———. 1934. Die Sehnsucht nach dem Dritten Reich in deutscher Sage and Dichtung. Stuttgart: Metzler. Plumpe, Gerhard. 1995. Epochen moderner Literatur: Ein systemtheoretischer Entwurf. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Prang, Helmut, ed. 1968. Begriffsbestimmung der Romantik. Wege der Forschung 150. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Praz, Mario. 1976 (1930). La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. 5 ed. Firenze: Sansoni. Rasch, Wolfdietrich. “Zum Verhältnis der Romantik zur Aufklärung” in Ribbat: 7–22. Remak, Henry H. H. 1961. “West European Romanticism Definition and Scope” in Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective. Eds. Newton O. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP. 275–311. ———. 1968. “A Key to West European Romanticism?” Colloquia Germanica 2:1–2: 37–151. Ribbat, Ernst, ed. 1979. Romantik: Ein literaturwissenschaftliches Studienbuch. Königstein: Athenäum. Schanze, Helmut. 1966. Romantik und Aufklärung: Untersuchung zu Friedrich Schlegel und Novalis. Nürnberg: Carl. Scherer, Wilhelm. 1894. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur. 12th ed. Berlin: Weidmann. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1958. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel- Ausgabe. Ed. Ernst Behler. Paderborn: Schönigh. Schmidt. Julian. 1866. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur seit Lessings Tod. Vol. 2: Die Romantik (1797–1818). 5th ed. Leipzig: Grunow. Schmitt Carl. 1925. “Vorwort” to Politische Romantik, 2nd ed. München: Duncker & Humblot. Schulz, Gerhard. 1996. Romantik: Geschichte und Begriff. München: Beck. Seeber, Hans Ulrich, ed. 1991. Englische Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart: Metzler. Staiger, Emil. 1947. “Deutsche Romantik in Dichtung und Musik.” Musik und Dichtung. Zürich: Atlantis. 61–85. Stierle, Karl-Heinz. 1987. “Renaissance: Die Entstehung eines Epochenbegriffs aus dem Geist des 19. Jahrhunderts” in Herzog. 453–492. Strich, Fritz. 1962. Deutsche Klassik und Romantik. 5th ed. Bern: Francke. Strohschneider-Kohrs, Ingrid. 1960. Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Thalmann Marianne. 1963. Romantik und Manierismus. Sprache und Literatur 7. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Träger, Claus. 1984. Geschichte und Romantik. Frankfurt/M: Verlag Marxistische Blätter.



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Viëtor, Karl. 1949. Deutsches Dichten und Denken von der Aufklärung bis zum Realismus, deutsche LiteraturGeschichte von 1700 bis 1890. 2nd rev. ed. [by Gustav Erdmann]. Berlin: de Gruyter. Vordtriede, Werner. 1963. Novalis und die französischen Symbolisten: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des dichterischen Symbols. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Walzel, Oskar. 1929. “Wesensfragen deutscher Romantik.” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts 29. Frankfurt: Das freie deutsche Hochstift. 253–76. Wellek, René and Austin Warren. 1956. Theory of Literature. 3rd rev. ed. New York: Harcourt Brace. Wellek, René. 1963. “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History” Concepts in Criticism. Ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. New Haven: Yale UP. 128–98. Weimar, Klaus. 1989. Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. München: Fink. Wiese, Benno von. 1933. “Zur Kritik des geistesgeschichtlichen Epochenbegriffs.” DVjS 11: 130–44.



Romantic Disavowals of Romanticism 1800–1830 JOHN ISBELL Indiana University

The title Realist was imposed on me as the men of 1830 had the title Romantics imposed on them. In no time have titles given a just idea of things; if it were otherwise, works would be superfluous. Courbet in Barrère 1041 Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Shelley 56

To ask what romanticism is at the beginning of the twenty-first century may seem little different from asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. When I make words work harder, argues Humpty Dumpty to Alice, I pay them extra; a laudable solution, but one which describing realities will not allow us (Carroll 197). This, in essence, is Lovejoy’s famous position: defining the word romanticism, he writes, will either require assuming that the word has one accepted meaning, or will be a personal definition leading to “a vast amount of bad history”; “To call these new ideas of the 1780s and 1790s ‘romanticism’ … suggests that there was only one such idea, or, if many, that they were all implicates of one fundamental ‘romantic’ idea, or, at the least, that they were harmonious inter se and formed a sort of systematic unity. None of these things are true” (Lovejoy, “Meaning” 259–61). Eichner replies that “if we are not permitted to mean more than ‘organic dynamicism,’ it is much simpler to say ‘organic dynamicism’” (“Genesis” 214), and as Peckham writes, any theory of romanticism worth its salt “must show that Wordsworth and Byron, Goethe and Chateaubriand, were all part of a general European literary movement” (5). One, common solution to this dilemma is empirical: if it quacks like a romantic, then call the thing romantic. Eichner notes that in sixty years, “some seven hundred articles and treatises have been devoted to this quest” (“Romantic” 3). “The spirit of the age was romanticism,” states McFarland, adding a quote from Blake, “To Generalize is to be an Idiot” (1–3). This study prefers to examine some first-hand romantic positions on the “romantic movement” as such; taking Blake’s advice to heart, it hopes less to map a field than to open a window for debate and to raise more questions than answers. Three pressures complicate this global survey. First, “romanticism” is a civilization. Peyre thus contrasts it with other movements: “We could hardly speak of symbolist history or even of symbolist philosophy, of realist music or politics, of existentialist music, painting, criticism, and

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hardly more appropriately of existentialist poetry. Classicism … never reached, even in France, a fraction of the reading public” (333). Second, “romantic” works reflect a series of apparently irreconcilable antinomies: male/female; energy/ennui; form/chaos; art/science; public/private; group/individual; right-wing/left-wing; nation/exoticism; naive/ironic; antique/Christian; classic/romantic/realist (my The People’s Voice: A Romantic Civilization, 1776–1848 attempts to resolve these antinomies). Third, as Courbet notes, thing and label repeatedly blur. Behler remarks on “the amazing fact that most of the authors whom we today call Romantic poets did not consider themselves to be Romantics,” citing the Schlegels, Novalis and Brentano, Staël and Chateaubriand, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron (110). If none of these romantics use the term, then who did? McGann in particular has argued that we are here the unwitting prisoners of forgotten late nineteenth-century critics. Writing of “Romantic irony,” Fetzer notes that “the addition of the adjective Romantic was apparently the arbitrary decision of a later, influential critic writing in the mid-nineteenth century” (21); Greene observes that “neo-classicism … had an obscure birth in uninspired manuals of literary history around the end of the nineteenth century” (70), while Wellek remarks that “classicisme” has never entered the dictionary of the French Academy and dates Klassik in Germany from 1887 (Discriminations 68, 74). As Perkins notes, “The major Victorian critics … did not refer to an ‘English Romantic Movement,’ though they wrote abundantly about the poets” (137); Taine names the school “romantic” in 1863 echoing Anatole France, and Pater in 1889 calls it a French and German term. That story has many fascinating aspects, and several recur here: artists show the mellowing of age and personal feuds among classics and romantics alike; critics show ideology and the politics of canon formation. But this study’s main focus lies elsewhere, focused on a group of facts that throw our primary sources into a new light. It argues that a common thread does indeed link Europe’s major romantics despite religion, politics, and national boundaries: their disavowal of their own creation. Goethe, Tieck, or the Schlegels; Wordsworth or Byron; Manzoni, Leopardi, Pushkin, Chateaubriand, Hugo: their parallel remarks show more than personal feuds or late regrets, since it is their own works these romantics disown, and their doubts are there from their first manifesti.

Germany Historians may call them “Weimar classicists,” another term we owe to Wilhelmine scholarship, but Wieland and Herder, Goethe, and Schiller launched the adjective romantisch in Germany. Alert critics still struggle with “the common German view that Romanticism is the creation of the Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, and Wackenroder” (Wellek, “Concept” 147–8; see also Eichner, “Romantic” 60–5, 145–8, and Period 39–42, 48–53; and Wellek, History 1–2). Wellek argued in 1949 that since Goethe in particular shapes German romanticism, to sidestep Goethe as “Classic” is to read the Apocrypha without the Bible (“Concept” 147–8), and Eichner repeats this complaint decades later: “matters are not so simple as the reader of most German histories of literature is led to believe” (“Romantic” 10). Novalis in 1798 uses the noun die Romantik, describing a science of “romantics” akin to physics or numismatics (Das Allgemeine Brouillon). In 1804, Jean Paul Richter applies this noun to the art of Klopstock, Herder, Goethe, Schiller,

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and the Schlegels (see his Vorschule der Ästhetik). In Heidelberg, 1808, Voß and Baggesen use the agent noun Romantiker for living writers, as an insult (Der Karfunkel oder, Klingelklingelalmanach: Ein Taschenbuch für vollendete Romantiker und angehende Mystiker); Brentano and Arnim take the insult as a badge of honor, and romanticists are born (Zeitschrift für Einsiedler). Germany’s media debate runs 1801–08, in essence; Bouterwek’s monumental Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit already reviews German Romantiker in 1819. Here also are the first to disown the term: Goethe claims that he and Schiller invented the classic/romantic distinction (“Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde, und das Romantische das Kranke” in Gespräche March 21 and April 2, 1830); Pushkin and Heine call Goethe “the giant of Romantic poetry” (Pushkin 465; ctd. Eichner, “Romantic” 151) . His place in German romantic lyric is fundamental; his Märchen launched the romantic literary fairy tale; Wilhelm Meister prompted the romantic Bildungsroman (Trainer 98) from Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which Novalis wrote in reply, to Tieck’s Sternbald (Eichner, “Romantic” 98) — not to mention Faust or Werther’s impact, and this is a short list (Goethe, Gedenkausgabe 1: 585). Yet Goethe’s rejection of romanticism is explicit. In an unpublished Römische Elegie, Goethe says that if Werther had been his brother, he would have killed him; on his Weimar stage, he classicizes Kleist (Menhennet 122; see also Staël, Allemagne 3: 247–8) and refuses Brentano’s Ponce de Leon, an 1801 competition entry, preferring Kotzebue and even Terence (Buckhardt; also Balayé 80); he talks of his “horror and loathing” at each contact with Kleist (“Schauder und Abscheu”; see Schriften 3: 141). As early as 1808, he despairs of Germany’s spoiled talents, listing Werner, Oehlenschläger, Jean Paul and Görres, Arnim and Brentano whom he had praised in 1806; his attacks on “Charakterlose” romantic art continue through the 1820s (Briefe 3:92). Expanding on his famous observation that the classic is healthy while the romantic is sick, Goethe notes that “they encounter one another in the emptiness.”2 A tiresome aspect of much work on romanticism is the new set of criteria used to form each canon. Germany’s “romantics” have since Bouterwek and Heine been rather a fluid list with many common absentees: Herder, Bürger, Klopstock, Schiller, Goethe; Hölderlin, Richter, Kleist. What purpose is served, we may ask, by a history of romantic lyric where Goethe, Bürger, and Hölderlin are unmentioned? It will be half a story. Yet the Schlegels at least remain romantic shibboleths for a fastidious post-Wilhelmine tradition making their own resistance to the term all the more surprising. Friedrich Schlegel, the modernist, stops calling modern art charakterlos after 1796: he looks now to combine Europe’s old split between ancient and medieval, classical and romantic ages, to create the Indifferenzpunkt of new art, an equilibrium of the universal in the local. Goethe is his model. By 1797 (Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie), his definition of romantisch is “125 sheets long” (“Bogen lang”; Schlegel in Baldensperger 93–5), and in 1800, Friedrich famously suggests that romantic art is not dead: “the romantic type of poetry is still becoming.” Yet his preceding remark in this same passage goes uncited, on “the prospect of a boundlessly growing classicism.” What impulse makes us suppress half of Friedrich Schlegel’s message? Wellek claims that “the Schlegels were obviously strongly anticlassicist at the time,” and even Eichner deletes just that remark in his meticulous study’s page-long Schlegel extract (“Concept” 7; both Eichner [“Romantic” 112] and Immerwahr [50–4] cite the 116 Athenäum Fragment’s “die romantische Dichtart ist noch im Werden,” not its talk

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of “grenzenlos wachsende Klassizität”). Berlin’s Athenaeum writers use romantisch in art, like its partner klassisch, almost wholly for the past, not the future or even the present; and after Paris in 1802, Friedrich drops his “highly idiosyncratic” usage, consigning the term romantisch to history (in Baldensperger 91). He calls Jean Paul’s novels “the only romantic products of our unromantic age,” as he had said of Tieck’s Sternbald in 1799 (Kritische 2: 330).3 Even for Friedrich at his peak, romantic and classical art are just two old parents for a new artistic future. As Behler writes, Friedrich’s aesthetic theory tries to unite “two antagonistic aesthetics, to find a synthesis of … the antique and the modern, the classical and the romantic”; a third epoch will bring “the harmony of the Classical and the Romantic,” which the 1800 Gespräch über die Poesie calls the ultimate goal of all literature (Behler, “Origins” 117–9). Moreover, Schlegel distrusts not only his own romantic label, but also the new art that took his name: he writes around 1800 that “Tieck has no sense at all of art … he is absolutely unclassic and unprogressive” (Fragmente 65).4 In 1806, he complains to his brother Wilhelm of Goethe’s “indecent and scandalous praise” for Brentano’s “rabble songs,” Des Knaben Wunderhorn: “German scholars have become a band of gypsies; thank God we are out of that!” (Krisenjahre 1: 292).5 He calls all he dislikes brentanisch (1: 246) and remarks at Kleist’s suicide in 1812 that Kleist had mistaken madness for genius (2: 239; Wilhelm repeats this to Staël six days later [see Pange’s Auguste-Guillaume Schlegel et Madame de Staël], and Staël then quotes it in her Réflexions sur le suicide).6 Friedrich and his brother Wilhelm have turned toward the East. One key to Schlegel’s thought may be the mistranslated term Roman itself. Eichner stresses three points: “The Roman is the dominant form both of the earliest and the most recent postclassical poetry; the central position in the history of the Roman is occupied by Shakespeare, … the Roman is characterized by the vast variety of forms it can assume” (“Theory” 1021). For Schlegel, Shakespeare mixes classical Tragödie with Roman (1030), as does Schiller in Die Jungfrau von Orleans: Eine romantische Tragödie (1032–3); the Gespräch suggests that “Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Cervantes should all be discussed in a Theorie des Romans.” These facts may illustrate the absurdity in translating Roman as novel, when the term romance exists — romance will subsume Eichner’s dispute with Lovejoy, where both are right, and force a fruitful rethinking for us of the links between novel and verse romance throughout European romanticism from Byron and Pushkin to Grossi, Mickiewicz, and Hugo (1040–1). Eichner notes that the word Roman had a wider range “than the English ‘novel’ and ‘romance’ combined”: yes indeed! Schlegel’s antipathy is precisely the “sogenannte Roman” or novel of Fielding and Richardson. Schlegel later replaces the problem term romantisch by romanartig or “romancy,” stressing his etymology and locating its pastness (“Romantic” 110). Jean Paul for his part prefers Kames to the Schlegels and attacks their new Fichtean idealism as pernicious solipsism and egoism (Wellek, History 100–1); in 1792, a friend persuades him to delete the word romantisch in a title (Tieck 98) since it had been “used too often and … had acquired a bad reputation” (ctd. Eichner, “Romantic” 101).7 Uhland similarly condemns “what seemed to him the selfish poetry of those blinded by introspection to their nation’s agony” (Rodger 148). For here is a central paradox: if romantic art talks of people and nation, how can it ignore its public and national role? The 1803 Reichsdeputationshauptschluß and then Napoleon’s crushing of Prussia in 1806 had left all these writers in defeated and occupied territory, and

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that burning concern drives many German disavowals. The disavowals also show a series of avant-garde artists finding in succession that their message is being distorted by rivals and imitators: Tieck finds the Brentanos histrionic and insincere and calls Hoffmann a scribbler of grotesques; Heine’s Die romantische Schule, 1832–5, is no encomium (Matenko 437 on “AffenIncest” and “Generationen wie die Brentanos”); Eichendorff talks of “faded romanticism” and “juvenile reawakening,” while Brentano himself uses Romantismus to Arnim as a synonym of bad rhyming and empty lyricism (Eichendorff 6: 1073–4; Brentano 1: 220).8 “Classic-romantic-realist” runs the old chronology, and its simplicity has a certain schematic appeal, like Ptolemy’s cosmogony. Yet when we read that Tieck repudiates the later romantic dramatists, this neat timeline has distorted Tieck’s actual views (Paulin, “Drama” 184). As Tieck tells Friedrich Schlegel in 1813, he finds no pleasure “in all the things we have instigated” (in Lüdeke 169)9 and resents being considered the “head of the so-called romantic school” (Köpke 2: 173); Friedrich Schlegel himself talks of the “so-called New School” in 1812 (“sogennante Neue Schule”; Eichner, “Romantic” 141). Trivial-, Schauer-, Afterromantik: critics have coined many labels to keep true and false romanticism apart. Goethezeit polemic is vastly complex, due in part to geography and to endless personal feuds; but when Tieck, Goethe, and the Schlegels reject their own creations, something more is at issue. A German scholar, told in 1993 of a conference on Europe’s romantics, asked if it ran 1800–1804. In this narrow inner sanctum, our high priests will be apostates.

Switzerland German romanticism as such reached the world in translation after 1813 (see Körner and Isbell “Groupe”) from three writers under one Swiss roof — Wilhelm Schlegel, Staël, and Sismondi — Coppet’s Confédération romantique (a phrase coined by the Bonapartist Nain jaune). These creators of the genre are again profoundly ambivalent about their romantic dawn. Wellek claims that Wilhelm Schlegel’s “scales are heavily weighted in favor of the Romantic” (History 60) — true only if romantic means the dead past, medieval, and renaissance. As early as 1797, Wilhelm deplores modern taste: “From Vehmic courts, mysterious compacts, and ghosts there is now absolutely no escape” (Werke 11: 26).10 Körner calls Wilhelm’s 1808 Vienna lectures German Romanticism’s Message to Europe, and their message is that romanticism is over. To Wilhelm Schlegel, Spain’s siglo de oro is “the last summit of romantic poetry”; after 600 pages on the past, he ends with just two on the future of German theater, lamenting the word romantic as “a word profaned in a hundred posters” (Vorlesungen 2: 266, 290).11 Wilhelm “gradually lost sympathy,” writes Wellek, “with the group of which he was supposed to be a leader” (History 72) — telling Staël’s son in 1822, “je me moque de la littérature” (F. Schlegel, Krisenjahre 2: 394), calling Görres in 1840 an “ultramontane buffoon” — yet his disavowal of romanticism came years earlier in the very works that defined the term (in Solovieff 50 n65). Staël’s De l’Allemagne was decisive in bringing romanticism to the Latin world, Britain, and America. Hugo dates the concept from that “femme de génie” (in the preface of Odes et Ballades); the Quarterly Review says that Staël “has made the British public familiar” with the classical/romantic distinction (October 1814; 113). Eggli prints 500 pages of polemic Staël

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caused in France in three years, 1813–16; Pushkin, Emerson, and Leopardi cite her in founding their national literatures (Isbell, Birth 2–3). Yet her manifesto is also famous for its silences: Wackenroder, Hölderlin; Kleist, Hoffmann, Fouqué; the Brentanos, Görres; Runge, Friedrich, Beethoven; and her friends Arnim, Adam Müller, Chamisso. Arnim had refused to visit the author; the space in her manuscript for Görres was deleted (Staël, De l’Allemagne 3: 364a), while Friedrich Schlegel was indignant at his small place in her text (Isbell, Birth 56). Niebuhr and Hegel were unknown, like Chamisso; the Schlegels’ feuds, and political expediency, also play some part here, but Staël’s resistance runs deeper. Though Staël likes Faust, she writes that such productions should “not be repeated,” rejecting the “singular system” of “the new German school” (De l’Allemagne 3: 127, 257).12 She finds in Germany, as Moreau remarks, “the elements of a new Classicism” (118)13; actual romantics she then puts elsewhere in ancillary texts. Thus, Staël’s Corinne reworks La Motte-Fouqué’s Saalnixe (Corinne 11); Sainte Geneviève de Brabant answers Tieck’s seminal Genoveva, as Le Mannequin parallels Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (these parallels have been unnoticed); and in 1812, her Réflexions sur le suicide speak out against Germany’s “Romantic ideology.” Seeing Kleist’s double suicide as an insult to a suffering nation, Staël here strongly condemns the “New School” and its effects: “genius is, in many regards, popular … those who torment themselves to draw the public’s attention … imagine that what revolts the sentiments of the greater number is of a higher order than what touches them…. Gigantic vanity!” (Œuvres 1: 190–1).14 This verdict is unjust, given Kleist’s passionate nationalism (Die Hermannsschlacht); and Staël had appeared alongside Kleist in Phöbus. But her mind is fixed on liberating Europe, and romantic egotism is to her mind a dangerous poison: in the Phöbus she argued that when one can be reborn as a nation and thus revive Europe’s heart paralyzed by slavery, there must be no more talk of sickly sentimentality, of literary suicides. Finally, Sismondi’s impact has long been neglected outside Italy, where Dalla in 1819 translated chapter 30 of Sismondi’s Littérature du Midi de l’Europe without his permission, and called it Vera — or “True” — definizione del Romanticismo (Pellegrini). But Sismondi himself never uses that noun, and Italy’s living romantics are as strangely missing from his history as are Germany’s romantics from Staël’s and Schlegel’s “romantic” surveys. His friend Foscolo appears in the third edition, as a translator (Gennari 208). Sismondi’s own reaction to Dalla’s romantic label was to rewrite the entire offending chapter, cutting five paragraphs and adding eighteen (he deletes 461–3 and 470–4 from the 1813 edition, and adds 293–302 in the 1826 edition; the rest remains untouched). We lose both his “three romantic unities” and his attack on those kept by “the narrow prejudices of a fatal ignorance” (from 1813, 461–3). We gain his insistence that his “desire for impartiality has not been recognized”; adding, “we will persist in not aligning ourselves beneath any banner” (from 1826, 293–4).15 Enemy of popes and dictators, Sismondi does not mention his antipathy to Schlegel (Isbell, “Confédérations” 309), but a letter to the Comtesse d’Albany (20 June 1816) was discreetly explicit: “Chateaubriand in France, Goethe, Novalis, and Werner in Germany, Lord Byron and Walter Scott in England do not imagine they belong to the same school; and yet it is in the same point that all sin against truth” (Epistolario).16

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Britain In Britain, the word romantique dates at least from Pepys (Diary 10 march 1667), the media debate from 1811–31, and the Lyrical Ballads from 1798–1800, precisely the dates of the Athenaeum. Scholars are unanimous in calling this the romantic period. Yet as critics repeat, “none of the English poets of the time … recognized himself as a romanticist or admitted the relevance of the debate” (Wellek, History 110–11, 123). Wordsworth uses the word romantic ten times in poetry (Whalley, “England” 164, 178); Coleridge, five (178); Keats, four times in all his writings, once after the word werry, and even Byron just fifteen times in his verse (194–5). Shelley “used [the word] thrice in his prefaces” (233n). Tennyson did not use the word in his poems at all; Browning does twice, Arnold once; Hopkins never does (237). Examining each instance, Whalley suggests that Britain’s “romantics” avoided the term as a tiresome and vulgar nonce-word which can only cause trouble, concluding that “the poets themselves never applied the term to themselves, nor did their enemies apply it to them” (159). Our use of the term romantic, he argues, “has done widespread (but probably not irreversible) damage to the precise appreciation of early nineteenth-century poets and their work” (256–7); quite apart from its impact on the rest of the canon. Britain’s “romantics” all knew the term, and chose not to use it. So why do we? Let us consider some authors in sequence. Whalley notes that Wordsworth “never regarded himself as a romantic at all, but took the word to mean barbaric, gothical, grotesque” (“Literary” 242). He protests Jeffrey’s Lake School (Perkins, “Construction” 131) in 1804: “As to the School about which so much noise (I am told) has been made, … I do not know what is meant by it nor of whom it consists”; Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria also mentions, like Tieck or Schlegel, “this fiction of a new school in poetry” (ctd. Whalley, “England” 235). Lockhart’s Cockney School, Southey’s Satanic School were modeled on Jeffrey’s term. This may seem a label war, and the Lakers did settle with age — Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth — yet even in 1798, the Lyrical Ballads’ landmark preface is a curious romantic revolution: “The invaluable works of our elder writers … are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” (Wordsworth 735). Byron, famously labeled one of the dangerous fifth column romantici by an Austrian spy in Venice, seems another likely British romantic (Byron 4: 463). “We are,” he writes in 1817, “upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system — or systems — not worth a damn in itself — & from which none but Rogers and Crabbe are free” (4: 169); intriguing, since Shelley for his part remarks in 1821 that Byron in Marino Falieri is following a false system, the “pernicious effects” of which will “cramp and limit his future efforts” if unchecked (Works 10: 297). In 1821, Byron attacks Bowles, Pope’s detractor, saying like Goethe that “I have been amongst the builders of this Babel,” and “I am ashamed of it” (5: 559). To Moore, he writes: “As to Pope, I have always regarded him as the greatest name in our poetry. Depend on it, the rest are barbarians” (5: 559). It seems possible to talk of Britain’s failed classical-romantic debate. Weisinger remarks that discussion of the debate “occurs in the work of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Scott, Robinson, and De Quincey … it is hard to understand why the idea was not treated more extensively” (479). Coleridge borrows this German usage in 1811; by the 1813–14 lectures, he is reworking

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Wilhelm Schlegel’s terms (Wellek, History 152; compare with his “Concept” 15). Hazlitt and the others briefly discuss Staël and the Germans, though De Quincey, who found Endymion vaguer “than the reveries of an oyster” (Lucas 39), claims with less support than Coleridge that the Germans deserve no credit. As De Quincey hints, this seemed a silly European quarrel, alien to Britain: “nobody thought them worth making a sect of,” says Byron (Weisinger 486). For indeed, the terms arrived late: romantic as either a label for the modern as opposed to its picturesque sense or Warton’s historical usage with regard to Coleridge, Staël, and Schlegel (though the OED also cites Byron’s usage of the term in his rejected epistle to Goethe about Marino Falieri [not published until 1896; Classical.6.a]); romanticism in 1831, when Carlyle remarks that “we are troubled with no controversies on Romanticism and Classicism, — the Bowles controversy on Pope having long since evaporated without result” (Works 14: 149). In France, the term was common and used in analogy with Protestantism (see Goblot’s “Les mots protestants et protestantisme sous la Restauration” in Beauchesne’s Civilisation chrétienne). Artists, media, and public intersect in canon formation. Britain’s “romantic movement” we owe, as we have seen, to late Victorian scholarship: Mrs. Oliphant’s 1882 Literary History of England ignores the term. Perkins cites Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant Garde in arguing that the cultural meaning of works of art — specifically those associated with romanticism — “is determined by the sociological character of the public and by the ‘institution of art’ within which they are received” (“Construction” 142); or, as Shelley puts it in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, “Poets … are , in one sense, the creators, and in another, the creations, of their age. From this subjection the loftiest do not escape” (2:174). Canons shift, and in 1985, the third edition of The English Romantic Poets brought startling news: “the inclusion of Blake.” Expanding that male canon from five to six is one thing, but calling Blake romantic only renews the dilemma. As Massey remarks, Blake despises chiaroscuro (402) and insists on absolute clarity of line — like Ingrès the classicist, not like Turner or Delacroix: “the mere passage of time does not give us the right to simplify their lives in retrospect” (409). Mellor argues that an entire female romantic tradition, including ten of the day’s twelve most popular writers, disavowed basic male romantic tenets; “Mary Shelley,” she notes, “was profoundly disturbed by what she saw to be a powerful egotism at the core of the Romantic ideology” (“Women” 284). Austen wrote Northanger Abbey for a reason; and Scott, “with whom, more than with anyone else, the adjective ‘Romantic’ was associated during his lifetime,” shares Austen’s ironic distance from romantic excess (Pierce 293). As David Simpson remarks of Raymond Williams, “Goldsmith, Crabbe, Cobbett and Clare are more important to his narrative than Wordsworth or Keats or Shelley. This has surely had the effect of making Williams’s work more ignorable than it deserves to be” (in Curran 13). The fine poet Crabbe, “Pope in worsted stockings,” still suffers from our feeling that history led elsewhere, as do Moore and Rogers, despite immense popular success. If we want to see what the romantic age read with pleasure, Blake, Keats and Shelley should not head our list.

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Italy, Russia, Sweden Milan was, after Heidelberg, the second city in Europe to have an explicitly “romantic” group, with a media debate 1816–27 (Wilkins 400, 411–13): Italy and Germany as such were geographical concepts. Critics date Italian romantic debate from Staël’s 1816 article on internationalism, which had four replies within the year: in support, di Breme, Borsieri, and Berchet’s Semi-serious Letter; vehemently against, Leopardi. Berchet wants “popular” art; to Leopardi, the romantics do not see that poetry needs “myth” or illusion (see Moget, Pange, Isbell “Italian”). In Milan, media debate was skewed by Austrian occupation, as elsewhere by other local circumstances: in the Conciliatore, Visconti argues that “romanticism does not consist in the lugubrious and the melancholic” (ctd. Ragusa 317);17 the age’s two great poets, Leopardi and then Foscolo in Della scuola nuova drammatica in Italia, attack “romanticism” though they fit its European profile (Wellek, History 264–65; see also Martegiani). Curiously, Leopardi finds in Staël a firm ally against “the romantic system” and a bellissima, solennissima “condemnation of the horrors and excess of terror so dear to the romantics” (2: 50, 46).18 Foscolo for his part ignores the romantics in his survey of recent Italian literature appended to Byron’s Childe Harold (Edizione 11.2: 490). After 1821, Breme was dead, and as active patriots, many Italian romanticists were in prison like Pellico or Borsieri or in exile like Foscolo, Berchet, and Gabriele Rossetti, thus, prematurely ending the movement: “It seems hardly surprising that a modern student could argue that there really was no Italian romanticism” (Wellek, History 264). Though Milanese, Manzoni stands apart, thanks in part to his five years in Paris, 1805–10: Shakespeare, Schlegel, Schiller, and Scott helped to shape his plays Carmagnola and Adelchi, and his novel I promessi sposi (1827). Wellek calls Manzoni “the one great Italian who expressly proclaimed himself a romanticist” (History 261) although begging the definition; asked if romanticism would last, Manzoni “replied that the name was already being forgotten, but that the influence of the movement would continue” (McKenzie 33). Three treatises explain the views of this self-proclaimed “bon et loyal partisan du classique” (Manzoni, Opere 1683): there are people, he says, who by the term Romanticismo understand “a hodgepodge of witches, of specters, a systematic disorder, a striving for the extravagant, a forswearing of common sense” (1726);19 if such were indeed its character, he argues, it would deserve oblivion. As Wellek deduces from his vast reading, “one important argument for the coherence and unity of the European romantic movement emerges from an investigation of the minor literatures — the ‘predictability’ of their general character” (History 170); van Tieghem’s equally global survey supports this view (Romantisme). This study is not short, but let us linger a moment on two exemplary cases, Russia and Sweden. Pushkin in Boris Godunov lists himself in the romantic camp and calls the work a “truly romantic tragedy” (ctd. Saprynkina in So˝tér 106); yet in 1830, he praises the poet Glinka for “not professing either ancient or French Classicism and not following either Gothic or modern Romanticism” (in Wellek, Discriminations 69). His 1831 review of Joseph Delorme talks once more of “the so-called Romantic school of French writers”; Mersereau adds that “among his contemporaries only Goethe categorically qualified as a Romantic” (38–40). Gogol’s 1847 history of Russian poetry simply avoids the term. In 1836, he calls the romantics “desperately audacious people like those who foment social rebellions” (qtd. Proffer 121–22). Tegnér, “traditionally the foremost romantic in Swedish literature,” states

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similar views over two decades — writing in his Om det Romantiska i Grekiska Poesien (1822–24) that “romanticism degenerates into the fantastic and marvelous through the misuse of freedom,” and condemning French taste in 1841 for “the cannibalistic style they seem to view as the principal constituent of Romanticism” (qtd. Mitchell 381, 394).20 In both these countries, the curious stress on France and revolution is worth noting; other countries stress Germany and reaction, while talk of Britain focuses on Byron, Scott, and the Edinburgh Review.

France French media debate runs largely 1813–30, but the English borrowing romantique as an alternative to romanesque — “romancy,” perhaps — reached France in 1776, in passages on gardening by Rousseau and Girardin: romantique describes not only the scene, but also “the touching impression we receive from it,” an epochal distinction which empowers the consumer. Chateaubriand’s Essai sur les Révolutions borrows the term early from d’Agincourt (Baldensperger 76); he later massages chronology to call Staël and Byron ingrate imitators (Chateaubriand, Mémoires 1: 418) though, in fact, he launched his career attacking Staël, and the Byron letter he alleges dates from 1802, when Byron was fourteen. His famous “critique de beautés” is also silently borrowed from Staël and the Germans (235). “The Romantics — my sons,” Chateaubriand proclaims, yet the rest of his judgments are “full of the clichés of classicism” (see esp. Lettres 363: “O mes fils! Combien vous êtes dégénérés!”): revising his Génie du Christianisme to replace mélancolique with sérieux, to prefer Homer now to Milton, to praise Sophocles, and to add a peut-être to his praise of Dante (Moreau 88–90). His aim, he says, echoing Chénier’s cliché, is to “put … the classic tongue in the mouth of my romantic characters.” But we cannot ignore his public impact. Chateaubriand deplores the consequences of his early writings, like Goethe, Tieck, or Byron: “A family of poet Renés and prose-writing Renés has pullulated,” he writes, dreaming of destroying René, which “has infested the spirit of part of our youth” (Mémoires 452, 462, 1095). “If in the past we fell too short of the romantic,” he argues, “now we have overshot the mark” (Œuvres 11: 579).21 “Je suis un romantique furieux,” writes Stendhal in 1818, “I am a furious romantic” (Correspondance 1: 909). Wellek says of Stendhal that he is “the first Frenchman who called himself a romantic” (“Concept” 10). Van Tieghem prefers, as many do, to group him among writers “still” — rather tellingly — classic by taste or temperament, who toyed with aspects of romanticism while belonging in another box (or “restes classiques” as he calls them [461]; in 1840 he claims that the new generation’s “réaction contre l’ère romantique est systématique” — more false teleology [463]); but is there not some sleight of hand involved in refusing the term to those who claim it, while forcing it on those who resist? The term after all is theirs, not ours. By 1823, Stendhal sharply divides his liberal Italianate romanticisme, a hapax legomenon in France, from émigré reaction and “the German gibberish many people today call romantic” (Racine 75).22 He despises Chateaubriand and Schlegel and rejects Vigny, Lamartine, and Hugo, whose Han d’Islande disgusts him (Wellek, History 245–51). Stendhal seems Italian much as Coleridge the critic seems German, standing apart from his national contemporaries. What then of the great romantics, Hugo, Vigny, Musset, and Lamartine? In 1824, Lamartine

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remarks, “I am neither classic as you understand it, nor romantic as they understand it”; “the two rival absurdities, in tumbling, will make way for truth in literature” (Correspondance 2: 276, 266).23 The ever-subtle Musset, often presented as naïve, detests “writing three words when two will do” (ctd. Moreau 317)24; he parodies his much-quoted Confession d’un enfant du siècle in his less-quoted Histoire d’un merle blanc, proud to be white among blackbirds. Flaubert the ironist took Bouvard et Pécuchet, as it happens, from Musset’s Dupuis et Cotonet, dogged provincial catalogers of romantic’s bizarre semantics in the 1830s: “From 1833 to 1834, we thought romanticism consisted in not shaving, and in wearing large-breasted starched waistcoats” (Musset 876).25 The arch-romantic Hugo later suppressed his 1820 remark about having never “understood this difference between the Classic genre and the romantic genre” (Conservateur 25 March 1820)26; why then in 1834, at the height of the textbook romantic period, is he talking again of the death of those terms, which he “has always refused to pronounce seriously”? Barrère notes that Hugo “stood himself in 1824 outside the two camps among the ‘conciliators’ and repudiated ‘all these conventional terms that the two parties toss about reciprocally like empty balloons’” (94–5).27 Hugo uses the term with caution after 1824 — qualified by dit or ‘so-called’ in 1826, for instance — and almost never after 1830 (his revised Littérature et Philosophies mêlées would instead talk of terms that he “always refused to pronounce seriously” [“s’est toujours refusé à prononcer sérieusement”; 1: 19]); in 1864, he claims that “he who writes these lines never used the words romanticism or romantic” (Œuvres 2: 208).28 In 1827, his famous preface to Cromwell seeks to change tradition safely, unlike “some unenlightened partisans of romanticism” and calls precisely like Deschamps for “powerful dikes against the irruption of the common” (Préface 260, 267):29 “War in peace-time” in La Muse française of 1824 demands a “potent barrier” against modern “adventurous innovation” (Deschamps, Œuvres 4: 13).30 Moreau has brilliantly shown echoes of Molière and fragments of Corneille in Cromwell’s verse, as indeed in Constant’s Wallstein. Again our touchstone romantic manifestoes are ambivalent; or rather, they simply refuse the pat all-or-nothing teleology encouraged by literary history (see Moreau’s 175–6 and Wallstein 109). Moreau talks of Nodier’s “duplicité souriante,” his “smiling duplicity” (Classicisme 166–7). Despite his romantic cénacle, Nodier in his turn rejects the label, talking of “this often ridiculous and sometimes revolting genre” (Nodier, Bertram 70),31 and adding: “the romantic genre is a false invention” (in Moreau 166–7).32 (Nodier’s 1822 preface to Trilby calls the romantique “un fort mauvais genre” [Contes 97].) Saintine remarks that in 1820 the romantics included Guiraud, Lebrun, and Soumet, author of the Scrupules littéraires de Mme de Staël; Guiraud and Soumet co-founded La Muse française in 1823 (169). By 1830, they were Classics, changed by the excess around them. Gautier’s Grotesques mock the “barbouilleurs,” or “daubers of local color” (Moreau 332); his Les Jeunes France mocks the young who no longer find Chateaubriand romantic enough, as does Sand’s Histoire de ma vie, which also smiles at Hugo’s dealings with these “marmots,” or “brats from his own school” (2: 159).33 Perhaps most frustrating, as Sismondi found, is to see discretion ignored by our readers; Bizet makes Carmen romantic by simply discarding Mérimée’s ironic frame, while Mérimée’s Colomba says of couleur locale: “Let whoever wishes explain the sense of these words which I understood very well some years ago” (759).34 In short, this first-generation romantisme mitigé is not some “pre-romantic” failure

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of nerve or vision: romanticism since Schlegel invented the term was never more than half a pole, except to fools and historians. When Barante talks of classic and romantic genius meeting, that is not neoclassical reaction, but an echo of Berlin (2: 139); when the Globe praises the end of 1820-style “romantisme hypocondriaque,” it sees therein, as Moreau observes, “the triumph of true romanticism” (196–7). Compare Guizot to Fauriel in 1820, on the “mania of chopping truth in two and only wanting half” (in Glachant 22).35 Compare Jouffroy: the romantics “thought that people were tired of the beautiful. They therefore made the ugly” (48).36 Staël, Constant, Fauriel, like Ladvocat’s theater collaborators, rework their romantic translations to find this new Berlin synthesis of classic and romantic art (see Isbell, Birth 2 and “Présence”; see also Moreau 216). Or compare Berlioz, who for Gautier belongs with Hugo and Delacroix in the “Romantic trinity” (in Barzun 243),37 on a scene he stole from Shakespeare for Les Troyens: “et je l’ai virgilianisée” — “and I virgilified it” (in Legouvé 2: 189). Beethoven, who seems to Delacroix “romantic to a supreme degree” (Journal 1: 201), comments in later years that he can learn only from Bach, while Delacroix, observing his own growing distaste for Schubert, remarks: “I have been enrolled willy nilly in the romantic coterie” (Véron 1: 273; see also Delacroix, Journal 1: 340).38 Sand notes that “the romantics, having found in him their highest expression, believed that he belonged exclusively to their school” (in Moreau 248).39 His resistance to this hijacking emerges when asked if he was happy at the romantics’ triumph: “Sir, replied Delacroix,” to a librarian of the Chambre des députées, “I am classic” (Andrieux 61).40

Conclusion This study asks a question sidelined by history with disturbing ease: how to explain romanticism’s repeated disavowals by the very thinkers who had been its pioneers, indeed its theoreticians, throughout Europe. Where traditional narratives talk of this term being tainted in the decades which follow the “romantic period” and attacked from outside by a classical old guard, it seems surprisingly clear on reflection that the term never attained a position of acceptance from which to fall, even among its coiners. The durability of our traditional narratives looks increasingly like a simple tribute to the power of myth. As Marilyn Butler argues, “Going out to look for ‘romanticism’ means selecting in advance one kind of answer,” and the price of these preconceptions is the way they “interfere with so much good reading” (186–7). Was it not limiting to reduce Britain’s “romantic age” to six male poets; to discuss the Germans with Goethe absent; to date French romanticism from 1830, while Italy cites two French authors in 1816? A new reading can perhaps resituate the pressures on which our systematic disavowals depend. Hesitations glibly read as proof of “pre-romantic” insipidity here emerge, with some support from context as the result of many factors: the persistence of a classical taste born of old-regime education and reading; the return to norms thought more solid and durable after a period of experimentation; and the understandable distaste of pioneers who see their terms being hijacked by alleged followers with quite different agendas. Ironically, a whole group of “pre-romantic” writers like Staël and Sismondi were subsequently condemned by their successors, precisely for not sharing their successors’ own concerns. Here meet the different

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generational roles of avant-garde and grand public in shaping historical movements and the difficult relationship between romantic desires for a truly popular, national art on the one hand and the realities of vulgarization on the other. The later shape of the nineteenth century will reflect these problematics. Clearly, also, one might expect ample evidence in praxis to support this study’s conclusions; but to strike at the core of certain persistent myths, the label itself is splendidly explicit. What then is our new narrative to be? As we survey post-Revolutionary Europe, certain key themes recur. First, Friedrich Schlegel’s call for a new art, to replace the antithesis between Europe’s older “classical” and “romantic” ages — painfully misread by imitators, media and public as a call for “romantic” war on the past. Butler refers to the younger British romantics as neoclassicists; della Chiesa calls romantic and neoclassical art “two interdependent aspects of a single phenomenon” (31)41; as Jordan remarks, “Artz’s idea that neoclassicism and romanticism are parallel movements may strike literary scholars as peculiar, though art and music historians are quite familiar with it” (Romantic Poets 88). As So˝tér notes, “the parallel existence of romanticism and classicism matters so much that … certain phenomena of both can only be explained from their parallel nature” (European 52), adding in answer to facile teleology that “the classical period of both Goethe and Schiller was as much ‘modern’ as the poetry of Novalis” (72). Remak calls romanticism “the desire … to have synthesis follow antithesis”; he later stresses our new attention to the romantic fusion of classic and romantic art, emotion and Enlightenment, realism and fantasy, which later ages forgot, concluding: “In this sense romanticism had better equilibrium than they did” (“Key” 44; and in Hoffmeister 340–2). Lubich points out the crucial place of parody in this narrative citing Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura, Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Like Byron’s Don Juan. Kreuzgang, and Onegin both ridicule the whole storehouse of romantic cliché: “Pushkin uses Onegin … to deal an ironic coup de grâce against his former poetic self” (qtd. Hoffmeister 321). Peacock’s Scythrop is modeled on Shelley; Byron sent Peacock a rosebud in thanks, and Shelley wrote back: “I am delighted with Nightmare Abbey. I think Scythrop a character admirably conceived and executed.” As Lubich remarks, Shelley “actually named his own rooftop study ‘Scythrop’s tower’ “(316). Eichner observes that in the media debate, adversaries added to the semantic confusion and ridicule providing romantic artists “with a further reason for not applying the term to themselves”; if we ignore these subtleties, “the writings of the romantics will inevitably be misinterpreted.” Immerwahr adds that the term could not be cleaned of all its negative implications contributing to the emergence of “romantic irony.” Europe’s romantics thus connived with their adversaries to wink at their own enthusiasm from Walpole’s Castle of Otranto onward. Butler argues in consequence against “the received view that … a Romantic Revolution occurred, which worked a permanent change in literature and in the other arts…. In reality there would seem to have been no one battle and no complete victory. It is not even clear that there were defeats” (Butler 183). From this new and wider field, a long series of critical antinomies may lose their sense of urgency: the classic/romantic/realist series for one, along with the amputations and falsehoods it entails. How was this elegant new synthesis lost? Brown is incisive: “Far from being a repudiation of the Enlightenment, romanticism was its fulfilling summation…. Repudiation and triumph are its most visible gestures, which have led to conventional accounts of the war of Romanticism

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against Enlightenment reason” (in Curran 38–42). Perkins also points to the sense that the age was new, brought on by the French Revolution: “the ‘spirit of the age’ was always described as impatient of authority or limits”; ironically, he adds, this periodization cast Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Scott as revolutionaries, though all were solidly conservative by the 1810s (“Construction” 134–36). Our new narrative’s second theme is thus the ensuing tug of war between artists who witness this hijacking of their conciliatory agenda and a public drift they cannot control: as Whalley argues, “the specific symptoms of the emerging category seem always to be most pronounced in the minor figures” (“Literary” 236). Our third and final theme is the Faustian bargain this media bandwagon represents for artists deeply concerned with a public and national art. What happens to art, when it speaks to and for the nation? Must artists compromise their program in order to be heard? The radical Shelley’s late works went unpublished, as the legislator in him yielded to the romantic nightingale; Blake’s verse prologue to Milton became a hymn of the establishment, still sung during my own childhood in Britain’s boarding schools; even Byron, so much the master of his myth, lost his very name from Don Juan’s title page. We speak, and the public hears what it chooses: these radical thinkers saw their politics disallowed. They stood their terms, their books, and careful manifesti on Europe’s vast and confusing post-Revolutionary stage, and saw them hijacked by forces beyond their control. Ironically, this world of contingency is nowhere more evident than in crossing the new national frontiers these artists helped to create: as Simpson remarks, “there has never been a single entity called ‘Romanticism,’ and … this very knowledge may be read out of the Romantic writings themselves” (in Curran 20). Heine opens Die romantische Schule by stressing that French and German romantics are different animals; Stendhal and Leopardi show Italy’s distinctness; Britain’s artists and media see “romantic” as a foreign term (Heine 1169).42 The label “romantic” is a political coin in Napoleonic Europe, whose local value depends on our knowledge of local politics: what van Tieghem calls critics’ “esprit exclusivement national” (“exclusively national spirit”) can therefore lead to a dangerous blindness (Romantisme 15). And here lies another reason for the term’s almost immediate distortion; as Wellek says of France, “just as in Italy, a broadly typological and historical term, introduced by Mme de Staël, had become the battle cry of a group of writers who found it a convenient label” (“Concept” 12). That danger is for us to judge, not to ignore. At the root of this old misreading, finally, is another fiction, born by a further irony of the deep if ambivalent romantic desire to speak to and for the people, in unmediated speech: the fiction that artist and consumer are one being. For romanticism is perhaps above all a change of audience, the shared fruit of artistic, industrial, and political revolution: stereotype printing, romantic art, and a vast consumer market are born in symbiosis. In that romantic triangle of artist, product, and consumer, the new bourgeois publics were disturbing bedfellows. Contemporary readers’ letters naively reveal their appropriation of the artist: “I recognized myself in it…. I said to myself: This is me,” writes one (A. Julien in Moreau 267); “this is not you … it is me,” writes another to Hugo (Ulback in Simon 293).43 Seeing this shift with his usual flair, Hugo uses it the same year in a preface to his romantic readers: “madman, to think I am not you!” (Les Contemplations).44 Yet text and romantic label, as Sismondi’s hapless fate makes clear, remain forever separate events; they are as divorced as thing and word, artist and

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consumer, despite romantic myth and generations of historians. (Lovejoy suggests that the term Romantic “has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign” [253]. I would argue that this was true, on a European scale, by 1820.) Look at the case of Britain. No artists can govern the myth they launch, that much is the contract of Promethean creation; yet this, after all, is a strange fate for the great to suffer, to be colonized by their own epithet while they yet lived and protested. Goethe, Tieck, the Schlegels, Sismondi, Manzoni, Leopardi, Pushkin, Byron, Stendhal, Hugo, Delacroix: when Europe’s romantics line up to reject the “so-called romantic school,” how can we so easily have backgrounded their resistance to the label? Every public will impose a persona on its artists, a fictive Doppelgänger they only half control. But which, after all, are we here to judge, that romantic myth, or its creators?

Notes 1. “Le titre de réaliste m’a été imposé comme on a imposé aux hommes de 1830 celui de romantiques. Les titres n’ont donné en aucun temps une idée juste des choses; s’il en était autrement, les œuvres seraient superflues” (Courbet in Barrère 104). 2. “wodurch sie sich denn beide im Nichtigen begegnen” (Goethe’s Moderne Guelfen und Ghibellinen, in Über Kunst und Alterthum). 3. “die einzigen romantischen Erzeugnisse unseres unromantischen Zeitalters” (Schlegel, Kritische 2: 330). 4. “Tieck hat gar keinen Sinn für Kunst sondern nur … [für] Fantasmus und Sentimentalität…. Es fehlt ihm an Stoff, an Realismus, an Philosophie…. Er ist absolut unclassisch und unprogressiv” (Schlegel, Fragmente 65). 5. “Goethe hat … ein ausschweifendes und scandalöses Lob auf Brentano wegen der Pöbellieder in seinem Freimüthigen aufgestellt; die Deutschen Gelehrten … sind jetzt ein wahres Zigeunergesindel. Gott sei Dank daß wir heraus sind!” (Schlegel, Krisenjahre 1: 292). 6. Kleist “hat also nicht bloß in Werken sondern auch im Leben Tollheit für Genie genommen” (Schlegel, Krisenjahre 2: 239). 7. “weil es zu verbraucht und … schon in zu schlechten Ruf gekommen ist” (Eichner, “Romantic” 101). 8. “die verblichene Romantik”; “juvenile Wiedererweckung der Romantik”; “eine der Schule entwachsene Romantik” (Eichendorff 1073–4); “ein solch Gesinge und ein solcher Romantismus … daß man sich schämt” (Brentano 1: 220). 9. “Ich habe überhaupt keine Freude an allen den Sachen, die wir veranlasst haben” (Lüdecke 169). 10. “Von den Fehmgerichten, den geheimen Bündnissen und den Geistern ist vollends gar keine Rettung mehr” (A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen 11: 26). 11. “Der letzte Gipfel der romantischen Poesie”; “auf hundert Komödienzetteln wird der Name romantisch an rohe und verfehlte Erzeugnisse verschwendet und entweiht” (A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen 2: 266, 290). 12. “il est à désirer que de telles productions ne se renouvellent pas”; Meister and the “système singulier” of the “nouvelle école allemande” (Staël, l’Allemagne 3: 127, 257). 13. “les éléments d’un classicisme nouveau” (Moreau 118). 14. “Le génie est, à plusieurs égards, populaire … ceux qui se tourmentent pour attirer l’attention du public … vont jusqu’à s’imaginer que ce qui révolte les sentiments de la plupart des hommes est d’un ordre plus relevé que ce qui les touche … Gigantesque vanité!” (Staël, Œuvres 1: 190–1). 15. “trois unités romantiques”; “des préjugés étroits dans une ignorance fatale” (Sismondi [1813] 461–3); “mon désir d’impartialité n’a point été reconnu”; “nous persisterons à ne nous ranger sous aucune bannière” (Sismondi [1826] 293–4). 16. “Chateaubriand en France, Goethe et Novalis et Werner en Allemagne, lord Byron et W. Scott en Angleterre ne

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John Isbell se figurent point être de la même école; cependant, c’est par le même point que tous pêchent contre la vérité” (Sismondi 20 June 1816).

17. “Il romanticismo non consiste nel lugubre e nel malinconico” (Visconti ctd. Ragusa 317). 18. “Bellissima condanna del sistema romantico”; “una solennissima condanna degli orrori e dell’eccessivo terribile tanto caro ai romantici” (Leopardi 50, 46). 19. “non so qual guazzabuglio di streghe, di spettri, un disordine sistematico, una ricerca stravagante, una abiura in termini del senso comune” (Manzoni 1726). 20. “urartar äfven det romantiska genom frihetens missbruk till det phantastiska och vidunderliga”; “Det … kannibaliska tyckas de anse [Fransoserna] för Romantikens hufvudelement” (Tegnér ctd. Mitchell 381, 394). 21. “mettre … la langue classique dans la bouche de mes personnages romantiques” (Chateaubriand, Mémoires 452; he has “une famille de René poètes et de René prosateurs a pullulé” destroying René (462), and the variant, “infesté l’esprit d’une partie de la jeunesse” (1095). “Si jadis on resta trop en deçà du romantique, maintenant on a passé le but” (Chateaubriand, Œuvres 11: 579). 22. “Le galimatias allemand, que beaucoup de gens appellent romantique aujourd’hui” (Stendhal, Racine 75). 23. “Je ne suis ni classique comme vous l’entendez, ni romantique comme ils l’entendent”; “les deux absurdités rivales, en s’écroulant, feront place à la vérité en littérature” (Lamartine 2: 276, 266). 24. “Trois mots quand il n’en faut que deux” (Lamartine in Moreau, Classicisme 317). 25. “De 1833 à 1834 nous crûmes que le romantisme consistait à ne pas se raser, et à porter des gilets à larges revers, très empesés” (de Musset 876). 26. “Nous n’avons jamais compris cette différence entre le genre classique et le genre romantique” (Hugo, Conservateur 25.III.1820). 27. “se rangeait en 1824 en dehors des deux ‘camps’ parmi les ‘conciliateurs’ et répudiait ‘tous ces termes de convention que les deux partis se rejettent réciproquement comme des ballons vides’“ (Barrère 94–5). 28. “Celui qui écrit ces lignes n’a jamais employé les mots romantisme ou romantique” (Hugo, Œuvres 2: 208). 29. “quelques partisans peu avancés du romantisme”; “des digues les plus puissantes contre l’irruption du commun” (Hugo, Préface 260, 267). 30. “La Guerre en temps de paix” in La Muse française, 1824, demands a “digue puissante” against modern “innovation aventureuse” (Deschamps 4: 13). 31. “le genre souvent ridicule et quelquefois révoltant qu’on appelle en France romantique” (Nodier, Bertram 70). 32. “Le genre romantique est une invention fausse” (Moreau 166–7). 33. “On ne trouvait plus Chateaubriand assez romantique” (Sand 2: 159). 34. “Explique qui pourra le sens de ces mots, que je comprenais fort bien il y a quelques années, et que je n’entends plus aujourd’hui” (Mérimée 759). 35. “la manie de couper en deux la vérité et de n’en vouloir prendre que la moitié” (Guizot in Glachant 22). 36. “ont pensé qu’on était las du beau. Ils ont donc fait du laid” (Jouffroy 48). 37. “Hector Berlioz paraît former avec Hugo et Eugène Delacroix la trinité romantique” (Gautier in Barzun 243). 38. “on m’a enrégimenté, bon gré mal gré, dans la coterie romantique” (Véron 1: 273); “Je commence à prendre furieusement en grippe les Schubert, les rêveurs, les Chateaubriand” (Delacroix 1: 340). 39. “les romantiques, ayant trouvé en lui leur plus haute expression, ont cru qu’il appartenait exclusivement à leur école” (Sand in Moreau 248). 40. “Monsieur, répondit Delacroix, je suis classique” (Andrieux 61). 41. “due aspetti interdipendente di uno stesso fenomeno” (della Chiesa 31). 42. “diese [Schule] in Deutschland ganz anderes war, als was man in Frankreich mit diesem Namen bezeichnet” (Heine 1169). 43. “Je m’y suis reconnu … je me suis dit: C’est moi” (A. Julien in Moreau 267); “Ce n’est pas vous … c’est moi” (Ulbach in Simon 293). 44. “Ah! insensé, qui crois que je ne suis pas toi” (from Hugo’s 1856 preface to Les Contemplations).

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References Andrieux, Louis. 1927. Alphonse Rabbe. Paris: Lahure. Balayé, Simone. 1971. Les Carnets de voyage de Madame de Staël. Genève: Droz. Baldensperger, Fernand. 1937. “‘ Romantique’, ses analogues et ses équivalents: tableau synoptique de 1650 à 1810.” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 19: 93–5. Barante, Prosper de. 1859. Études littéraires et historiques. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Paris: Didier. Barrère, J.-B. 1951. “Sur quelques définitions du romantisme.” Revue des sciences humanines. Barzun, Jacques. 1982. Berlioz and His Century. Chicago: U Chicago P. Behler, Ernst. 1968. “The Origins of the Romantic Literary Theory.” Colloquia Germanica 2: 109–26. Bottasso, Enzo. 1984. “La rottura fra Breme e Foscolo: L’imprevista conseguenza d’un giudizio troppo sbrigativo sulla polemica romantica.” Ludovico di Breme e il programma dei romantici italiani. Torino: Centro Studi Piemontesi. 83–104. Brentano, Clemens. 1951. Briefe. 2 vols. Ed. F. Seebaß. Nüremberg: Hans Carl. Burckhardt, C. A. H. 1891. Das Repertoire des Weimarischen Hoftheaters unter Goethes Leitung 1791–1817. Hamburg: Voß. Butler, Marilyn. 1981. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries. Oxford: Oxford UP. Byron, Lord. 1898–1901. Letters and Journals. Ed. Lord Prothero. 6 vols. London: Murray. Carlyle, Thomas. 1884. Carlyle’s Works. 20 vols. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. Carroll, Lewis. n.d. Through the Looking-Glass. The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. Ed. A. Woolcott. London: Nonesuch. Chateaubriand, François-René. 1951. Lettres à Mme Récamier. Ed. M. Levaillant. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 1946. Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Ed. M. Levaillant and G. Moulinier. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1859–61. Œuvres complètes de Chateaubriand. 12 vols. Paris: Garnier. Courbet, Gustave. 1930. Courbet raconté par lui-même. Genève: Cailler. Curran, Stuart, ed. 1993. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Delacroix, Eugène. 1932. Journal de Eugène Delacroix. Ed. A. Joubin. 3 vols. Paris: Plon. Chiesa, Angela Ottino della . 1965. “Neoclassico e Romantico in Europa.” Il Veltro 9: 23–32. Deschamps, Emile. 1872–4. Œuvres d’Emile Deschamps. 6 vols. Paris: Lemerre. Eggli, Edmond and Pierre Martino. 1933. Le Débat romantique en France, 1813–16. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Eichendorff, Joseph von. 1987–90. Werke. Ed. H. Schultz. 6 vols. Frankfurt: Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker. Eichner, Hans, ed. 1972. “Romantic” and its Cognates: The European History of a Word. Toronto: U Toronto P. Eichner, Hans. 1965. “The Genesis of German Romanticism.” Queen’s Quarterly 72.2: 213–31. ———. 1956. “Friedrich Schlegel’s Theory of Romantic Poetry.” PMLA 71: 1018–41. ———. 1970. “The Novel.” In Prawer 64–96. Fetzer, John. 1990. “Romantic Irony.” In Hoffmeister 19–36. Foscolo, Ugo. 1952-. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo. 22 vols. Firenze: Le Monnier. Gautier, Théophile. 1974. Les Jeunes France: Romans goguenards. Ed. R. Jasinski. Paris: Flammarion. Gennari, Geneviève. 1947. Le Premier voyage de Mme de Staël en Italie. Paris: Boivin. Glachant, Paul and Victor Glachant, eds. 1902. Lettres à Fauriel conservées à la bibliothèque de l’Institut. Paris: Nouvelle Revue. Goblot, J. 1975. “Les mots protestants et protestantisme sous la Restauration.” Civilisation chrétienne: Approche historique d’une idéologie. Ed. Jean-René Derré. Paris: Beauchesne. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1948–60. Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche. Ed. E. Beutler. 24 vols. Zürich: Artemis. ———. 1970–3. Goethe. Schriften zur Literatur. Ed. E. Nahler. 7 vols. Berlin: Akademie. Greene, Donald. 1970. “What Indeed Was Neo-Classicism: A Reply to James William Johnson’s ‘What Was Neo-Classicism’?” Journal of British Studies 10.1:69–79. Heine, Heinrich. 1954. Heinrich Heines Werke. Die Bergland-Buch-Klassiker. Salzburg: Bergland.

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Nahler, E. ed. 1970–3. Goethe. Schriften zur Literatur. 7 vols. Berlin: Akademie. Nodier, Charles. 1961. Contes. Ed. P-G. Castex. Paris: Garnier. ———. 1956. Preface to Charles Marturin’s Bertram, ou Le Château de Saint-Aldobrand. Ed. M. Ruff. Paris: Corti. Pange, Comtesse de. 1967. “Quelques remarques sur l’article de Mme de Staël intitulé: De l’esprit des traductions.” La Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate [RLMC] 20 (December): 215–25. Paulin, Roger. 1985. Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1970. “The Drama.” In Prawer 173–203. Peckham, Morse. 1951. “Toward a Theory of Romanticism.” PMLA 66:5–23. Pellegrini, Carlo. 1926. Il Sismondi e la storia delle letterature dell’Europa meridionale. Genève: Olschki. Perkins, David. 1990. “The Construction of ‘The Romantic Movement’ as a Literary Classification.” NineteenthCentury Literature 45. Peyre, Henri. 1969. “The Originality of French Romanticism.” Symposium 23. 3–4: 333–45. Pierce, Frederick A. 1918. Currents and Eddies in the English Romantic Generation. New Haven: Yale UP. Prawer, Siegbert, ed. 1970. The Romantic Period in Germany. London: Weidenfield and Nicholson. Proffer, Carl R. 1966–7. “Gogol’s Definition of Romanticism.” Studies in Romanticism 6: 120–7. Pushkin. 1986. Pushkin on Literature. Tr. ed. T. Wolff. London: Athlone. Ragusa, Olga. 1972. “Italy/Romantico — Romanticismo.” In Eicher, “Romantic” 293–340. Remak, Henry H. H. 1968. “A Key to West European Romanticism?” Colloquia Germanica 2: 37–46. ———. “New Harmony: The Quest for Synthesis in West European Romanticism.” In Hoffmeister: 333–51. Rodger, Gillian. 1970. “The Lyric.” In Prawer 147–72. Sand, George. 1970. Œuvres autobiographiques. Ed. G. Lubin. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. 1846–48. Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. E. Böcking. 16 vols. 3rd ed. Liepzig: Weidmann. ———. 1967. Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur. Ed. E. Lohner. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1957. Fragmente zur Litteratur und Poesie I: Literary Notebooks, 1797–1801. Ed. Hans Eichner. London: Athlone. ———. 1936, 1969. Krisenjahre der Frühromantik. Ed. J. Körner. 3 vols. Brno: Rohrer. ———. 1967–79. Kritische Friedrich Schlegel-Ausgabe. Ed. E. Behler. 14 vols. München: Schöningh. Shelley, Mary. 1983. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. New York: New American Library. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1926–30. Complete Works. Ed. R. Ingpen and W. E. Peck. 10 vols. London: Benn. Simon, G. 1922. “Victor Hugo et les critiques.” Revue de Paris (July). Sismondi. 1933–75. Epistolario. Ed. Carlo Pellegrini. 5 vols. Firenze: Nuova Italia. Solovieff, George. 1990. L’Allemagne et Madame de Staël. Paris: Klinsieck. So˝tér, I. and I. Neupokoyeva, eds. 1977. European Romanticism. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Staël, Madame de. 1985. Corinne ou l’Italie. Ed. S. Balayé. Paris: Folio. ———. 1958–60. De l’Allemagne. Ed. Pange-Balayé. 5 vols. Paris: Hachette. ———. 1834. Œuvres complètes. 3 vols. Paris: Treuttel & Würtz. Stendhal, Henri Beyle. 1962. Correspondance. Ed. H. Martineau and V. del Litto. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1970. Racine et Shakespeare. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Trainer, James. 1970. “The Märchen” in Prawer 97–120. Tieghem, Paul van. 1969. Le Romantisme dans la littérature européene. Paris: Albin Michel. Véron, Louis. 1853–5. Mémoires d’un bourgeois de Paris. 6 vols. Paris: Gonet. Weisinger, Herbert. 1946. “English treatment of the Classical-Romantic Problem.” Modern Language Quarterly 7.4:477–88. Wellek, René. 1949. “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History.” Comparative Literature 1: 1–23, 147–72. ———. 1970. Discriminations. Hew Haven: Yale UP. ———. 1955–1992. A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950. 6 vols. New Haven: Yale UP. Whalley, George. 1965. “Literary Romanticism.” Queen’s Quarterly 72.2: 232–52 ———. 1972. “England/Romantic — Romanticism.” In Eichner, “Romantic” 157–262. Wilkins, Ernest. 1954. A History of Italian Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Wordsworth, William. 1964. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. T. Hutchinson. Rev. ed. de Selincourt. London: Oxford UP.



Hegel and Hegelianism in European Romanticism GERHART HOFFMEISTER University of California, Santa Barbara

“Hegel, we now recognize, is one of the most influential figures in the history of mankind” (Wellek 2, 318). This assessment is based on the impact of Hegel’s philosophy, which was an attempt to combine all available knowledge in a coherent system. Even if critics of the romantic age disagreed with Hegel’s conclusions, they could not bypass him because “the philosophy of Hegel embraced all the questions of the universal life…. Hegel has made philosophy a science, and the greatest service of this greatest of thinkers of the modern world consists in his method of speculative thought”1 (Belinsky 287). What made Hegel’s philosophy so attractive was both its message and its method. The task of the philosopher is to know everything, not only the objective world around us, but to recognize God’s Spirit (reason) in it, to show how it reveals itself among men and to help it to come into its own and thus become free. This way Hegel tried to unify spirit and nature, mind and matter, ideal and real and to arrive at a systematic synthesis in which each part is viewed as a mirror of the whole. To be sure, Hegel’s system is based on several optimistic assumptions: first, that the philosopher is able to know all; second, that he can trace the development of God’s Providence in history; third, that divine reason rules the world; and fourth, that he can overcome the alienation between matter and mind, being and thinking through his dialectic method applied to both. As opposed to the Enlightenment’s view of the universe as a static mechanism, Hegel saw everything in motion in nature, history, mind, and God; dialectic thinking overcomes oppositions and reintegrates them in its conclusions. Thus the final synthesis amounts to a compromise that contains both the positive and the negative positions on a higher level before the dialectic process starts anew. Scholarly opinions differ as to which work provides the key to Hegel’s system. The most comprehensive exposition takes place in Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences; 1817); other titles rival its importance: Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of the Mind; 1807), Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (The Philosophy of Right; 1821), Philosophie der Geschichte (Philosophy of History; 1837), and Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik (Lectures on Aesthetics; 1835). Whereas the first two works contain Hegel’s speculative ideas, the latter apply his theories to concrete examples. Basic to all is Hegel’s belief in God and reason. Not a transcendent personality, God as absolute Spirit manifests Himself in this world in history, art, religion, and the state. His spirit comes into His own by contrast with nature and through individual self-expression as objectivized in people’s histories and institutions. Only in man’s consciousness does nature become spiritual, whereas man gets to know himself as spirit in philosophy, art, and religion. Through the dialectic process, man, after his fall, gradually regains his state of grace with God, who in turn gains more and more consciousness of Himself in man.

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In his Philosophie der Geschichte, Hegel portrays history in dialectic terms in step with God’s trinity. “God is dialectics”2 (Heer 25), since through His son He unfolds Himself in history. God’s providence rules the world (Hegel, Werke 11:39, 67). Accordingly, Hegel’s view of history turns into a theodicy (Hegel, Werke 11:42, 569) in which suffering and death have a place, but not injustice because of the general purpose of world history and the progress of spirit toward freedom (Hegel, Werke 11:46). This conclusion makes sense only in the context of Hegel’s belief that history does not care for individual happiness (Hegel, Werke 11:56), on the contrary, it uses great men such as Caesar (Hegel, Werke 11:59) or Napoleon as unconscious tools in its drive toward greater self-knowledge as well as in the service of mankind’s progress (Hegel, Werke 11:63, 64). The ultimate goal of history is constant progress toward the selfrealization of spirit whose highest determination is freedom (Hegel, Werke 11:44). “What happens on earth and in heaven, happens but to reach this goal”3 (Hegel, Einleitung 110). God rules the world, everything must have some useful purpose and fit His plan of salvation. Spirit progresses from one culture to the next, from one state of cultural achievement to the next level of the evolution of spirit. Thus world history moves through stages (Hegel, Werke 11:92), the first phase being the Orient, characterized by a total lack of freedom in a masterslave society; this earliest phase is followed by the Graeco-Roman empire marked by the dawning of the idea of freedom and the plasticity of its arts; the Germanic Middle Ages with its focus on Christian spirituality synthesizes the two previous positions in an orderly monarchy guaranteeing the highest degree of freedom (Hegel, Werke 11:45); in its last section, history stretches from the Reformation until 1820, when the spirit’s mission seems to be completed: it has become free and the rights of man have been acknowledged (Hegel, Werke 11:567). This observation leads directly to Hegel’s “philosophy of right,” i.e. his conception of the state and the individual. As a manifestation of the divine spirit’s march through the world, states developed from slavery toward freedom. A mature modern state is founded on reason as expressed in good laws that are in keeping with reason. God’s progress through the world manifests itself in the state as divine will and spirit that has become tangible in the “organization of a world”4 (Hegel, Grundlinien 222). From this perspective, the task of each individual is to become a citizen, to objectify himself in order to be congruent with the “objective spirit”of the state. Thus the usual contrast between arbitrariness and freedom vanishes with each individual’s submission to the law as an expression of the general will: “the general will and the particular will must ultimately coincide in the realization of freedom” (Harris 167). This way the individual obeys itself and becomes free, a constituent element in organized civil society. Did Hegel, a professor in Berlin (1818), turn into a reactionary, servile philosopher of the Prussian state when he proclaimed: “Whatever is reasonable is real; and what is real, is reasonable”5 (Hegel, Grundlinien 14)? This statement was read as an invitation to accept the status quo in the Age of Restoration (1815–48). Yet progressive minds interpreted it in a dynamic fashion so as to express the idea that “whatever is rational must exist.” Heinrich Heine heard this version from Hegel himself at the University of Berlin in 1820 (Heine 4:653).6 By the same token, the Prussian state became a target of criticism when Hegel’s state as the manifest spirit of freedom was compared with its dismal reality, its bureaucracy, and its lack of citizens’ rights. In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel argues that art results from the progressive evolution

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of pure spirit; it is, next to religion and philosophy, one of the decisive moments in the history of the self-liberation of spirit from matter, a struggle that passes through three successive stages: the conflict with matter in the symbolic art of the Orient (architecture), the equilibrium between matter and spirit in the classical sculptures of antiquity, and finally, spirit’s emancipation from all previously achieved balance of form and content in post-Graeco-Roman “romantic” art as evidenced in the areas of painting, music, and literature. Even a capsule-like reduction of his aesthetic system leads to several conclusions: first, Hegel presses “the classification of the arts into the sequence of the historical stages of art” (Wellek 2:320); second, spirit, in its successive manifestations in art, religion, and philosophy finally transcends beautiful art as “the sensuous semblance of the idea”7 (Hegel, Werke 12:160) and turns inside, away from matter or form to the benefit of theory, thus, occasioning the eventual death of art and literature. “Art … finds its true justification only in science”8 (12:35), i.e. philosophy; romantic art as developed in the Christian era turns its back on classical harmony and instead focuses on the inner life of the mind, allowing full scope to the “unbeautiful,” to “sin and evil” as well as the presentation of protagonists torn within (13:15).9 Seen from the position of artistic perfection, ancient sculpture was the unsurpassed climax, but, viewed in terms of the evolution of spirit who withdraws from the external world into itself (13:122), romantic art becomes its highest achievement. Romantic art developed in three stages: from the religious sphere of medieval art through the secular art of chivalry to modern art, a division that implies an essential antithesis between this world and the world beyond. In other words, a gulf exists between the spiritual realm of the mind and the external world that is finally released from its classical fusion with Spirit. Thus the fundamental problem for romantic artists was how to cope with the experience of Weltschmerz or “Zerrissenheit.” The best means to express this dissonance were music and lyric poetry. Studying the life and works of his contemporaries, among them the brothers Schlegel, Novalis, and Tieck, Hegel realized the dangers lurking in the increasing introversion of his age whose religious foundation was fast dissolving under the threat of “irony” (Hegel, Grundlinien 138–9). In his critique of modern literature, Hegel targeted irony in both life and art as represented by Friedrich Schlegel, because in him romantic subjectivity seemed to culminate in undermining any serious effort at conviction or substance. To the ironist everything appears void and vain except his own ego that thrives on solely subjective, even narcissistic feelings, a position Hegel considered evil (Hegel, Werke 101–2). There are only two ways to solve the ironist’s predicament, conversion to faith or madness. Moreover, it would be tantamount to artistic bankruptcy to turn irony into the principle of artistic creation or worse, into a guideline for literary criticism without a philosophical standard at hand (12:99). Out of personal antipathy toward Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel seems to have equated irony with arbitrariness and romantic literature at large (13:136; 12:101–2). Although it appears that Hegel turned into an anti-romantic with his declaration of the end of art and with his construction of an all-encompassing system alien to romantic fragmentation, his European reception took place in the context of romanticism. His disciples and admirers could easily find all essential ingredients necessary to make him a romantic philosopher and to help the younger generation change the world: first, his optimism, undaunted in the face of major catastrophes, was based on the dominant role of spirit or reason in the historical process,

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an idea well encapsulated in the belief that everything that happens has a purpose or function in the scheme of Providence; second, his faith in man’s, especially the philosopher’s, capacity to know everything; third, his conception of a steady universal movement, growth, and evolution; and fourth, his understanding of nations as cultural entities with a history of their own and yet part of a concert of nations moving toward the highest goal, freedom that is to be achieved by great individuals. Most critics agree on one point: Hegel’s legacy to his age can hardly be overestimated. Hegelianism is the term used to identify the chief philosophical trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that developed out of Hegel’s system in various stages and sometimes in mutually exclusive “schools.” The “old Hegelians” on the right were conserving their master’s overall synthesis of opposites in contrast to the “young Hegelians” on the left who employed his dialectic to interpret his thought progressively and in a revolutionary vein during the first stage of his reception between 1830 and 1850 (Knox 491). The German left-wing is well represented by David Strauss (Das Leben Jesu [The Life of Jesus; 1835–36]), Ludwig Feuerbach (Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity; 1841]), Arnold Ruge (ed., Hallische Jahrbücher [Halle Annual; 1838–39]), and Karl Marx (ed., Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher [GermanFrench Annual; 1844], together with Ruge). Instead of focusing on the well-known Hegelian controversies in Germany, this essay attempts to elucidate the transformation of Hegel’s system outside of Germany during the 1840s, a period of antireligious and political radicalism. Johan Ludvig Heiberg introduced Hegel’s philosophy to Denmark, where it flourished in the 1840s, especially in the works of Kierkegaard, first in his dissertation Om Begrebet Ironi med stadigt Hensyn til Socrates (On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates; 1841), then in Begrebet angest (The Concept of Anxiety; 1844), in Philosophiske Smuler eller En Smule Philosophi (Philosophical Fragments or A Fragmentary Philosophy; 1844), and finally in his Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (Concluding Unscientific Postscript; 1846). Hegel had already died when Kierkegaard attended Schelling’s anti-Hegelian lectures in Berlin in 1841–42. Not surprisingly, Kierkegaard polemicized against Hegel with varying degrees of vehemence yet at the same time continued drawing on his terminology and dialectic. Early on, he took over Hegel’s critique of romantic irony as an expression of mere negativity and narcissism, of subjectivity that is without any redeeming ties to real life. “For irony, everything turns into nothing”10 (Kierkegaard 1:296). Instead Kierkegaard advocated a return to Socratic irony and adapted Hegel’s dialectic for his theology (Dialectic Theology), yet he criticized Hegel for his synthesis of existence and reflection. In Enten-Eller (Either/Or), he concluded that existence cannot be pressed into a logical system, a tendency that could only lead to abstractions of the sort found throughout Hegel’s Philosophie der Geschichte that to him seemed to exclude the ups and downs of real life in favor of a neat outcome of the dialectic process. For Kierkegaard, a “system” of reality is not possible, because real life exists only in individuals and their decisions. Whereas Hegel declared that the real was rational and that the harmony and progress of the universe preceded any individual’s happiness, Kierkegaard turned Hegel’s priorities upside down, questioned Hegel’s all-encompassing optimism, replaced his theodicy with the existential dialectic of either/or, his synthesis with a gulf between religion and philosophy, and his “spirit of the universe” with him “who now has infinitely chosen himself”11 (Kierkegaard 3:221) as an act of personal freedom. In Kierkegaard, Hegel’s justifications frequently gave way to angst and

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melancholy (Frygt og bæven, 1843 [Fear and Trembling]; Sygdomen til døden, 1849 [Sickness unto Death]).

Although no French translation of Hegel’s works of any significance was published until 1840 (Cours d’estétique, 1840–51), his impact on French philosophy had been felt even during his lifetime thanks to Victor Cousin, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and later minister of education. Cousin went to Germany in 1817 and 1824 where he befriended Hegel in Heidelberg (Cousin 188–9), who in turn met Cousin in Paris in 1827. Cousin’s eclecticism is not regarded as a major contribution to French philosophy, but his lectures beginning in 1818 incorporated many Hegelian ideas and made his friend well known in France. What seems to have attracted him to Hegel was his history of philosophy and philosophy of history (Hegel, Briefe 3:156), in particular Hegel’s appreciation of the French Revolution. However, Cousin’s eclectic psychological method undermined Hegel’s systematic approach, a fact that Cousin himself recognized early in the friendship when he objected to the “inflexible order” of the dialectic (Cousin 192, 194) that went against his instinct. For this reason, he referred to Hegel as an Aristotelean scholastic with dogmatic roots in the eighteenth century whereas after the 1830s he began to emphasize Schelling’s Platonic philosophy of nature (Cousin 197), perhaps, because he needed to protect himself from “accusations of plagiarism” (Kelly 13). More important than Cousin’s own work was his role as intermediary in naturalizing German philosophy in France (Hegel, Briefe 3:301) and acquainting Edgar Quinet and Proudhon with Hegel. Others attended Hegel’s Berlin lectures (e.g. Eugène Lerminier, Philosophie du droit (Philosophy of Right; 1831) or established contact with the young Hegelians of the émigré group in Paris, among them Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Arnold Ruge, and Mikhail Bakunin. Hegel’s Philosophie der Geschichte with its apotheosis of reason, its emphasis on the necessity of progress for the spirit of the universe toward freedom presented a tremendous challenge to young Polish students who had experienced the fourth division of their country in 1815 (Congress of Vienna) and studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the “new Athens” founded in 1810. How could the dissolution of the Polish state be justified by philosophy? As Tschizewskij reports, their response was overwhelmingly in favor of correcting Hegel’s principles out of indignation over their nation’s debacle with the eventual goal of applying them to the real world (Tschizewskij 12–14). The most influential among them, Count Augustus Cieszkowski embarked on transforming Hegel’s idealism by employing his dialectic in order to shape a philosophy of action for the future arguing that from that point on “philosophy would begin to be applied” (78). Being and thought, moreover, needed to dissolve into action (73). During the early years of Polish emigration after the November Revolution of 1830, Cieszkowski exerted a considerable influence on his countrymen as well as on Russians such as Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) and even on some German young Hegelians, for example Moses Hess. His importance increased after 1843, when he co-founded, together with Carl-Ludwig

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Michelet, the “Philosophische Gesellschaft” (The Philosophical Society) in Berlin, a meeting place for Hegelians of various persuasions. Among other prominent figures are Bronisław Trentowski, who after 1831 studied at Königsberg and Heidelberg Universities and between 1838 and 1853 lectured at Freiburg on the history of philosophy and the encyclopedia of science while revising the Hegelian system with the aid of dialectics (Vorstudien zur Wissenschaft der Natur, [1840; Preliminary Studies Concerning the Science of Naure]). In Poland, Hegel and Trentowski were received simultaneously and had a great impact on Jozef Kremer, J. I. Kraszewski, Z. Krasin´ski, and Karol Libelt (Tschizewskij 20–123). Hegel’s parallel impact on Russia between 1837–1848 was even more sweeping than on Poland. Alexander Herzen states that Hegel’s works were discussed incessantly; “there was not a paragraph in the three parts of the Logic, in the two of the Aesthetic, in the Encyclopaedia, and so on, which had not been the subject of furious battles for several nights together”12 (Herzen 2:115). Several avenues of dissemination traversed this philosophical decade: first, the attraction of Berlin University before and after Hegel’s death as the center of German and westEuropean learning for Russian students such as Ivan Kireyevsky, Mikhail Bakunin, Nikolai Stankevich, and T. N. Granovski; second, the circles and salons in St. Petersburg and as well as those in Moscow that arose alongside the university, the center of Russian Hegelianism; and third, cross-fertilization of ideas among Slavs. Apparently Herzen, when exiled to the Russian countryside, came across Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena and ordered it from Berlin (Walicki 75). Cieszkowski seems to have been instrumental in Herzen’s development of a “philosophy of action” of his own. How well was Hegel actually studied and understood? Certainly, Hegelianism became fashionable in society to the point that all young men pretended to know Hegel and even conversed in a jargon for the initiated, a so-called bird-language that no one else could understand: “The concretion of abstract ideas in the sphere of plastics presents that phase of the self-seeking spirit in which, defining itself for itself, it passes from the potentiality of natural immanence into the harmonious sphere of pictorial consciousness in beauty”13 (Herzen 2:116–17). Such a statement seems formidable even in the scholarly world of the 1990s, yet Kireyevsky thought that most of the young people using this bird-language had not even read Hegel (Tschizewskij 167, 279). However, enough students had made a serious investment in Hegel’s philosophy to participate in heated discussions and to become so devoted to this new thinking that they could appear as “Hegelians,” a recurrent type in Russian literature from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Tschizewskij 279–82). The reception of Hegel in Russia needs to be considered in terms of a process. It started out as a small creek but turned into a flood in circles and salons; it conquered university life as the dominant ideology of the 1840s until it became so dangerous for the authorities that by 1848 mentioning Hegel and German philosophy in the press was forbidden by the censor and the teaching of philosophy abolished at Russian universities (Wolff 165). Obviously, for state and church Hegel had become an unsettling influence with this very transformation of Russian Hegelianism from speculative concerns among conservatives focused on “Reconciliation with Reality” to a distinct “philosophy of action” (Walicki 115). This change ran almost parallel to the German split between right- and left-wing Hegelians and gained the added dimension in the Russian controversy between Slavophiles and Westernizers. But even

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Slavophiles co-existed for a time with Hegelianism until later (Herzen 2:254–55; Walicki 289). Actually, most of the “Westernizers” first met in Stankevich’s circle, e.g. Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky, and Herzen. They were united by an “unbounded love for freedom of thought and hatred of everything that restricts it” (Herzen, qtd. in Walicki 336), a yearning for the emancipation of the individual and of the Russian people in general. Stankevich, “the first disciple of Hegel in the Moscow circle”14 (Herzen 2:114), died too young to contribute much to the translation of philosophy into action, although he knew Cieszkowski and Feuerbach and inspired his friends to study philosophy. Mikhail Bakunin took over the leadership of the Stankevich-circle at the same time as he discovered Hegel, a turning point in his life. Studying his works, he became one of Russia’s pre-eminent Hegelians, who viewed him idealistically early on as the interpreter of the divine spirit’s manifestation in life. Once he arrived in Berlin (1840s), however, he rapidly changed his views on Hegel under the influence of Young Hegelians such as Arnold Ruge. In his periodical Hallische Jahrbücher, Ruge published his famous article on “Die Reaction in Deutschland” (The Reaction in Germany; 1842), in which reconciliation with reality gives way to his revolutionary principle of contradiction; he derived this insight from Hegel’s dialectics, but he freed it from its former equilibrium and fashioned it into a vehicle of negation and destruction of everything positive. Hegel’s theories exhausted themselves and are here replaced by Bakunin’s call to action (Tschizewskij 190–203). Belinsky associated with Stankevich and Bakunin in Moscow before he went to Germany to meet Arnold Ruge in Berlin and to get acquainted with the early works of Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels. Starting out as a romantic pantheist, Belinsky was introduced to Hegel’s ideas about 1835, and he used those ideas to his full advantage before he embraced revolutionary change in literature and social life. Familiar also with Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and the Young Hegelians, Belinsky was to serve as the most important intermediary between German philosophy and Russia, a great teacher and “the most important critic in the whole history of Russian literature” (Wellek 3:243). He adopted Hegel in two areas, his aesthetics and in his view of history. He took over Hegel’s dialectic pattern for the development of literature from lyrical works through epic poems to tragedies, a pattern determined by the rhythm of history. In his last years, he replaced divine spirit by social reality as the focus of poetry and criticism (Tschizewskij 220–21; Wellek 3:251). In a letter to Stankevich, he wrote about a crucial, eye-opening experience when he came across Hegel’s famous dictum, “The real is rational and the rational is real,” which he translated as “force is law and law is force.” This principle excluded any arbitrariness and coincidences in history (Tschizewskij 210) and led to a period in Belinsky’s life during which he reconciled himself with reality, with the particular being subservient to the general law of universal history. Herzen’s question to him was very much to the point: “Do you know that from your standpoint … you can prove that the monstrous tyranny under which we live is rational and ought to exist?”15 (Herzen 2:120). Belinsky viewed history in terms of Hegel’s stages in the dialectic progress of spirit that moves from one nation to a higher level in another people exploiting great individuals such as Peter the Great in the process without their being aware of it. Russia was to become heir to the preceding ages of mankind, predestined to synthesize the best ingredients of each on a higher level (Tschizewskij 218–20).

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By 1841, Belinsky was ready to reevaluate Hegel’s philosophy of history in the light “of all the victims of life and history, of all the victims of chance, superstition, the Inquisition, Philip II”16 (letter to Botkin, qtd. in Tschizewskij 227). Obviously, Belinsky had decided to rescue the individual from the tyranny of the universal law, thereby turning Hegel’s position upside down before Marx and aligning himself with Young Hegelians; in other words, he used Hegel’s method to demolish Hegel (Belinsky 287). For Belinsky, speculative philosophy was returning to life, and a revolutionary approach to reality was in the making. During his days as a student at Moscow University, Alexander Herzen had proclaimed that philosophical ideas should be combined with revolutionary ones (Herzen 2:128) in order to serve as tools for social reform. Exiled repeatedly to the Russian provinces, he learned of Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena with its accent on “philosophy of action” and upon his return to the capital ridiculed the “philosophy of reconciliation” practiced in the Stankevich circle. Intensive study of Hegel followed (115–6), and in 1847 he left Russia for good to live in exile in Paris, London, and Genoa from whence he advocated a new social order for his homeland as formulated in his On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia (1850). Herzen also began with Hegel’s position that “the real is rational” and that the dialectic movement consists of the congruence of logical and historical progress, of the identity of thinking and being. Yet gradually Herzen’s emphasis shifted in favor of being, of a dialectic method applied to reality itself (Herzen 2:119) and a focus on the link between personality and action. Thus he went beyond his beloved Hegel to draw some conclusions the “old Hegel,” caught in his web of philosophical abstractions, had overlooked, but the young Hegel had already formulated in his Theologische Jugendschriften (1844). In them, Herzen discovered the “algebra of revolution”17 (Herzen 2:121) on the way toward man’s emancipation from burdensome traditions. In this light, Hegel’s dialectic is put at the disposal of action promising to inaugurate a new age led by a philosophy of socialism (Herzen 2:113–29; Tschizewskij 275, 277). This procedure entails a second step involving a division of history different from Hegel’s four-part design (Orient, Greece, Rome, Germanic Middle Ages; Hegel, Grundlinien 294); it rather envisions a tripartite dialectic historicism consisting of antiquity, Christian feudalism, and the future epoch of action in Russia (Tschizewskij 85). Obviously, what emerges from the previous discussion is that together these radical Russian thinkers — Belinsky, Bakunin, and Herzen — with the aid of Hegelianism paved the way to Lenin’s Soviet Revolution. It is interesting to see how Italy also became part of the continental drive toward emancipation as expressed in some Hegelians’ call for a return of philosophy to life and action. (For Spain in the late nineteenth century, see García Casanova.) Several Italians had contacts with emigré circles in Paris and London, among them Augusto Vera, who met Victor Cousin in Paris (1839) and was instrumental in turning Naples into a Hegelian center, but even Giuseppe Mazzini, leader of the Risorgimento, knew of Hegel’s importance (Garin 124) and associated with Hegelians such as Arnold Ruge, with whom he co-founded the “European Democratic Committee” in London (1849) as well as with Alexander Herzen (beginning in 1852). Soon thereafter, he met Marx and Bakunin in London, where Mazzini had founded one of his many journals, this one notably entitled Pensiero ed azione. Interestingly, Giuseppe Garibaldi, leader of the “party of action,” followed plans devised by Mazzini in earlier years on his expedition to Sicily in 1860.

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The most important Hegelians second to Vera were Bertrand Spaventa and Francesco de Sanctis, whose Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature; 1870–71) is widely considered the last work published in the spirit of Hegel’s Aesthetics. A letter by Pasquale Villari pinpoints Hegel’s significance for Italy: “To teach Hegel to Italy would mean to regenerate it…. Without philosophy one cannot become a nation”18 (Oldrini 9). As in Poland and Russia, Hegel’s Philosophy of History, translated by Giambattista Passerini in 1840, received enthusiastic attention. For certain, spirit’s progress toward knowing itself in freedom had to include the Italian nation. No wonder, de Sanctis, Bertrando Spaventa, and others saw in Hegel a philosopher of the Italian revolution. Hegel became a cult-figure: “It was a cult, an ideal religion”19 (Oldrini 323), especially after 1843 in Naples. This does not mean that Hegel was welcome; on the contrary, the obstacles mounted by the police state were formidable (e.g., censorship and surveillance) and before 1848 allowed only a barely visible underground reception by means of French translations and without a specific center or program for guidance. The next decade saw a widening interest in other works by Hegel, even in the original. First de Sanctis read Hegel’s Aesthetics and incorporated Hegelian ideas in his Neapolitan lectures Teoria e storia della letteratura (Theory and History of Literature; 1838–48); thereafter he excerpted Die Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) in prison (Castel dell’Ovo, 1850–53), and Silvio Spaventa provided the Italian version of Hegel’s famous preface to Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (1850). A few years later, Bertrando Spaventa discovered in Vincenzo Gioberti and his book Il primato morale e civile degli Italiani (The Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians; 1843) the Italian fulfillment of Hegel. It claimed that Providence had chosen Italy as Europe’s teacher concerning the life of the spirit (Garin 123–38). This assertion amounted to the return of spirit through Hegelianism to its Italian origins. A couple of years earlier, Spaventa had already noted that German idealists appeared to be disciples of Giordano Bruno, but now their spirit had descended to the “field of practical activity, joining the battle of political and social elements”20 (Oldrini 317), a statement totally consistent with Young Hegelian thought in western and eastern Europe. As a late romantic literary critic, de Sanctis formulated his famous idea about poetic form by following Hegel’s definition of classical art and accordingly maintained that an artist’s formal expression is intrinsically linked to his conceptual content; form has a plastic, organic quality comprising the idea and is conceived unconsciously. Works of art reflect the progress of spirit, and each poet continues where the previous one failed: “That which [Milton] was unable to achieve, Klopstock took up in his Messias”21 (de Sanctis, Teoria I:232; Fornacca Kouzel 221). The critic’s task is to uncover the divine idea in literature, since Spirit reveals itself in material form, first in religion, thereafter in the arts and philosophy (de Sanctis, Teoria 2:136). In his later Storia della letteratura italiana (1870–71), he presented the dialectic development of Italian literature from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the modern age, frequently neglecting the uniqueness of literary works but emphasizing the ongoing dialectic process between the ideal and the real, idea and form. Not without reason did Benedetto Croce, known for his denial of the possibility of literary history, find traces of history conceived in Hegelian terms as a dialectic of abstract concepts in de Sanctis’s history of literature (Croce 397). However, de Sanctis differs from Hegel in his strong objection first to Hegel’s emphasis on art not as form but as a manifestation of ideas, thereby fitting the organic unity of each individual

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work into his system (Wellek 4:10); second, to Hegel’s declaration of the end of all art with its transformation into philosophy. De Sanctis believed in the constant regeneration of art as proven by Manzoni and Leopardi (de Sanctis, Teoria I:176, 261). Yet even in this case, “the revolt against Hegel is conducted with Hegelian means”22 (Contini 30). In conclusion, what emerges from this overview of the impact of Hegelianism on Europe in its late romantic phase appears to be the well-documented although nowadays mostly forgotten fact that for both Slavic countries as well as Italy, the philosophical emancipation in thinking carried forward by Hegel and his immediate disciples was to prove a decisive element in the political struggle for liberation from oppression.

Notes 1. “K4:@F@L4b ',(,:b @$>b:" F@$@` &F, &@BD@FZ &F,@$V,6 042>4 …. ',(,:\ F*,:": 42 L4:@F@L44 >"J8J, 4 &,:4R"6T"b 2"F:J(" ^H@(@ &,:4R"6T,(@ @&@(@ <4D" F@FH@4H & ,(@ <,H@*, FB,8J:bH4&>@(@ 4b (#,:4>F846” 280). 2. “Gott ist die Dialektik” (Heer 25). 3. “Was im Himmel und auf Erden geschieht, geschieht nur, um zu diesem Ziel zu gelangen.” (Hegel, Einleitung 110). 4. “Der Staat ist göttlicher Wille als gegenwärtiger, sich zur wirklichen Gestalt und Organisation einer Welt entfaltender Geist” (Hegel, Grundlinien 222). 5. “Was vernünftig ist, ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, ist vernünftig” (Hegel Grundlinien 14). 6. “Alles, was vernünftig ist, muß sein” (Heine 4:653). 7. “das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee” (Hegel Werke 12:160). 8. “Die Kunst […] erhält in der Wissenschaft erst ihre ächte Bewährung” (Hegel, Werke 12:35). 9. “das Unschöne” […] “die Sünde und das Böse” (Hegel Werke 13:15). 10. “For Ironien bliver Alt Intet” (Kierkegaard 1:296). 11. den, som nu uendeligt har valgt sig selv” (Kierkegaard 3:221). 12. “=±HX B"D"(D"L" &@ &F±NX HD,NX R"FHbNX :@(484, &X *&JNX ^FH,H484, ^>P48:@B,*i4 4 BD., 8@H@DZ6 $Z >, $Z:X &2bHX @HR"b>>Z<4 FB@D"<4 >±F8@:\84NX >@R,6” (',DP,>X 2:131). 13. “7@>8D,FP4D@&">i, "$FHD"8H>ZNX 4*,6 &X FL,D± B:"FH484 BD,*FH"&:b,HX HJ L"2J F"<@4VJV"(@ *JN", &X 8@H@D@6 @>, @BD,*±:bbF\ *:b F,$b, B@H,>P4DJ,HFb 42X ,FH,FH&,>>@6 4<<">,>H>@FH4 &X ("D<@>4R,F8J` FL,DJ @$D"2>"(@ F@2>">ib &X 8D"F@H±” (',DP,>X 2:132). 14. “B,D&Z6 B@F:±*@&"H,:\ ',(,:b &X 8DJ(J <@F8@&F8@6 <@:@*,04” (',DP,>X 2:129). 15. “1>",H, :4, RH@ FX &"T,6 H@R84 2D±>ib … &Z <@0,H, *@8"2"H\, RH@ RJ*@&4V>@, F"<@*,D0"&i,, B@*X 8@H@DZ<X @ 4 *@:0>@ FJV,FH&@&"H\” (',DP,>X 2:136). 16. “%@ &F,N 0,DH&"N JF:@&46 042>4 4 4FH@D44, &@ &F,N 0,DH&"N F:JR"6>@FH,6, FJ,&,D4b, 4>8&424P44, K4:4BB" II” (#,:4>F846 280). 17. “":(,$D" D,&@:`Pi4” (',DP,>X 2: 137). 18. “Fare intendere Hegel all’Italia vorrebbe dire rigenerare l’Italia” (Oldrini 9). 19. “Era un culto, una religione ideale” (Oldrini 323). 20. “nel campo dell’attività practica, nella lotta degli elementi politici e sociali” (Oldrini 317). 21. “Ciò che egli non riuscì a eseguire fu ripreso dal Klopstock nella Messiade” (de Sanctis, Teroria 2:136). 22. “La rivolta contro Hegel è condotta con mezzi hegeliani” (Contini 301).

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References Belinsky, V[issarion] G. [#,:4>F846, %. '.] 1941. 32$D">>Z, L4:@F@LF84, F@R4>,>4b. ;@F8&": '@FJ*"DFH&,>>@, 42*"H,:\FH&@ B@:4H4R,F8@6 :4H,D"HJDZ; translated as 1948. Selected Philosophical Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Calabrò, Gatano, et al. eds. 1972. L’Opera e l’eredità di Hegel. Bari: Laterza. Cieszkowski, Augustus. 1979. Selected Writings. Ed. A. Liebich. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Croce, Benedetto. 1913. Saggio sullo Hegel. Bari: Laterza. Contini, Gianfranco, ed. 1968. De Sanctis, Francesco. Storia della letteratura. 2 vols. Torino: Unione tipograficoeditrice torinese. Cousin, Victor. 1826. Fragments philosophiques. 1970. Reprint Geneva: Slatkine. de Sanctis, Francesco. 1926. Teoria e storia della letteratura. Ed. Benedetto Croce. 2 vols. Bari: Laterza. ———. 1968. Storia della letteratura italiana. Ed. Gianfranco Contini. Torino: Unione tipografico- editrice torinese. Fornacca Kouzel, Daisy. 1970. “The Hegelian Influence in the Literary Criticism of Francesco De Sanctis.” Hegel in Comparative Literature. Ed. Frederick G. Weiss. Jamaica, NY: St. John’s UP. 214–31. García Casanova, Juan F. 1982. Hegel y el republicanismo en la España del XIX. Granada: Universidad de Granada. Garin, Eugenio. 1972. “La ‘fortuna’ nella filosofia italiana.” L’Opera e l’eredità di Hegel. Ed. G. Calabrò et al. Bari: Laterza. 123–38. Harris, Errol E. 1983. “Hegel’s Theory of Political Action.” Hegel’s Philosophy of Action. Ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich and David Lamb. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities P. 157–72. Heer, Friedrich, ed. 1957 [© 1955]. Hegel: Ausgewählt und eingeleitet von Friedrich Heer. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1949. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Hermann Glockner. Rpt. Jubiläumsausgabe in 20 Bänden. Stuttgart: Frommann. ———. 1952–60. Briefe von und an Hegel. Ed. Johannes Hoffmeister. 4 vols. Hamburg: F. Meiner. ———. 1955. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Ed. Johannes Hoffmeister. Philosophische Bibliothek. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1955. Hegel: Ausgewählt und eingeleitet von Friedrich Heer. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ———. 1959. Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philosophie. Ed. Johannes Hoffmeister. Philosophische Bibliothek 166. Hamburg: Meiner. Heine, Heinrich. 1972. Sämtliche Werke in vier Bänden. München: Winkler. Helferich, Christoph. 1979. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Sammlung Metzler 182. Stuttgart: Metzler. Herzen, Alexander. 1921. [',DP,>X, !. 3.] #Z:@, 4 *J


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Planty-Bonjour, Guy. 1974. Hegel et la Penseé philosophique en Russe 1830–1917. The Hague: Nijhoff. Pöggeler, Otto. 1956. Hegels Kritik der Romantik. Bonn: Bouvier. Senger, Charles. 1991. “Hegel’s Aesthetic Theory and the Critique of Romanticism.” Diss. University of California, San Diego. Tschizewskij, Dmitrij. 1931. Hegel bei den Slaven. Reichenberg: 1931; 2nd. ed. Darmstadt: Gentner. Walicki, Andrzej. 1975. The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth Century Russian Thought. Trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1979. A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism. Stanford: Stanford UP. ———. 1991. Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration: Studies on Russian and Polish Thought of the Romantic Epoch. Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP. Wellek, René. 1955–92. A History of Modern Criticism. 8 vols. Vol. 2: The Romantic Age; Vol. 3: The Age of Transition; Vol. 4: The Later Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP. Wolff, Michael. 1970. “Hegel im vorrevolutionären Rußland.” Aktualität und Folgen der Philosophie Hegels. Ed. Oskar Negt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 151–82.



The Aesthetics of German Idealism and Its Reception in European Romanticism

MANFRED ENGEL

JÜRGEN LEHMANN

University of the Saarland

Erlangen University

The formulation of the aesthetics of German idealism was a joint venture of many philosophers and poets. In this essay, we can only discuss the contributions of Kant, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, and Hegel and shall have to ignore those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Jean Paul (especially Vorschule der Ästhetik; 1804), Adam Müller, Novalis, Karl Rosenkranz, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Theodor Vischer — whose monumental Ästhetik (Aesthetics) of 1854–56 ended the long series of idealist aesthetic systems — Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and the later transformations of idealist ideas in the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Likewise the discussion of the European reception has to be restricted to a few selected examples: to the popular books of de Staël and A. W. Schlegel and the works of a few cultural mediators in France (Hugo), Great Britain (Coleridge), and Russia (cf. Hoffmeister, 1994, for a more comprehensive survey). The parts on Kant, Schiller, Fichte, F. Schlegel, de Staël, A. W. Schlegel, and the reception in western Europe were written by Manfred Engel; those on Schelling, Hegel, and the east European reception by Jürgen Lehmann. All translations are by the authors. 1.

The Aesthetics of German Idealism

1.1 Immanuel Kant Considered as aesthetics, Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment; 1790) is a strange book indeed: its second half deals exclusively with organic nature, and even its first part more clearly devoted to aesthetics seems more interested in natural beauty and sublimity than in works of art and their different manifestations and genres. And yet there can be no doubt that Kant’s book is the founding document of idealist aesthetics and poetics, which were to dominate German culture for more than half a century. As a philosophical work, the Critique of Judgement is based on the same principles as Kant’s other mature writings — especially his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason; 1781) and his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason; 1788). In these two books, Kant had overcome the epistemological, moral, and metaphysical crisis caused by empiricist philosophy without regressing to the dogmatism of rationalist or Christian metaphysics. Although we can never know reality as such (the “thing-in-itself”) and can make no verifiable statements about anything beyond our experience — i.e. metaphysics — we can yet

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rely on the inter-subjective validity of our cognition, and we can (and in fact ought to) base our actions on the “kategorischer Imperativ” (categorical or unconditional imperative) — that is, act in such a way that our action could become the basis for a universal law — and on the necessary “Postulate” (postulates) of practical reason: freedom of the will, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul. This victory over the relativism and skepticism of empiricist philosophy had been made possible by Kant’s invention of a new “critical” method: the transcendental analysis of the human faculties by which our knowledge and our actions are shaped. As Kant puts it in his famous definition: “I call transcendental all knowledge which is not so much concerned with objects as with the mode of our cognition of objects in so far as this mode of cognition shall be possible a priori.”1 Thus Kant is able to find principles that — although no longer grounded in a transcendent realm or in the nature of things — have an a priori validity and are therefore independent of all empirical circumstances. The Critique of Judgment uses this critical method for the analysis of the “Urteilskraft” (judgment) — the faculty by which we subsume manifold sensory details, objects, or events under a concept or a general rule. Like “Einbildungskraft” (imagination), judgment is one of our means of synthesizing the sensual manifold, a process which will be completed by the higher faculties of “Verstand” (understanding) and “Vernunft” (reason). Yet the title Critique of Judgment is somewhat misleading, as the book does not deal with this standard type of judgment, that is “bestimmende Urteilskraft” (determinative judgment), but only with the variant of “reflektierende Urteilskraft” (reflective judgment), which is needed whenever the general concept or rule is still unknown. Then reflective judgment has to presuppose its existence by falling back on its own transcendental (a priori) principle, the idea of the “Zweckmäßigkeit” (purposiveness) of nature. It has to judge nature, as if it were made to meet the requirements of our understanding (i.e. as if the sensual manifold formed a coherent and rational unity). We shall never be able to prove positively the existence of this purposiveness — but without its assumption all attempts at cognitive synthesis would be manifestly absurd. The Critique of Judgment discusses two types of reflective judgment in detail: “ästhetische” (aesthetic) and “teleologische” (teleological) “Urteilskraft.” Aesthetic judgment is necessary to identify objects as beautiful or sublime: it is reflective, because we have no clear concept of beauty or sublimity, and it is subjective, because our only clue for identifying an object as beautiful or sublime is a specific feeling of pleasure (Lust) — arising from a harmony between sensibility and intellect — which we experience during its perception. Therefore we attribute subjective purposiveness to it, i.e. we consider it adequate (purposive) to our faculty of judgment. Teleological judgment is needed to identify an object as a natural organism. This has the ability to build, sustain, and reproduce itself; in order to understand it we have therefore to assume that it is a purpose of nature (even though we have no rational concept for this); so here we attribute purposiveness to the object itself (objective purposiveness). This, basically, is the philosophical framework of the Critique of Judgment (for more details cf. Cassirer). To a modern reader not well versed in idealist philosophy, it may seem abstract or even abstruse speculation, yet it enabled Kant to reach conclusions that were not only of enormous influence during the romantic period but are still of basic importance for anyone interested in a specification of the autonomy of art. We cannot give a complete overview of the more intricate details of Kant’s argument — first he analyzes the classes of aesthetic judgment

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(quality, quantity, relation, and modality); then he discusses its dialectic (the antimony between its claim to general validity and our inability to prove this claim by rational arguments) — but must restrict ourselves to two of his most important results: 1. The Autonomy of Aesthetic Experience. Kant was the first to distinguish aesthetic experience (in his terms, aesthetic judgment) from our experience of the pleasurable, the true, and the good. Aesthetic judgment is based on a feeling of pleasure: the perception of the beautiful object leads to a pleasant harmony between the synthetic faculty of the sensual apprehension (imagination) and the synthetic faculty of comprehension (understanding). This special kind of pleasure is caused (Kant, concerned with the subjective side of aesthetic experience only, does not discuss this point in detail) by the correspondences between the sensual details of a beautiful object. These correspondences constitute its specific form of unity: a manifold of well-balanced relations, too complex ever to be submitted to a rational formula or concept. Therefore the apprehension of a beautiful object leads to a free, “playful” interaction of the human faculties of cognition — the senses, the imagination, and the understanding. Aesthetic experience perpetuates and continually renews this interplay moving from details to synthesis and back again. Therefore it forms an end in itself, whereas cognition, where the imagination is governed and directed by the understanding, must reach a rational conclusion and end there. But aesthetic experience is not only clearly distinct from our experience of the true, but also from that of the sensually pleasant (Angenehmes) and that of the morally good. Here we desire the factual existence of the object — we want to enjoy the sensually pleasant object, and we want to bring about the existence of the morally good — there we are perfectly content to revel in the (contemplative) pleasure of apprehension. Thus the appropriate mode of aesthetic experience may be defined as “interesseloses Wohlgefallen” (disinterested pleasure). This implies that pure aesthetic pleasure (free beauty) rests solely on the form of the object, “the congruence of its manifold with a unity,”2 and not on its contents (adhering beauty), e.g. the specific utility (or inutility) or perfection (or imperfection) of a thing or person depicted in a work of art. However, one important quality which our experience of the beautiful shares with that of the true and the good is its claim to inter-subjective validity (as opposed to sensual pleasure, which remains completely individual). Though it is based on neither a concept nor an idea — and therefore cannot be proved in a rational argument — an aesthetic judgment may be considered universal, because it rests on a “Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck” (purposiveness without a purpose) or “formale Zweckmäßigkeit” (formal purposiveness), i.e. on the adequateness of the object to the structure of our cognitive faculties, which is common to all mankind. Strictly speaking, aesthetic judgment does not judge the object, but only its aptness (purposiveness) to induce a special kind of pleasure in its human spectator. 2. Aesthetic experience as synthesis. In the introduction to his Critique of Judgment, Kant explains that this book was meant to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical reason — between the world of appearances and that of ideas, between the realm of necessity and that of freedom, and between the bodily and sensual (and therefore empirically determined) part of human nature and that which is trans-sensual and a priori (and therefore free of all empirical determinations). In Kant’s argument, aesthetic (and teleological) judgment can, however, do little more than hint at the existence of such a unity behind the obvious contraries. The most

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important of these hints are: a) Aesthetic experience leads to a harmonious interplay of man’s sensibility (the senses and the imagination) and his rational faculties (the understanding), in which the sensual part of our cognition is not subordinated to the understanding, but coordinated with it — the observer of a beautiful object thus experiences a higher form of sensuality, which is quasi-rational because of its universal validity, and he experiences himself in the unity of his faculties; b) Aesthetic judgment is not subject to the contingency of empirical impressions, but free because it follows its own law only (i.e. its own immanent, a priori principle of purposiveness), just as practical reason follows its own, immanent law (i.e. the categorical imperative) — because of this analogy the beautiful may be called a “symbol of morality” (“Symbol der Sittlichkeit” KW 10: A251); c) Beautiful objects (and likewise natural organisms) belong to the world of appearances, yet they are also compatible with an idea of reason: purposiveness. This conclusion is extraordinary since ideas have, as a rule, no direct equivalent in our empirical experience. We may therefore hope that the sensual realm is in some way related to the supersensual world of ideas (without such a relation between “the intelligible substratum of nature without and within ourselves,”3 there would be no hope for the realization of the morally good within the empirical world). In his investigation of the aesthetic judgment, Kant discusses a vast number of aesthetic and poetic issues. Some of his results are of extreme importance for the poetics of romanticism. (1) Aesthetics of the Sublime. This second source of aesthetic pleasure had been considered by many aestheticians during the eighteenth century (cf. especially Edmund Burke’s On the Sublime and Beautiful; 1786). Kant’s transcendental analysis leads him to a new explanation of the aesthetic pleasure afforded by formless or even threatening objects. He distinguishes between the “Mathematisch-Erhabenes” (mathematically sublime) — objects which are too big to be apprehended by the imagination in a single act of synthesis (e.g. the Alps) — and the “Dynamisch-Erhabenes” (dynamically sublime) — objects which exhibit a physical power far superior to that of man (e.g. the stormy sea). In the first case, we experience a frustration at our power of cognition; in the second case a frustration at our urge to preserve our physical existence. This frustration leads, however, to a special, “negative” kind of pleasure (negative Lust). When the empirical side of our nature is thwarted, we are reminded of our participation in the transempirical realm of ideas. Where imagination and understanding are helpless, reason supplies us with the idea of the infinite; where our physical powers are bound to fail, we are led to consider ourselves as trans-empirical, moral beings, independent of the forces of nature. (2) Aesthetic Ideas. Beauty may be defined as the expression of aesthetic ideas, i.e. “representations of the imagination … which occasion much thought,” but cannot be “completely compassed and made intelligible by language.”4 In their transcendence of the understanding, these aesthetic ideas are analogous to the ideas of reason, which transcend the realm of appearances. This is not only a lucid explanation of the polyvalence of art but, after the discussion of the sublime, also another important element of an aesthetics of the infinite and therefore of considerable influence in the romantic discussion of symbol and allegory. (3) Organism and the Organic Form of a Work of Art. The second part of the Critique of Judgment deals with organic nature. Kant defines the organism in terms of the specific relationship between its parts and the whole: “An organized product of nature is one in which every part is reciprocally end and means.”5 Translated into modern terminology this quality may

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be described as self-similarity: every part of an organism is the whole in a nutshell, contains its generating power, and can, therefore, under certain circumstances become the source of a new organism (as, for instance, a cutting may grow into a new tree). Kant does not explicitly develop the aesthetic concept of organic form, but his explanation of the organism supplies a potent formula for the complex unity of romantic works of art and literature. 1.2 Friedrich Schiller In his mature aesthetic writings, Schiller tried to reconcile two very different traditions: Kantian transcendentalism and the anthropology of the late Enlightenment (to which Schiller had been introduced by his teacher Abel and by his study of medicine). Enlightenment anthropology (cf. especially Ernst Platner’s Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise; 1772) attempted to solve the key problem of eighteenth-century philosophy: the question of the “commercium mentis et corporis” (commerce between mind and body). Descartes and the other rationalist philosophers had divided the world into two substances — matter and spirit — but had been unable to explain the obvious interrelations between the two, which can be observed in any human action or perception. Enlightenment anthropologists — in most cases physicians by profession, who were also keenly interested in philosophy (“philosophische Ärzte”) — did not attempt to solve the commercium problem by abstract speculation, but were, in a truly empiricist fashion, content to collect examples of the many influences which the body exerts on the mind and vice versa. Thus they managed to overcome the dualistic anthropology of the rationalists, yet their writing also demonstrated that the “whole man” as unity of body and mind is to a large extent determined by circumstances like inheritance, nutrition, climate, education, and bodily organization. That Schiller was well aware of the deficiencies of this empiricist or even materialist world view is demonstrated by his early Philosophische Briefe (Philosophical Letters; written around 1782–83 and published in 1786), which show the breakdown of traditional metaphysics under the assault of materialism. So he enthusiastically welcomed Kant’s philosophy — he read the Critique of Judgment in March 1791, the two other Critiques in the winter of 1791–92 — as the refutation of all materialist mortifications of man, but he also realized the price that Kant had had to pay: a renewal and even aggravation of the rationalist dualism of body vs. mind, sensibility vs. intellect, inclination vs. duty, and the world of appearances (which we experience and know) vs. the realm of ideas (accessible in moral action only). In his major philosophical, aesthetic, and poetic studies — most of them written 1790–95 — Schiller therefore set himself the task of elaborating and expanding Kant’s view of the synthetic nature of aesthetic experience. Schiller’s most ambitious attempt at a new philosophical deduction of the beautiful and a new definition of its function is his study Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts in einer Reihe von Briefen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind; 1795). In his earlier essays — especially Kallias oder Über die Schönheit (Kallias or On Beauty; 1792–93, unpublished in Schiller’s lifetime) and Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity; 1793) — he had tried to find an objective concept of beauty (instead of Kant’s merely subjective analysis of the aesthetic judgment) and to bridge, at least partially, the Kantian dichotomy between inclination and duty, but neither was accomplished very successfully. This shortcoming was not, however, a personal failure: with Kantian means, the dualism of his philosophy could never be

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completely overcome. Not surprisingly Schiller’s most advanced argument thus uses elements of Fichte’s Doctrine of Knowledge (cf. below 1:3), the first systematic metaphysics of post-Kantian idealist philosophy. Fichte had based his theory of the ego on the dialectics of two basic urges or powers: one leads man to the “expansion” of his self into the sensual manifold, the other causes a selfreflective “contraction” back to the unity of the “I.” In Letters XI-XV, Schiller translates this reasoning into the dialectics of a material urge (Stofftrieb) and a formal urge (Formtrieb). The first strives for life (Leben), a maximal variety of impressions and experiences; the second for form (Gestalt) and unity, a maximal freedom from change and empirical determination. A balanced interaction (Wechselwirkung) of these two urges would be the realization of true humanity, an ideal state, which, as all ideals, can never be completely translated into reality, but only approximated in a process of continual striving. To be motivated to this end, however, man must first experience this ideal and feel its possibility and value, which is the function of art and the corresponding play-urge (Spieltrieb). This play-urge tries to realize an intermediate state in which man — likewise freed from the determinacy of daily life and from that of the moral imperative — can experience change and identity, life and form. This aesthetic state constitutes a sphere of its own, clearly marked off from daily life. Schiller, therefore, calls for an art which openly manifests its fictionality (“ästhetischer Schein” Schiller 17: 399), an imperative, which was to become one of the most important tenets of romantic aesthetics. Although aesthetic experience belongs to a realm of its own, it is by no means without influence on everyday life. In the Aesthetic Letters art has a double social function: a) it humanizes man’s sensual nature and thus prepares him for moral freedom. This aesthetic education of man is the necessary precondition for a successful change of the present absolutist system, which is based on power only (“Naturstaat”), into a republican state based on moral law (“Vernunftstaat”) — a change which would avoid the disaster of the French Revolution, where freedom had led to a reign of terror (cf. Letters I-IX); b) The more general function of art is its mission in the history of mankind. Schiller uses here for the first time the triadic model of history, which was to become one of the most influential commonplaces of the age. The development of man — of the individual and of mankind as a whole — leads through three stages: 1) an early state of unity (antiquity or some other golden age, or childhood), which knew of no distinction between sensibility and intellect, reality, and ideal; 2) a state of conflict (the present, modern state, or youth), where the progress of knowledge and self-consciousness has led to a dissociation of sensibility and opened a gap between man’s full human potential and its only partial activation in the functional sphere of professional activity; 3) a state of synthesis at a higher level (as the ideal telos of human and individual progress), which would combine harmonious unity with freedom and self-consciousness. Art enables us to experience this ideal destination already within the present state of dissociation and therefore becomes an incitement for human progress. Schiller’s essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naive and Sentimental Poetry; 1795–96) applies this historical vision to the progress of poetry and thus formulates a poetics of romanticism avant la lettre. This analysis, at least, is the most important function of the opposition between the naive and sentimental, which also serves, on a more personal level, to describe the differences between Goethe and Schiller (cf. Schiller’s letter to Goethe of

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August 24, 1794) and, on a typological level, to describe two poetic styles, which are special variants of two anthropological types (the realist and the idealist). Here only the historical dimension can be discussed: the naive poet of classical antiquity strove for the imitation of nature, for objectivity without self-reflection and emotional interest. The sentimental poets of modern times strive for the representation of the ideal. Finite reality is of interest to them only in its relation to this infinite ideal. The three different possibilities within this relationship define three types of sentimental poetry classified according to the dominant mode of feeling (“herrschende Empfindungsweise”) — the first of many idealist attempts to reformulate the system of genres on a new, transcendental basis. The sentimental poet can 1) criticize reality because of its inferiority to the ideal — i.e. the satiric mode, which exists in a comic and a “punitive” (“strafende”) version; 2) he can concentrate on the ideal and mourn its absence — the elegiac mode
; or 3) depict the ideal as real in the idyllic mode (a new version of the idyll, which does not reach back to an “arcadian” past, but anticipates the utopian state of a future Elysium). This last mode, not realized yet, would be the highest form of sentimental literature, because it would achieve a synthesis with the naive (and therefore directly depict the third, utopian stage of history). But Schiller was not concerned with abstract aesthetic speculation only; as poet and dramatist he also tackled the more concrete questions of poetics: the relation between content and form, the mode in which a work of art is produced and received, and the poetics of specific art forms and genres, etc. Many of these considerations were explicated in lesser-known reviews but primarily in the correspondence with Goethe. Schiller’s by far best known and most influential contribution to the more practical issues of poetry was his new theory of the tragedy formulated primarily in his essays Über das Pathetische (On the Pathetic; 1793), Über das Erhabene (On the Sublime; 1801), and the preface to his late play Die Braut von Messina (The Bride of Messina; 1803). Schiller’s theory of the tragedy is largely an expansion of Kant’s writings on the sublime. Tragedy confronts us with the special type of the “Pathetisch-Erhabenes” (pathetically sublime), that is, man’s “moral resistance against suffering.”6 This resistance can also assume the rather paradoxical mode of a moral reinterpretation of an invincible immoral constraint. In his play, Maria Stuart, for instance, the heroine accepts the death sentence passed upon her for an act of high treason, which she has not committed, because, in an act of moral freedom, she reinterprets it as a punishment for her participation in the murder of her husband. Tragedy thus portrays not a sublime object in the Kantian sense, but a sublime action. Faced with the destruction of his physical existence, the hero changes into a moral subject by an act of spiritual elevation (Erhebung). The effect of tragedy on the spectator may therefore be defined as an “inoculation against unavoidable fate”:7 a fictional aesthetic experience that helps the individual prepare for the vicissitudes of real life. 1.3 Johann Gottlieb Fichte Kant’s ardent young followers greatly admired his work, but considered it as incomplete. In spite of Kant’s tentative attempts at synthesis in the Critique of Judgment, his philosophy lacked systematic unity, and it offered no coherent theory of the self. Fichte’s Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge; 1794) was the first of many

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attempts to round off Kant’s work. Fichte bridged the gap between consciousness and being — between subject and object — by deducing an absolute principle — the absolute I (absolutes Ich) — which, for transcendental reasons, arises as the foundation of all knowledge. This absolute I posits itself in a primal act of reflection, and, in the same act, posits the “non-I” (“Nicht-Ich”). Without an object, there could be no subject; without difference, no identity. From the beginning, I and non-I are so related in a process of mutual determination (“Wechselwirkung”). Ascending syntheses of I and non-I — centrifugal expansion and centripetal contraction — produce the world of appearances or theoretical knowledge (primarily a work of the imagination, which here, for the first time, becomes a truly productive faculty). Practical reason will in turn, though, strive to determine the non-I by moral action until in a process of interminable approximation all non-I will have become I. The basic scheme of this process is, once again, based on the triadic model: 1) Absolute I; 2) I vs. non-I; 3) I as idea (“Ich als Idee”). Here lies Fichte’s second important innovation: he organizes his philosophy as a transcendental history of consciousness progressing in a spiral of ascending syntheses. German writers of the age, especially the novelists, used this as a powerful scheme for narrative organization in their “transcendental novel” (Transzendentalroman [Engel, 1993]). This history of the ego is, of course, no factual report, but a transcendental fiction. In Fichte’s case, it is motivated by practical reason, which strives for absolute self-consciousness and self-determination. If one longs for a world in which in the end moral freedom will triumph, one must conceive of this world as the result of a free action of the ego (i.e. the absolute I) (cf. especially. Fichte’s Attempt at a New Presentation of the Doctrine of Knowledge
; 1797–98). Thus in Fichte’s system, contrary to Kant’s intentions, practical reason becomes the foundation for theoretical knowledge. Fichte exerted an enormous influence on the young intellectuals of the next generation — especially Hölderlin, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis. They readily adapted the dialectic scheme of his philosophy: the transcendental history of the division of an absolute principle into a polarity of opposite urges or powers interacting in ascending syntheses until unity is reached again. But they disagreed with Fichte in two important ways (cf. Frank, 1989): 1) In their opinion, Fichte had wrongly conceived of the Absolute as Ego; it must rather be thought of as subject-object, a unity that lies before the distinction between “I” and “not-I.” The first to demonstrate that unity could not be based on dualistic self-reflection was Hölderlin in his lucid Urteil und Sein (Judgment and Being; 1795; cf. Engel, 1993: 322–25). This short note remained unpublished, but it closely resembles the results which were independently reached by Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Schelling. Their new interpretation of the Absolute as subjectobject made it possible to avoid Fichte’s degradation of nature to a mere “not-I”; instead, nature and the subject were now — especially in the all-important new romantic “Naturphilosophie” (philosophy of nature) — considered as intimately related to each other. The subject and the operations of its mind as well as the phenomena and forces of nature are analogous products of the Absolute distinguished only by the presence or lack of self-consciousness. 2) As knowledge is always based on the distinction between subject and object, the newly defined Absolute can never be an object of knowledge. All that philosophy can do is prove the transcendental necessity of the Absolute’s existence; to apprehend it, “intellectual intuition” (intellektuale Anschauung), an intimation of unity, is needed as, for instance, the contact with nature, love, and art can provide. Therefore art, not philosophy, was the proper medium to approach the Absolute,

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for the poets of early romanticism and for idealist philosophers, at least in the period between Fichte’s Doctrine on the one hand and Schelling’s philosophy of identity and Hegel’s mature work on the other. The new fragmentary (para-aesthetic) mode of philosophic reflection and the highly avantgardist literary works of the early romantics are likewise attempts to represent aesthetically — to symbolize — the Absolute. 1.4 Friedrich Schlegel These are the philosophical premises on which the aesthetic and poetic speculations of early German romanticism (1796–1801) were based. Their authors were close acquaintances or even friends constituting a “symphilosophic” circle, which had its center in Jena. The inner-circle of early German romanticism consisted of the couples Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel and August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel along with Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Schelling, and, to a lesser degree, Fichte. Of their varied aesthetic writing, only those of Friedrich Schlegel can be discussed here. Schlegel’s first important aesthetic study was his essay, Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (On the Study of Greek Poetry), finished by December 1795 — that is, before the author could have read Schiller’s On Naive and Sentimental Poetry — but not published until January 1797. There are striking parallels between Schiller’s and Schlegel’s views of the differences between ancient and modern poetry. What Schiller had described as naive vs. sentimental was to Schlegel the opposition of the organic, objective, and beautiful — i.e. disinterested in the Kantian sense — vs. the artificial, subjective, mannered, and “interested” (interessiert, i.e. concerned primarily with content, not with form, with the true and the good, not with the beautiful) and of perfect art vs. an art which is endlessly progressing toward perfection. In his evaluation of the “sentimental” and the “modern,” however, Schlegel was more conservative than Schiller, who had shown a preference, albeit cautious, for sentimental poetry. For the young Schlegel, the superiority of the ancients lay beyond question. To him Greek poetry comprised “a complete natural history of art and taste” and had provided examples, which were “valid and normative for all ages.”8 The complete change of these pre-romantic preferences is demonstrated by the Gespräch über die Poesie (Dialogue on Poetry; 1800) published in the Athenaeum (1798–1800), the programmatic journal of Jena romanticism. The text is divided into four parts — “Epochen der Dichtkunst” (Epochs of Poetry), “Rede über die Mythologie” (Speech on Mythology), “Brief über den Roman” (Letter on the Novel), “Versuch über den verschiedenen Styl in Goethes früheren und späteren Werken” (Essay on the Different Style in Goethe’s Earlier and Later Works) — framed and linked by a symphilosophic discussion among six friends: four men (the authors of the four studies) and two women. The organization of the Dialogue is an instructive example for the new fusion between literary criticism and history, which was to become paradigmatic of romanticism: the macroscopic view of the development of European literature and its microscopic pendant in the analysis of Goethe’s literary progress provide the historical frame for the two middle chapters, which give an outline of romantic aesthetics and poetics. The Letter on the Novel contains Schlegel’s famous definition of romantic art: “That is romantic, which presents a sentimental theme in a fantastic form.”9 “Fantastic,” on the other

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hand, refers to the manifestation of individual freedom, to spontaneous arbitrariness (Willkür), which manifests itself (e.g. in the novels of Sterne and Diderot) in an “arabesque” form ungoverned by the linear and teleological structure of a plot-line and by the causal links of psychological motivation. This arabesque novel is the “romantic book” per se10 combining individual licence with a higher, organic form of unity blending a multiplicity of the conventional genres of poetry into a new, complex whole. The Speech on Mythology is based on the same dialectic of universality and individuality, unity and chaos. (Schlegel was one of the first to see Greek culture in a Dionysian light.) In contrast to Christian religion, mythology is polytheistic, chaotic, and pluralistic, but it still suggests the existence of some form of unity behind its metamorphoses and a hidden relationship between man and nature. Mythology is therefore the appropriate medium to achieve a synthesis between “idealism” and “realism,” or, as the Dialogue puts it, between Fichte and Spinoza. And last but not least, mythology can supply the poet with a familiar and well-established system of images and symbols. Of course Schlegel did not advocate a return to the ancient belief in myths. Like Hölderlin, Novalis, and many other poets and philosophers of the age, Schlegel called for a “new mythology” as a world view expressed by poetic means only and therefore a work of the poetic imagination: “it must be created from the deepest depths of the spirit; it must be the most artistic of all works of art.”11 To establish such a new mythology poets can either eclectically mix and reinterpret traditional myths of Greek, Nordic, Oriental, or Christian origin or create new ones based on the new findings of natural philosophy (cf. Engel, 1992). The Dialogue is Schlegel’s only attempt to lay down his early romantic aesthetic credo in a comparatively coherent and discursive form. As a rule, he published his ideas in collections of “fragments” — a new mode of aphoristic writing, which the Jena romantics used for the poetic representation of their anti-systematic system of philosophy. In these short and often fairly hermetic texts, Schlegel expounds such key-concepts of his poetics as a) “Transzendentalpoesie” (transcendental poetry; Athenaeum Fragment 238), which includes “the producer along with the product” in an act of “artistic reflection and beautiful self-mirroring”12; b) “progressive Universalpoesie” (progressive, universal poetry; Athenaeum Fragment 116), which points not only to the infinite progress of romantic poetry toward a new classicism, but also to its claim to gradually shape all spheres of intellectual and social life; c) “romantische Ironie” (romantic irony) as a constant tension between spontaneous, unconscious creation and free self-reflection, between “self-creation” and “self-annihilation”13 (cf. Garber, 1988). 1.5 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling The writings of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the area of aesthetics are integral components of comprehensive idealist philosophical systems. Their characteristic philosophical speculation is primarily concerned with the relationship of subject to object, thought to being, freedom to necessity, as well as with the possibility of conceiving these oppositions as mediated in the “idea” or in the “absolute.” The assumption of a mediation or reconciliation (Versöhnung) in a non-subjective entity distinguishes both philosophers from Kant and also from romantic theoreticians such as Friedrich Schlegel (cf.

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Hegel’s criticism of Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of irony in the Introduction to Aesthetics). The speculative approach which unites them is derived not from a given instantiation, but from the idea that underpins the definition of art and the division of art into different branches (architecture, painting, music, poetry) and genres (lyric poetry, epic poetry, drama). The aim is to develop an objective, content-specific definition of art and to work toward a recognition of what art is, not what it brings about or causes. The special content of art, which reveals itself in specific works of art, is precisely a reconciliation of mind and nature, of subject and object, and of freedom and necessity. The respective conclusions that the two philosophers draw from their theoretical outlines are considerably different, however. Schelling is certainly not — as has been asserted on occasion — simply a forerunner of Hegel. Rather, to a much greater extent than is the case in Hegel, his thinking granted the aesthetic realm a dominant role in the philosophical engagement with the problem of mediation. No other philosopher made such extensive use of art and the theory of art as Schelling in dealing with fundamental philosophical questions, but his approach was subject to changes and modifications. Art plays a dominant role above all in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). In this most significant work from the transcendental-philosophical phase of his thinking — that is from the phase dedicated to the question of the fundamental structure of all knowledge — Schelling ascribes to art (not to philosophy) the power to fuse mind and nature, which is the precondition for all knowledge and thus establishes the original unity of subjective perception and objective being, of the conscious and the unconscious, and of concept and its object. Art thus becomes “the only true and eternal organon and pattern of all philosophy … , which always and continually gives fresh confirmation of what philosophy cannot outwardly represent, that is: the unconscious in action and production and its original identity with the conscious.”14 For in the young Schelling’s view, the “absolutely identical,” which unites within itself these oppositions, is beyond the reach of conception and can only be experienced through aesthetic contemplation (the objectivization of “intellectual intuition”) of the work of art. Schelling defines such an objectifying, delimiting representation of the absolute as beauty. Beauty and the perception of the absolute are connected because the sensual articulation of the absolute is identical with the structure of all knowledge. Schelling goes so far as to claim that only through art can philosophy become accessible to objective perception. Art is thus declared a universal cognitive process. Aesthetic production is, therefore, the highest form of action. Its result, the work of art, “reflects for us the identity of conscious and unconscious activity”15 and is therefore the identity in concrete physical form of organicism and of conscious free action. Schelling describes the work of genius as the special ability of the artist to unite the unconscious impulse (inspiration) — “poetry” (“Poesie”) — with conscious craftsmanship (techne) — “art” (Kunst) in the narrower sense. This conception of artistic activity — unlike other aesthetic positions — was one which Schelling scarcely altered throughout his entire philosophical career. In the second important phase of Schelling’s thought — the philosophy of identity (“Identitätsphilosophie”) — art no longer dominates. In the Philosophy of Art, both art and philosophy are allotted the task of representing the absolute. Revealing the fundamental structure of knowledge is therefore no longer the central concern, but the object of this knowledge, the absolute. The definition of art follows from the conclusion that art is one of the preferred forms

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in which the absolute manifests itself. As the representation of the absolute, art is thus not an imitation or a reproduction, but a representation of the absolute in a particular form (Potenz): In order for it to be the object of philosophy, art must therefore always either actually represent or be able to represent the infinite in itself as a particularity. But this not only occurs as a result of art, but it stands as representation of the infinite at the same level as philosophy — just as the latter represents the absolute in its primal form (Urbild), so the former represents the absolute in its reciprocal image. (Gegenbild 3:369)16

As a counter or reciprocal image of the absolute, art mediates the divine. Art thus surpasses all mythology. The Greek gods are ideas which through the imagination appear concrete: the divine is articulated in them. As being and meaning merge in these gods, art must be considered symbolic. In their totality, they constitute one of the powers (Potenzen) of the absolute. As such, they are the preferred object of the artist of genius. Of course this is chiefly true of the art of antiquity. The division of the earthly and the divine that characterizes the (Christian) modern period precludes a mythology encompassing and embracing the human and the divine. Since the end of the ancient world, man could only fail in his attempt to bridge the chasm between the sensual and the super-sensual world through historical action. As a result, the modern world has only an allegorical mythology at its disposal, in which abstractions dominate, in which the finite appears only as a sign hinting at the infinite, and in which the finite and the infinite therefore no longer merge in the symbol. This allegorical mythology is thus only a transitional stage on the way to the as yet unrealized mythology of reason (Mythologie der Vernunft) — mentioned already in the Oldest Systematic Programme of Idealist Philosophy (1796) — in which philosophy and art are to be united. Schelling’s discussions of mythology are therefore to be seen in the context of the debate on the relationship between antiquity and modernism, a debate which excited Goethe and Schiller’s interest as well as that of the romantics. Here The Philosophy of Art is given a historical-philosophical component, which almost has the appearance of a foreign body. Schelling, unlike Hegel, does not rely on historical arguments in his philosophy of identity but always explains the differences between the phenomena by differences in the relationship between the real and the ideal. This is also true of his definition of the individual branches of art and of his “construction of the individual poetic forms.” Poetry is dominated by the ideal and is the most highly ranked of the arts. The reason is its medium, i.e. language, which is understood as a spiritual, not a material artistic medium (such as stone, paint, or sound) and therefore particularly close to the ideal. In contrast to Hegel, Schelling’s works reveal a high regard for the value of language, for in language, the ideal and the real — i.e. sense and sound — are especially intimately linked and form the organic unity of the symbol. Moreover, the linguistic work of art sets itself apart through a specific property whereby rhythm is assigned a particularly important function. In the deductive process that leads to the definition of the three genres — lyric poetry, the epic, and drama — the criterion of speech does not play a decisive role, however. Here again the system-oriented relation of the ideal and real, of identity and difference, and of subjectivity and objectivity is relevant. Unlike his contemporaries, Schelling ascribes both subjectivity and objectivity to the various genres; the difference lies in the balance between the two. Thus lyric poetry distinguishes itself from other genres by drawing on “the subject and hence the particular”17 more widely and with greater immediacy and by focusing

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more strongly on the aspects of self-contemplation and self-consciousness. In literary-historical terms, Schelling’s statements on epic poetry are of greatest interest, because here his affinity to the literature and literary criticism of the romantics is starkly evident. True to his system, he defines this genre as dominated by identity and objectivity. The acting or speaking subject does not see himself as separate from the world, but appears as an integral part of it; individual and society form a totality. This requires a dispassionate, objective intermediary, a narrator who presents the epic as an orderly, uninterrupted sequence of individual occurrences. As in his essays on mythology, Schelling’s arguments here draw more strongly on the notion of history, for example in distinguishing between the ancient epic (the works of Homer) and modern epic (chivalric poetry and the novel). The latter differs from the ancient epic in terms of the principle of individuation: the chivalric poem (Tasso, Ariosto) in its content (emphasis on individuality, preponderance of reflection), the novel in its (closed) form. In his definition of the novel, Schelling’s affinity with his romantic friends — in particular with August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel — above all becomes apparent: “The novel should be a mirror to the world, to the age at least, and thus becomes a partial mythology. It should invite one to calm, untroubled contemplation and engage the interest at every point to an equal degree; each of its parts, all words, should be equally guilded, as if composed in a higher, inward poetic meter in the absence of an outward one.”18 The formal objectivity of the novel is guaranteed by a particularly distanced relationship between the narrator and his object, i.e. by romantic irony. Here Schelling’s position differs radically from that of Hegel, who condemns irony in his Aesthetics as the manifestation of a vacuous inartistic subjectivity. Clearly allying himself with Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling cites Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as a successful example of objectivization through irony. In creating his hierarchy of the poetic forms, Schelling distances himself from the romantics, however. Not the novel, but drama is “the final synthesis of all poetry” (“letzte Synthese aller Poesie”), which subsumes the contrasting forms of lyric and epic poetry. In Greek tragedy, art reaches its highest perfection; this genre is the very incarnation of art, because the essence and function of art — the articulation of the absolute — are its central and decisive features. By drawing genre theory into his philosophy of identity and focusing on the conceptual pairs freedom-necessity and subject-object, Schelling consciously distances himself from the Aristotelian definition of tragedy. He eliminates the important Aristotelian concept of hamartia, which imputes a certain measure of blame to the hero for his fall and links the hero’s guilt inextricably to the notion of necessity. In other words, Oedipus — Schelling’s preferred example — cannot escape his fate; his attempts to do so are doomed to failure. The drama manages to reconcile necessity and freedom by showing that the tragic hero freely embraces the fate imposed upon him by necessity. This act of conviction is not stated or narrated, but made present in the course of dialogues spoken at that precise moment before the audience. On account of this concrete presentation in which events are not simply described but placed directly before the audience’s eyes, drama is the only symbolic and therefore also the highest art form in the field of poetry. 1.6 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Hegel did not publish his Lectures on Aesthetics. Notes taken by his students and published between 1835 and 1838 form the basis of the text as it exists today. This fact is important, as it

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explains why Schelling’s writings on the theory of art — published and disseminated early in the century — were known in eastern Europe, for example, much earlier than Hegel’s views on art. To a much greater extent than Schelling’s, Hegel’s aesthetics are a theory and history of art. As a result, they give — again with greater intensity than Schelling’s — a detailed treatment of concrete artistic phenomena. The object of art is above all artistic beauty (das Kunstschöne), not natural beauty (das Naturschöne). Hegel thus also calls aesthetics the “Philosophy of Beautiful Art” (Philosophie der schönen Kunst). The essential feature of artistic beauty is its purposelessness: art is not determined by an intention exterior to itself, for example an intended effect, but by its independence, its freedom. Nonetheless, like religion and philosophy, it has a task to fulfil: the task of bringing to consciousness and naming the most comprehensive spiritual truths. Art is therefore marked out by the connection of beauty, freedom, and truth. In contrast to religion and philosophy, art makes the absolute accessible to the senses: “Beauty thus defines itself as the sensual appearance of the idea.”19 In the work of art, the one truth — i.e. the fundamental unity of freedom and necessity, of thinking and being — reveals itself and becomes accessible to the senses. “Appearance” (“das Scheinen”) should therefore not be understood as deception, but as a necessary form in which the “higher reality” is apprehended by the cognitive faculties. This is precisely what is meant by the concept of content aesthetics as applied to Hegel’s philosophy of art, not for example the imitation of certain facets of empirical reality. In Hegel, unlike in Kant or Schiller, unity is already given. It does not need to be produced or reproduced, but made manifest. Religion and philosophy are also capable of achieving the latter. However, in Hegel’s system, art, religion, and philosophy as manifestations of the absolute do not stand adjacent to one another but follow one another in the course of the progression of history. In other words, the present also has works of art to offer, but these are — in contrast to Greek art — no longer the most apt manifestation of the absolute; rather, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, philosophy took over the role of presenting the absolute. As far as the categorization of the arts is concerned, Hegel does not make distinctions on the basis of the senses relevant for their reception and therefore does not distinguish between visual, musical, and linguistic art forms. Rather, art is categorized according to its material and the degree to which spirit is released from the constraints of the material. Of the individual arts (architecture, painting, music, poetry), poetry most fully achieves this goal: “Thus in terms of content, poetry is the richest and most unconstrained of the arts” (2:261).20 It is a characteristic feature of Hegel’s aesthetics that this systematic definition of poetry is inseparably linked to his explanation of its place in the history of the arts: poetry is the zenith and final phase in the history of the arts because it is also their synthesis. In poetry, the principles which determine the other arts (for example sound with respect to music) are subsumed in a more spiritualized form. Poetry, however, differs from music, for example, in that the materia — in this case the sound — no longer serves to make the idea accessible to the senses. In Hegel, language is only a sign, “the word is a means of spiritual or mental expression without an independent existence of its own” (3:228).21 The word and the conceptions (Vorstellungen) it evokes do not form a symbolic unity. The activity of the poet thus consists of two actions: that of developing conceptions and that of naming them. The product, the poetic work, is an “infinite organism” (unendlicher Organismus), an individuality perfect in itself. Poetic art is the only art to be subdivided (into lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry), once again on the basis of historical reasoning. Epic, lyric, and

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dramatic poetry are ascribed to certain periods: epic poetry reaches its most perfect form in the Homeric epic, modern poetry provides a particularly apt articulation of the lyric. This division into literary genres is related to a form of thought that is typical in Hegel: the tripartite dialectical advance. Epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry are allied to each other in the same way as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The relation of subject to object and freedom to necessity again dominates. For Hegel, the principle of objectivity reaches its purest realization in the epic. This genre is marked by a “reality closed off to itself and removed from the subject” portraying it (3:322).22 The object of this portrayal is a world in which humans and the reality surrounding them are as one. This world “in the entirety of its circumstances and relations” is to “come to articulate form as a rich event in the context of the world of a nation and period which forms a totality in itself” (3:330).23 The people who perform actions are “total individuals,” for they are the expression of a totality that encompasses them, the expression of the “spirit of a people” (Volksgeist). In the Homeric epics, as Hegel sees it, “the total world of a nation and a time comes to definite form,” the “conceptions and objectivity of a people’s spirit in their entirety” (3:330).24 Nevertheless the epic is not the product of the anonymous, collective spirit of a people, but of an artist’s individuality. In contrast to epic poetry, lyric poetry is defined as having “the self-expression of the subject as its one form and ultimate purpose” (3:322).25 Unlike the epic poet, the lyric poet presents himself in the poem. Instead of a totality — the complete representation of an outer reality — the particularity of a reality mediated by the subject characterizes the latter form. Lyric discourse thus deals with subjectivity, inwardness, or reflection in that what it conveys only exists in relation to the inwardness of a subject. It manifests a concentration of verbal resources as well as a versification that facilitates this concentration. Drama is the highest form of poetry and of art in general. In dialogue — the conjunction of speech and action characteristic of drama — drama subsumes and thereby reconciles objective epic and subjective lyrical speech. In this form of conscious action, the fusion of the objective development of a series of events with their origins in the inner workings of individuals is made concrete in the present. The dramatic plot differs from the epic in that it rests on “clashing circumstances, passions, and characters and therefore leads to actions and reactions which in turn necessitate a resolution of the struggle and discord” (3:475).26 This resolution is ultimately achieved through the reconciliation of the individual with the whole, through the conscious acceptance of outer circumstances. In this way, drama offers the purest representation of the structure and movement of the spirit (self-sufficiency — outward expansion — return to the self). This is exemplified by ancient tragedy, in particular Sophocles’s Antigone. The selfawareness reached by the individual is here linked to a recognition of trans-individual norms and rules. Thus for Hegel tragedy is not determined by the principle of rupture, but by a reconciliation between the individual and the whole, between reality and reason. This conciliation, however, is linked to a condition (Weltzustand) of the world long since past, i.e. with the heroic age of Greek antiquity. Hegel’s speculative differentiation of the genres, which is conditioned by the dynamics of his philosophical system, is therefore historically fixed and related to the ancient world and at best provides for a rudimentary understanding of the art of his own time.

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Manfred Engel and Jürgen Lehmann Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne and August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literature: The Bibles of European Romanticism

What makes early German romanticism unique in world literature is the absence of a clear borderline between philosophy and literature. Not only did philosophers and poets join their efforts in symphilosophic interaction, but even within the poets’ œuvres, it is often impossible to distinguish between literature and philosophic argument. The romantic fragment is an aesthetic form not only because of its highly condensed structure, but also because its dialectic of hermetic concentration and suggestive generalization symbolically represents the relation between the individual and absolute unity. Even in Germany, however, this close alliance between literature and philosophy only lasted for a few years and was restricted to small groups in Jena, Weimar, and Berlin. In later phases of romanticism, the connections between idealist philosophy and literature are much looser and more implicit, and most of the authors seem not to have been very interested in a direct participation in aesthetic discussions. This fact is even more evident in terms of the European reception of idealist aesthetics. Only very few of the European romantics were avid readers of Kant, Schelling, or Hegel. Most of them derived their knowledge of German aesthetics from the explanatory essays or the books of cultural mediators written in their native tongues. In many cases, the basic ideas of German idealism were even meditated solely by their reflection in literary texts: Schiller’s and Goethe’s works as well as above all the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann were well-known even by authors who had never read a word about German philosophy. But two books in particular were avidly devoured by intellectuals from all of the European countries: de Staël’s De l’Allemagne and A. W. Schlegel’s Vorlesungen. These popular (and in many respects popularizing) studies disseminated the aesthetics of German romanticism across Europe. Germaine de Staël’s knowledge of German culture was based on intensive field-studies undertaken during her visits to Weimar, Berlin, and Vienna in 1803–04 and 1807–08; on conversations with many German intellectuals (e.g. Schiller, Goethe, and Fichte); on intensive reading; and on discussions with many connoisseurs of German culture, e.g. Charles de Villers (the first French expert on Kant), Henry Crabb Robinson (cf. 3:2), and A. W. and F. Schlegel. De l’Allemagne (On Germany) was written between 1808 and 1810 and printed in October of that year. But before the book could reach the public, all copies were destroyed by the police (following a personal intervention by Napoleon), and the author was exiled from France. Therefore De l’Allemagne came out in London (October 1813) and reached France first in May 1814 immediately after Napoleon had been defeated by the allies. An English translation appeared in December 1813, and a German in 1814. De l’Allemagne is divided into four parts: “De l’Allemagne et des mœurs de l’Allemagne” (On Germany and German Manners), “De la littérature et des arts” (On Literature and the Arts), “La philosophie et la morale” (Philosophy and Morals), and “La religion et l’enthousiasme” (Religion and Enthusiasm). The first part portrays Germany as the exact inverse of all that de Staël had criticized in her mother country: cold rationalism, materialist egotism, atheism, frivolity, superficial esprit, and uniformity of taste and manners. Due to the influence of the northern climate — which makes

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the inhabitants turn inward and concentrate on emotions and metaphysical abstractions — and to Germany’s decentralized and heterogeneous political and social organization, German culture is deeply emotional, idealistic, religious, sincerely felt, imaginative, individualistic, and ingenious though it may lack social refinement, intellectual clarity, and the capacity for effective action. Part two gives a detailed survey of the late Enlightenment through contemporaneous German literature discussing the different genres (the epic poem, lyric poetry, the novel, and, above all, the drama), important authors (e.g. Wieland, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Zacharias Werner), historians (Johannes von Müller), and critics (A. W. and F. Schlegel) as well as their works (mostly in critical synopses interspersed with often extensive prose translations). The most important part is the eleventh chapter, which deals — clearly under German influence — with the differences between classical and romantic poetry. The most influential oppositions are once again the predominance of objective reality in classical antiquity (all interior feelings were considered exterior forces, e.g. the conscience as the furies) as opposed to the inner reality of the self (character, emotion, and self-reflection), of simplicity as opposed to complexity, of perfection as opposed to endless perfectibility. Part three deals with the differences between English, French, and German philosophy and gives a detailed explanation of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. De Staël’s chief aim is the refutation of empiricism and materialism, of egotism (the doctrine of “self-interest”), and of atheism. Therefore she is not primarily interested in the more abstract aspects of idealist philosophy, but concentrates her summary on its practical consequences. In de Staël’s view, Kant wanted to “reestablish primitive truths, the spontaneous activity in the soul, conscience in morals, and the ideal in arts” (4:113).27 Astonishingly enough, Kant’s practical philosophy is thus converted into a Rousseauistic ethics of feeling and conscience following de Staël’s own credo: “We need a philosophy of belief, of enthusiasm; a philosophy which confirms by reason that which feeling reveals to us” (4:145).28 In her summary of the Critique of Judgment, de Staël quite correctly describes Kant’s distinction between the pleasant, the useful, and good on the one hand and the beautiful on the other but pays little attention to Kant’s precautions against too direct a linkage between beauty and morality. For her, the beautiful is the “ideal” (l’idéal), not as a representation of nature, but as the “exterior image” (l’image extérieur) of enthusiastic sentiments of heavenly origin (“des sentiments d’origine céleste” [4: 136–37]), which are innate to our soul. So the last part of De l’Allemagne may be read as a summary of those ideas which were most dear to de Staël: religion and enthusiasm. In general terms, she describes the different religious movements in Germany, but the special kind of undogmatic religion propagated by the early German romantics (cf. especially. F. Schleiermacher’s Über Religion; [On Religion; 1799]) is of fundamental importance to her: German writers “relate all religious ideas to the feeling of the infinite”; this feeling awakens in us “the hope and the desire for an eternal future and a sublime existence,” it opens our heart for the experience of nature, poetry, and of innocent, universal love (5:11–13).29 De Staël’s own formula for this is enthusiasm, a concept more central to the Age of Sentiment than to German romanticism: “Enthusiasm joins itself to universal harmony; it is love of the beautiful, the elevation of the soul, the joy of devotion…. Enthusiasm means God in us” (5:187).30 The enormous success of De l’Allemagne was due to two of its qualities, which today may be its basic weaknesses. There is little abstract analysis, either philosophical or aesthetic, but an

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abundance of colorful individual portraits and vividly presented literary texts. And the foreign world of German idealism and romanticism is clearly seen through glasses which are deeply colored by the Age of Sentiment and by ideas of Rousseau. Although her view of romantic aesthetics and poetics is very close to that of Schlegel’s Lectures, it is accentuated in such a way as to make it sound familiar to any reader critical of classicism and well versed in Enlightenment sentimentalism and rather strange to a partisan of early German romanticism: De Staël, for instance, sharply censors any excessive use of the miraculous and all forms of anti-illusionism. Ironically, however, de Staël’s pre-romantic and pre-Kantian views were in many ways close indeed to the increasingly anti-subjective and anti-speculative mood of German high romanticism and post-Kantian German philosophy, which was more interested in a new metaphysical system than in Kant’s critical method. Herein lies an initial explanation for the astonishing number of parallels between de Staël’s De l’Allemagne and the Lectures of August Wilhelm Schlegel. Today he is primarily remembered as the German translator of Shakespeare but was a critic and aesthetician in his own right whose influence and reputation far exceeded that of his more original brother, Friedrich. A second, more obvious reason for the similarities derives from the close personal acquaintance and cooperation between the authors: De Staël met Schlegel in Berlin in 1804, was deeply impressed by his personality and his comprehensive literary knowledge, and asked him to follow her to France as the teacher of her children. Schlegel became a member of the illustrious circle of men of letters, whom de Staël had gathered around her at Château Coppet near Geneva. For years he was closely linked to her in intellectual partnership and in a rather unhappy and onesided love affair; he also accompanied her on travels all over Europe. This affiliation with de Staël and her circle of French intellectuals suggests the third reason for the many affinities between the Lectures and De l’Allemagne: Schlegel had become deeply involved in de Staël’s campaign against French classicism. Although the Lectures were directed to a German-speaking audience, they are not only a popularized summary of German romantic thought, but are also part of the French bataille romantique. Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature) were delivered in Vienna in 1808, published in 1809–10, and soon translated into many European languages (e.g. French 1813, English 1815, Italian 1817). The book begins with a short outline of critical and literary principles and a theory of literary genres in general and of the drama in particular. The most important part presents a detailed history of drama: classical antiquity, Elizabethan England, Golden Age Spain, and French classicism — especially the works of Shakespeare and Calderón — and a short outline of German drama from Hans Sachs to his day. Schlegel’s Lectures contain a wealth of information on the literary history of world drama and on individual dramatists and their works. But he also discusses more general questions of aesthetics and poetics — such as a new conception of literary criticism — elaborates a theory of poetic genres, and offers a detailed refutation of classicist poetics. Here only two aspects that were of particular influence can be discussed: (1) A Comprehensive Definition of Romanticism. Schlegel combines his brother’s ideas with those of Schiller that he in turn supplements with his own thought to formulate the new, authoritative concept of the differences between classical and romantic art: romanticism began

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with the advent of Christianity, that is in the Middle Ages (since the literature of this period was still largely unexplored, Schlegel characterizes its romantic culture as the natural poetry of chivalry, courtly love, and honor). The truly artistic version of romanticism originated during the Renaissance, when the important paradigms of romantic literature were created, e.g. the works of Shakespeare and Calderón. Greek culture was pagan and favored by a mild southern climate; it was built on the worship of natural forces and earthly life as well as a harmonious perfection and concord of all natural human faculties. So the Greeks strove for nothing which could not be attained through human powers. Christianity and the northern climate, however, lead to a completely different world view. Divided into body and soul, northerners, therefore, no longer believed in the Greek ideal of natural harmony but strove for the infinite, for a happiness which no earthly pleasure can provide. Therefore their poetry is not — like that of the ancients — a poetry of possession and joy, but one of yearning and melancholy, of emotion and reflection, and of memory and presentiment. What is ultimately sought is the termination of dualism and self-division: “Sensual impressions should be hallowed by their mysterious alliance with more noble feelings, whereas the mind wishes to symbolically represent its presentiments or ineffable contemplations of the infinite within the world of appearances” (A. W. Schlegel 26).31 This difference in world view is the foundation for a whole series of aesthetic and poetic oppositions between classical and romantic literature: plastic vs. picturesque technique (i.e. concentration on an isolated group vs. an inclusion of the surroundings and a perspective into an unlimited background), perfect representation of the outer form vs. nuances of color — which express the inner life — and the representation of the incorporeal, and perfection vs. perfectibility in endless approximations, purity of genres vs. mixture of all poetic elements and genres. (2) Poetics of the Drama in General and of Romantic Drama in Particular. The unity of a play is not mechanical but organic; it is not the effect of the rational links of causality and motivation, but one of ideas, i.e. “necessary and true conceptions and feelings which transcend the worldly existence” (A. W. Schlegel 34).32 In Greek tragedy, for instance, this unifying idea is the irreconcilable conflict between human liberty and the necessity of fate. The romantic play is no longer tragedy or comedy, but simply drama (Schauspiel); it ignores the unities of time and place and combines tragic and comic elements, verse and prose, as well as dialogic and lyrical parts. Its central idea is the poetic suggestion of a higher, hidden unity behind the apparent dissensions. Unlike the drama of antiquity, it is no longer based on the pre-ordered world of myth, but on national and local history (therefore it shows its characters as part of their surroundings and their age).

3.

Western Europe

3.1 France While in Germany the poetics of classicism were superceded by the last third of the eighteenth century, in Great Britain they had never been predominant. In France (and similarly in other Romance and in most Slavic nations), however, the classicist tradition was still preeminent when the romantic movement arose. Idealist aesthetics were therefore primarily used as an instrument

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in the fight against classicism. In early French romanticism, this was the self-appointed task of de Staël and her literary-philosophical circle, the Groupe de Coppet, whose most prominent members were Benjamin Constant, Simonde de Sismondi, and A. W. Schlegel (cf. Nagavajara: 45–127). Since drama was the domain of French classical literature, the early romantics concentrated their efforts on the poetics of this genre. De Staël, Constant, and A. W. Schlegel agreed that the drama of French classicism was by no means the continuation (and perfection) of classical drama of antiquity, but the result of a misplaced attempt to transfer an ancient model into an age that had a different world view and different theatrical conventions. This argument was advanced by de Staël’s De l’Allemagne and Schlegel’s Lectures and was supported by Sismondi’s De la littérature du midi de l’Europe (On the Literature of Southern Europe; 1813), which developed the concept of a common European romanticism from which only France had separated itself. The frontal attack of these three books had been anticipated by two essays, which had led to an intense — and mainly hostile — reaction by the literary public: A. W. Schlegel’s Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d’Euripide (Comparison of Racine’s Phaedra and That of Euripides; 1807), and Constant’s Quelques réflexions sur la tragédie de Wallstein et sur le théatre allemand (Some Reflections on the Wallstein Tragedy and on German Theater; 1809), first published as preface to Constant’s translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein. The second generation of French romanticists, mainly Victor Hugo and his circle, succeeded in shattering the predominance of classicist poetics. The final victory was won in the famous “bataille d’Hernani,” the tumultuous reaction to the first performance of Hugo’s play Hernani and the ensuing critical debate. There was, however, little discussion of basic aesthetic and poetic questions in high French romanticism. And the influence of German culture, undoubtedly strong indeed, was exerted not so much by German philosophy as by literary texts: by Goethe’s Werther as a model for the conte sentimental and by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tales as a model for the conte fantastique. One of the few exceptions to this rule is Hugo’s famous preface to his play Cromwell (1827). This manifesto of the école romantique shows paradigmatically which elements of German origin had become topical in the French discussion, but it also shows the completely different direction that French romanticism was taking. Hugo starts with a triadic model of history and combines it with the new triadic scheme of poetry. The first, childlike period of world literature was dominated by the lyric genre, the second by the epic. The third period, dominated by drama, begins with the advent of Christianity and its inherent dualism. Man lives a short earthly and an eternal heavenly life; while on earth, he is divided into body and soul, beast (bête) and angel (ange), This, as Schlegel in his Lectures had explained, leads to melancholy and reflection (méditation) as the predominant mood of modern man. Christian dualism engenders a new form of art, which portrays both sides of reality: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, as well as the sublime and the grotesque (which shows the animal side of man). In Hugo’s words, “Christianity leads poetry to truth” (1:416).33 Here lies the fundamental difference between Hugo and the aesthetics of German idealism: Hugo transforms its antimimetic and anti-illusionistic foundation into the plea for a new realism. Just like Schlegel, Hugo attacks all classicist rules, especially those of the unities of time and place (which were adequate to ancient, but not to modern theater), calls for a mixture of styles and genres and for drama instead of tragedy or comedy, and proclaims Shakespeare the model of the romantic play.

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But while Schlegel sharply attacked the mimetic doctrine of art, Hugo, in his revolt against the classicist rule of “bienséance,” constantly appeals to nature and truth (la nature et la vérité [1: 435]) and to verisimilitude (in a new definition of classicist vraisemblance). Of course, Hugo does not simply advocate realism or naturalism: drama is a mirror for nature, but a “concave mirror which collects and condenses its colorful rays” (1:436).34 When it comes to a closer description of the “magic wand of art” (la baguette magique de l’art [1: 436]), Hugo has, however, little more to offer than the prescription of verse instead of prose and of truth to historical manners and modes of behavior instead of truth to historical events along with the general preference for concentration, unity, and the characteristic. If one takes Hugo as exemplary of the French romantics, one might well say that it was not they but the French symbolists, who should be called the true heirs of idealist aesthetics. 3.2 Great Britain The reputation of German philosophy and literature in Great Britain was extremely low at the beginning of the nineteenth century and fairly high by the end of its first half. This change was partially occasioned by the books of de Staël and A. W. Schlegel but was mainly the result of the patient efforts of a few cultural mediators, especially: 1) Henry Crabb Robinson, who had studied in Jena during a long stay in Germany (1800–05) and had personally met many of the leading German philosophers and poets (Robinson published little, but shared his knowledge and library with other British mediators of German intellectual life and with de Staël, to whom he gave private lectures on German aesthetics in 1804); 2) Samuel Taylor Coleridge whose work will be discussed below; 3) Thomas de Quincey, who published numerous articles on German culture (e.g. on Kant and on Jean Paul, whom he also translated); 4) Thomas Carlyle, who reaped the harvest of the work of his predecessors: his article, “The State of German Literature” (1827), other essays on Novalis and especially on Goethe (whose Lehrjahre he translated), and his novel Sartor Resartus (1833–34) were of enormous influence and were the prime means by which the American transcendentalists were informed about German idealism (cf. Ashton). Just as in France, German philosophy and literature were of interest primarily because of their opposition to an empiricist, materialist, skeptical, mechanical, and deterministic world view. Great Britain saw, however, less emphasis on the refutation of classicism (which had alread been accomplished in the preface to the second edition of Wordsworth and Colderidge’s Lyrical Ballads, 1800) and on the poetics of drama and little concern with the differences between ancient and modern or classic and romantic literature. Of all European romantics, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the one most deeply versed in German idealism and its aesthetics. In 1798–99 he had traveled to Germany together with his friend Wordsworth and studied at the University of Göttingen but never met any of the intellectual heroes of the new literary or philosophical movement. In fact, his stay was primarily devoted to studying the German language and buying German books. Back in England, he translated Schiller’s Wallenstein and in 1801 began his study of Kant; he worked through all three Critiques and soon was also well informed on the philosophy of Fichte and, above all, Schelling (cf. Orsini). Coleridge’s aesthetic and poetic writings show clear evidence of the immense influence of these studies; he was even accused of plagiarism — and not unjustly so,

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as long passages in his theoretical work are unmarked adaptations or even mere translations from Kant, Schelling, or A. W. Schlegel. Like many of his European contemporaries (and, in fact, like many German romantics in their later years and many lesser known idealistically inspired thinkers of German high romanticism, e.g. the romantic anthropologists Schubert, Troxler, and Carus), Coleridge was less interested in the transcendental deduction of German idealism than in its compatibility with (Anglican) Christianity. One of his basic aims thus was to reconcile Kant’s transcendentalism and Schelling’s philosophy of nature with Christian theism. Coleridge published many essays on aesthetics and poetics while still many others remained unpublished or fragmentary, but the most important account of his contact with and his adaptation of German idealism is certainly his Biographia Literaria (1827). It gives a record of the author’s intellectual biography — embedded in a comprehensive survey of the history of modern philosophy — from his early dependence on the associationism of David Hartley (Observations on Man; 1749) to his new philosophical system developed after studying Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. The poetic consequences of this new philosophy are then explained in a detailed critique of Wordsworth’s poetics and poetry. Coleridge sums up his new “dynamic” philosophy in his famous distinction between fancy, primary, and secondary imagination. “Fancy” is a merely reproductive faculty, “a mode of Memory,” receiving “all its materials ready made from the law of association” (7.1: 305). In contrast, imagination is a productive faculty as it had been conceived by Fichte and Schelling. “Primary imagination” refers to the (unconscious) activity of the perceiving mind, which creates the world of appearances; Coleridge defines it as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human perception.” “Secondary imagination” — active, for instance, in artistic creation — is a variant of the primary, unconscious form of imagination, but “co-existing with the free will.” It does not merely reproduce the effects of primary imagination, but “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create,” or, at least, “struggles to idealize and to unify.” The terminology is Coleridge’s own invention, but his distinction is definitely based on Schelling. As in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (cf.1.4), Coleridge considered imagination “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (7.1: 304); significantly, Coleridge substitutes his infinite “I AM” for Schelling’s “Absolute” because it allows for an orthodox theistic reading. The second part of the Biographia Literaria contains a detailed critique of Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads and of his poetry. Coleridge gives a definition of the poem and the poet that is fairly close to Kant’s, Schiller’s, and Schelling’s descriptions of the aesthetic experience, but generalizes its synthetic power: The poet … brings the whole soul of man into activity …. This power [i.e. the imagination] … reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposites or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; … steady self-possession, with enthusiasm.(7.2: 3)

These ideas are the philosophical basis for Coleridge’s discussion of diverse poetic questions (e.g. meter, style, imitation of nature) often exemplified in the critical analysis of literary works.

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Coleridge sharply disagrees with Wordsworth’s conception of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” depicting “humble and rustic life” in a “language near to the language of men” (Preface). Coleridge’s objections closely resemble Schiller’s critique of Bürger’s poems (Über Bürgers Gedichte [1791; On Bürger’s Poems]). To Coleridge “the natural tendency of the poet’s mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions” (7.2: 119); “poetry is essentially ideal, … it avoids and excludes all accident” (45–6); as it appeals to imagination and not to fancy, there is no need for “a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects” (126). Coleridge’s and de Staël’s work may be considered as two extreme reactions to the aesthetics of German romanticsm. While de Staël in her campaign against classicism tends to reduce romanticism to an intensified version of sentimentalism, Coleridge preserves at least some of the anti-mimetic, anti-illusionist, symbolist, and dialectic impulses characteristic of early German romanticism.

4.

Russia

During the nineteenth century, the aesthetics of German idealism left a profound mark on eastern Europe, in particular Russia. The significance of the eastern European reception can be seen for example in the fact that it remained a recurrent theme in Russian literature until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the work of Ivan S. Turgenev (Rudin; Fathers and Sons) and Fyodor M. Dostoevsky (The Devils; The Brothers Karamazov). Critical attention given to authors such as Herder, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and the Schlegel brothers enabled and accompanied a cultural change in paradigm, i.e. the break with French rationalist and English empirical philosophy and the turn away from the classicist literature of France. German literature and philosophy of the years around 1800 were taken as paradigmatic of a modern strain of thought that was rendered particularly accommodating to the demand for critical reflection on culture by combining aesthetics and the philosophy of history and to a means of defining the position of nations, a demand which at least since the turn of the century had often become virulent. Thus the debate that continued through the entire nineteenth century between the Westerners (2"B"*>484) and the Slavophiles (F:"&b>@L4:Z) on the historical role of Russia in Europe was decisively marked by Herder, Schelling, and Hegel. Both sides cite German authorities in their arguments as can be seen in the essays with which the Westerner Peter J. Caadaev in the first of his K4:@F@LF84, B4F\<" (Philosophical Letters; 1836), for example, and the Slavophile Ivan V. Kireevsky in his ),&bH>"*P"HZ6 &,8; (The Nineteenth Century; 1832) opened the debate. Idealist thinking was disseminated in a variety of different ways: reading of original texts, academic learning, study in Germany, discussion groups like the Moscow Circle — which was so important for Schelling’s reception — the “9`$@<J*DZ,” (Friends of Wisdom), and periodicals (;>,<@24>", ;@F8@&F846 &,FH>48, ;@F8@&F846 >"$:`*"H,:\). The system-related speculative German method of combining historical reflection with the study of art was central to the literary scene above all between 1820 and 1850. While the differences and distinctions separating the philosophical positions of the German authors may

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not always have been perceived, clear accents were marked. Kant was familiar to only a small number of “initiates”; Schiller was read — extremely intensively — chiefly as a dramatic and lyric poet. Interest focused mainly on the aesthetic writings of Schelling and Hegel, partly also on the literary criticism of the Schlegel brothers. However, distinctions also need to be made here. During the 1820s and ‘30s, the critical study of Schelling was dominant; the reception of Hegel, which ultimately proved more enduring and productive, began only later. Two important histories of philosophy dating from this period, A. Galich’s History of Philosophical Systems (1818–19) and I. Davydov’s Experimental Handbook on the History of Philosophy (1820) end with a treatment of Schelling’s philosophy. In the development of philosophically grounded aesthetic thought during the first half of the nineteenth century, Schelling played the more influential role, particularly as a result of the influence of his System of Transcendental Idealism, Lectures on the Method of Academic Study, Exposition of my System of Philosophy, and Philosophy of Art. Positions taken in Hegelian aesthetics did not have any significant effect until the middle of the 1830s, for example in the works of the philosopher Nikolai V. Stankevich and in the essays of the literary critic Vissarion G. Belinsky (e.g. in his 94H,D"HJD>Z, <,RH">4b [Literary Reveries]; 1834). The effects of this reception can be detected in the literature as well as in the literary criticism of the period. In the poetry of the Russian romantic period, this impact is most obvious in Vladimir F. Odoevsky’s cycle of novellas, CJFF84, >@R4 (Russian Nights; 1844) and Fyodor I. Tyutchev’s nature poetry, in which nature appears as the concrete, material unity of spirit and matter (e.g. in the famous poem =, H@, RH@ <>4H, &Z, BD4D@*" [Nature is not what you think]; 1836). Far more significant and far-reaching in its consequences was the importation of idealist aesthetics into the field of Russian literary criticism. Here the combination of aesthetics and philosophy of history underwent a specifically Russian development. Almost all the ambitious aesthetic outlines — no systematically ordered theory of art was developed — were formulated within the framework of literary-critical essays and reviews. Here it must be added, however, that all representatives of a philosophical critical approach — for example Ivan V. Kireevsky, Dmitry V. Venevitinov, Nikolai I. Nadezhdin, Vissarion G. Belinsky, and Apollon A. Grigor’ev — subjected their German predecessors only to a partial reading. Individual sections of Schelling’s and Hegel’s systems or partial aspects of Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel’s art criticism were blended with the respective critic’s own thoughts to such an extent that one can no longer distinguish between the individual German sources. Nonetheless the truth function of art and the philosophy of art, which Schelling above all had sought to establish, was taken seriously and used for comprehensive critical reflections on culture and for defining terrain in the philosophy of history. To a society that had been — since the failed Dekabrist uprising — almost entirely denied the right to participate in the shaping of the Russian state, philosophically grounded criticism developed into the central outlet for socially critical and political commitment. This development was possible because in the wake of German idealist aesthetics the work of art was understood as an organism in which not only a philosophically definable idea was objectified, but in which essential features of a specific people were represented. Art or literature thus appear as both the individually achieved creation of a genius and as the “document and organon” (“Dokument und Organon”) of national self-perception and self-definition. Consequently

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the concept of >"D@*>@FH\ (ethnic authenticity, attachment to nation) becomes a central component in idealist-influenced literary criticism, especially with critics like the young Vissarion G. Belinsky and Apollon A. Grigor’ev. The synthetic character which German systems assigned to the work of art (synthesis of nature and spirit, reason and inspiration) was broadened so that now a artistic reconciliation of societal contradictions also appeared possible. The reception of idealism is also significant in another respect. Russian literary critics became familiar with the tools of objective literary criticism, i.e. the concepts and evaluative criteria developed and put into practice in the context of idealist philosophy. Freed from a commitment to the aesthetics of mimesis, critics now attempted to apply the “German method” to reconstructing the ideal content of a given literary work, to determining its quality as an organic unity, and to demonstrating its position and significance in the development of the idea.

Notes 1. “Ich nenne alle Erkenntnis transzendental, die sich nicht sowohl mit Gegenständen, sondern mit unserer Erkenntnisart von Gegenständen, insofern diese a priori möglich sein soll, überhaupt beschäftigt” (Kant 3: B25). 2. “Die Zusammenstimmung des Mannigfaltigen zu Einem” (Kant 10: A45). 3. “Das intelligible Substrat der Natur außer uns und in uns” (Kant 10: A240). 4. “Unter einer ästhetischen Idee … verstehe ich diejenige Vorstellung der Einbildungskraft, die viel zu denken veranlaßt”, die aber “keine Sprache völlig erreicht und verständlich machen kann” (Kant 10: A190). 5. “Ein organisiertes Produkt der Natur ist das, in welchem alles Zweck und wechselseitig auch Mittel ist” (Kant 10: A292). 6. “Moralischer Widerstandes gegen das Leiden” (Schiller 30: 199). 7. “Eine Inokulation des unvermeidlichen Schicksals” (Schiller 21: 51). 8. “Eine vollständige Naturgeschichte der Kunst und des Geschmacks”; “für alle Zeitalter gültige, und gesetzgebende Anschauungen” (F. Schlegel 1: 317–8). 9. “Ist eben das romantisch, was uns einen sentimentalen Stoff in einer fantastischen Form darstellt” (F. Schlegel 2: 333). 10. “Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch” (F. Schlegel 2: 335). 11. “Die neue Mythologie muß … aus der tiefsten Tiefe des Geistes herausgebildet werden; es muß das künstlichste aller Kunstwerke sein” (F. Schlegel 2: 312). 12. “Das Produzierende mit dem Produkt”; “künstlerischen Reflexion und schönen Selbstbespiegelung” (F. Schlegel 2: 204). 13. “Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung” (F. Schlegel 2: 172). 14. “Das einzig wahre und ewige Organon zugleich und Document der Philosophie … welches immer und fortwährend aufs neue bekundet, was die Philosophie äußerlich nicht darstellen kann, nämlich das Bewußtlose im Handeln und Produciren und seine ursprüngliche Identität mit dem Bewußten” (Schelling 3: 627–8). 15. “Reflektiert uns die Identität der bewußten und der bewußtlosen Thätigkeit” (Schelling 3: 619). 16. “Die Kunst, um Objekt der Philosophie zu seyn, muß also überhaupt das Unendliche in sich als Besonderem entweder wirklich darstellen oder es wenigstens darstellen können. Aber nicht nur findet dieses in Anlehnung der Kunst statt, sondern sie steht auch als Darstellung des Unendlichen auf der gleichen Höhe mit der Philosophie: — wie diese das Absolute im Urbild, so jene das Absolute im Gegenbild darstellend” (Schelling 3: 369). 17. “Von dem Subjekt und demnach von der Besonderheit” (Schelling 5: 640). 18. “Der Roman soll ein Spiegel der Welt, des Zeitalters wenigstens, seyn, und so zur partiellen Mythologie werden. Er soll zur heiteren, ruhigen Betrachtung einladen und die Theilnahme allenthalben gleich fest halten; jeder seiner Theile, alle Worte sollten gleich golden seyn, wie in ein innerliches höheres Sylbenmaß gefaßt, da ihm das äußerliche mangelt” (Schelling 5: 676). 19. “Das Schöne bestimmt sich dadurch als das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee” (Hegel 1: 151).

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20. “Dem Inhalte nach ist deshalb die Poesie die reichste, unbeschränkteste Kunst” (Hegel 2: 261). 21. “Das Wort [wird] … zu einem für sich selbstständigkeitslosen Mittel geistiger Äußerung” (Hegel 3: 228). 22. “[Vom darstellenden] Subjekt entfernte und für sich abgeschlossene Wirklichkeit” (Hegel 3: 322). 23. “[In ihrer] ganzen Breite der Umstände und Verhältnisse als reiche Begebenheit im Zusammenhange mit der in sich totalen Welt einer Nation und Zeit zur Anschauung gelangen” (Hegel 3: 330). 24. “[Die totale] Welt einer Nation und einer Zeit [muß] zur Anschauung gelangen”; “[die] gesamte Weltanschauung und Objektivität eines Volksgeistes” (Hegel 3: 330). 25. “Das Sichaussprechen des Subjekts zur einzigen Form und zum letzten Ziel” (Hegel 3: 322). 26. “[Auf] kollidierenden Umständen, Leidenschaften und Charakteren und führt daher zu Aktionen und Reaktionen, die nun ihrerseite wieder eine Schlichtung des Kampfs und Zwiespalts notwendig machen” (Hegel 3: 475). 27. “Kant voulut rétablir les vérités primitives et l’activité spontanée dans l’âme, la conscience dans la morale, et l’idéal dans les arts” (de Staël 4: 113). 28. “Il faut une philosophie de croyance, d’enthousiasme; une philosophie qui confirme par la raison ce que le sentiment nous révèle” (de Staël 4: 145). 29. “C’est au sentiment de l’infini que la plupart des écrivains allemands rapportent toutes les idées religieuses”; “excite en nous l’espoir et le désir d’un avenir éternel et d’une existence sublime” (de Staël 5: 11, 13). 30. “L’enthousiasme se rallie à l’harmonie universelle: c’est l’amour du beau, l’élévation de l’âme, la jouissance du dévouement … l’enthousiasme signifie Dieu en nous” (de Staël 5: 187–8). 31. “Die sinnlichen Eindrücke sollen durch ihr geheimnisvolles Bündnis mit höheren Gefühlen gleichsam geheiligt werden, der Geist hingegen will seine Ahnungen oder unnennbaren Anschauungen vom Unendlichen in der sinnlichen Erscheinung sinnbildlich niederlegen” (A. W. Schlegel 26). 32. “Notwendige und wahre Gedanken und Gefühle, die über das irdische Dasein hinausgehen” (A. W. Schlegel 34). 33. “Le christianisme amène la poésie à la vérité” (Hugo 1: 416). 34. “Un miroir de concentration, qui … ramasse et condense les rayons colorants” (Hugo 1: 436).

References Ashton, Rosemary. [1980] 1994. The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Cassirer, Heinrich. [1938] 1970. A Commentary on Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgement.’ New York: Barnes & Noble. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1969ff. The Collected Works. 13 vols. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. London: Routledge & Kegan. Davydov, I. 1820. Experimental Handbook on the History of Philosophy. Moscow: n.p. Engel, Manfred. 1992. “Träume und Feste der Vernunft: Zur Vorgeschichte des romantischen Projekts einer ‘Neuen Mythologie’ in der Aufklärung.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft 36: 47–83. ———. 1993. Der Roman der Goethezeit. Vol. 1: Anfänge in Klassik und Frühromantik: Transzendentale Geschichten. Stuttgart: Metzler. Frank, Manfred. 1989. Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Galich, A. 1818–19. History of Philosophical Systems, Saint Petersburg: n.p. Garber, Frederick, ed. 1988 . Romantic Irony. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1970. Werke. Vol. 13–15: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I-III. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hoffmeister, Gerhart. 1994. “Deutsche und europäische Romantik.” Romantik-Handbuch. Ed. Helmut Schanze. Stuttgart: Kröner: 130–64. Hugo, Victor. 1963. Théâtre complet. Eds. Roland Purnal, J.-J. Thierry, and Josette Mélèze. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard. Kant, Immanuel. [1968] 1978. Werkausgabe. 12 vols. Ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Vol. 3: Kritik der reinen Vernunft; Vol. 7: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft; Vol. 10: Kritik der Urteilskraft [as customary in Kant studies, pagenumbers refer to the first (A) or second (B) edition of the Critiques].



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Lehmann, Jürgen. 1975. Der Einfluß des deutschen Idealismus in der russischen Literaturkritik des 19. Jahrhunderts: Die organische Kritik Apollon A. Grigor’evs. Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte 3.23. Heidelberg: Winter. Nagavajara, Chetana. 1966. August Wilhelm Schlegel in Frankreich: Sein Anteil an der französischen Literaturkritik 1807–1835. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Orsini, Giann N. G. 1969. Coleridge and German Idealism: A Study in the History of Philosophy with Unpublished Materials from Coleridge’s Manuscripts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. 1856–61. Sämmtliche Werke. 14 vols. Ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling. Stuttgart: Cotta. Schiller, Friedrich. 1943ff. Werke: Nationalausgabe. Eds. Jürgen Petersen et al. Weimar: Böhlau. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. [1809–11] 1966. Kritische Schriften und Briefe. Vol. 5: Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur. Ed. Edgar Lohner. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer [soon to be replaced by vol. 4 of: Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen. 1989ff. Ed. Ernst Behler. Paderborn: Schöningh]. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1958ff. Kritische Ausgabe. Eds. Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner. München: Schöningh. Staël, Germaine de. [1813] 1958–60. De l’Allemagne. 5 vols. Ed. Jean de Pange. Paris: Librairie Hachette.



Romantic Theories of National Literature and Language in Germany, England, and France MARY ANNE PERKINS Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London

The influence of romanticism, however defined, was universal in the sense that it spread throughout the whole of Europe in the early nineteenth century and from there to the rest of the Western world. The fact that this universality was often subordinated to the national interests and identity of some of its greatest exponents is typical of the energy-generating paradoxes on which romantic thought thrived. This tendency is particularly clear in relation to one of the major romantic concerns: the intense interest in the nature, origins, and development of language and literature. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the publication of scores of dictionaries, lexicons, etymological and grammatical studies, histories and philosophies of language, and comparative studies of national literatures. Increasingly widespread agreement arose that the study of language provided a key to questions of epistemology and aesthetics (as the new science of hermeneutics demonstrated). Firm conclusions were drawn concerning national character — both intellectual and moral — on the basis of comparative studies. “The genius of language,” wrote Herder, “is … also the genius of a nation’s literature” (Herder 1:177).1 Language and literature are inextricably linked: “for what was the first language other than a bringing together of the elements of poetry? … A dictionary of the soul, which is, at the same time, mythology and a wonderful epic poem about the dynamics and language of nature as a whole” (Herder 1:740).2 Herder was wise enough to argue that universal judgments concerning the literature of an entire country are at best difficult and uncertain. He questioned whether judgment should be passed “from above” or from within the sphere of literature itself. If from some higher point, then “who can raise himself to this height? Outside the mind of a people, in order to judge it? Who dares to leave the earth, his mother and nurse, and rise up with wings, not provided by nature, to place himself on an airy cloud from whence he can send out a meteoric criticism?” (Herder 1:371).3 Yet writers as geographically and culturally disparate as the German J. G. Fichte, the Irishman Thomas Davis, and the Greek Adamantios Korais attempted to establish the superior character of their national literature on a similar basis: the claim that their language could be linked to ancient and pure roots and was mostly uncorrupted by the admission of foreign words. The shift from dogmatic to critical axioms during the eighteenth century had laid the foundations for the philosophical, comparative, and historical studies of language and literature. The success of the scientific method was emulated in the human sciences. Kant’s brilliance, for example, led to the three great Critiques, which so deeply influenced romantic thought in terms of a philosophical shift toward the active, creative subject. German biblical scholars inaugurated the “higher criticism,” which subjected the Bible to the same critical analysis as other texts. The

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“science” of hermeneutics to which F. D. E. Schleiermacher made such substantial contributions was in its infancy, but its effect on comparative studies would be profound. Romantic historians carried forward the critical ethos of the Enlightenment, though many rejected what they saw as its mechanistic and soulless ideals. The relationship between language and thought had been central to Enlightenment criticism as exemplified in the seminal works of Locke, Condillac, and Rousseau. What made the romantic period different was the approach to history and historical analysis that included a new awareness of national character and culture. For example, the sense of a rooted, connected, and remembered past essential to national identity promoted an intense interest in the history of literatures. The genres of the historical novel and drama gained much of their popularity from both romantic nationalism and the idea of a European universal history. Here again the universally European in concept and in emphasis (i.e. history) finds its most intense and concrete expression in that particular past out of which the individual nation emerged. The novels of Sir Walter Scott were in part for this reason so admired, particularly in France. His emphasis on national character was representative of a European drive to recognize national identity and uniqueness. Despite Herder’s emphasis on the desirability of the diversity of cultures and of the literatures that sprang from them, he and his contemporaries accepted the strength and unity of European history and culture as the common legacy of the Judeo-Christian and the classical traditions. From this shared inheritance, which was centred on ideas of freedom, law, history, and religion, had emerged the Protestant emphasis on individuality, the concept of the sovereignty of the people, and the self-consciousness of national identity. Herder’s great legacy of comparative and historical studies of European literatures and languages inspired romantic thinkers with a sense of the value of cultural uniqueness and the importance of preserving it. Posing the question, “With what did the individual living culture of the nations always begin?” Herder himself provides an answer: “With the awakening and development of its language…. During the dark Middle Ages, with what did the Enlightenment of all of Europe begin? With the translation of the Bible into … national languages” (Herder, Sämtliche Werke 24:46).4 Gadamer provides a particularly insightful discussion of the concept of Bildung in terms of the central aspects of romantic philosophies of language and literature that sprang from Herder’s description of attaining to full humanity by passing through culture and of coming fully to oneself — to perfection — through the experience of the “Other” and of alienation (Gadamer 9–13). Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example, writes, “when in our language we say Bildung, we mean something both higher and more inward, namely the disposition of mind which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavour, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character” (Humboldt 7:30).5 For Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and many other of the German writers who were possessed by the idea of national culture and identity, the nation was inseparably linked to the concept of Bildung in its widest sense of the spiritual whole which was manifested in its religion, philosophy, literature, poetry, mythology, and politics. In his Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur (Fragments on Recent German Literature; 1767), Herder writes of his intention to produce a pragmatic history of the intellectual life of the state, of which a history of literature would provide the groundwork: “such a history seeks to become that which it was in antiquity: the voice of a patriotic wisdom and the reformer of the people” (Herder 1:170).6

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The web of relationships that Bildung represented was often closely linked to that represented by the term logos. Friedrich Schlegel illustrates this point at the beginning of his assertion that “In the world of language, or, what means the same, in the world of art and culture [Bildung], religion appears necessarily as mythology or the Bible” (F. Schlegel 93).7 In German romantic thought particularly, intellectual, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic development are all essential to the life of the nation, and all are interactively reconciled through the medium and the dynamic of language. According to Herder, “a people that has had great poets without a poetic language, great prose writers without a pliant language, great sages without a precise language is preposterous” (Herder 1: 177).8 The particular character of the language determines the particular character of a people. Although the new self-consciousness of national identity and of the inescapable historicity of language, thought, and aesthetic judgment were not confined within national boundaries, national and cultural difference yielded widely different responses. German writers, for example, from the end of the eighteenth century, had begun to attribute the lack of progress in German culture and literature to a lack of German self-confidence and to the tendency to adopt, or at least tolerate undue influence from, the ideas and language of other nations, particularly France. Justus Möser, in a series of articles appearing in 1781 and later published under the title Über die deutsche Sprache und Litteratur (On the German Language and Literature; 1781), berated the German tendency to adopt foreign intellectual and linguistic models instead of developing their own rich heritage. Karl Barth concurred claiming that the Germans had for too long built their history, everything they had learned, everything they had made on the work of foreigners (Barth iv). Jakob Grimm saw this borrowing as an inevitable historical process, though its worst effects could be limited, he argued, by the study and preservation of national linguistic and cultural roots (Thomas 96). The sense of inferiority that had been experienced under the dominant French influence of the eighteenth century was now vehemently challenged by German intellectuals who stimulated a reinterpretation of history in which “Germanic” was often identified with “European.” For example, for Fichte, Novalis, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, the fitness of the German people to represent universal humanity made the German nation great. (Germany was not united as a nation state in the political sense until 1871. I use the term nation here in the same sense as many German writers of the period: that is as a people with a linguistic, cultural, and historic identity.) Novalis argued that German nature in general is representative of genuine humanity and therefore should be considered an ideal and that no nation could compete with Germany in terms of vigorous universalism. In a letter to August Wilhelm Schlegel, he observed “German nature is cosmopolitanism mixed with the strongest individuality” (Schlegel, Schriften 1:650; Meinecke 55).9 Others, in contrast, laid greater emphasis on the particular virtues that distinguished German character and German history. In defence of a certain poverty of German drama, August Wilhelm Schlegel argues that “in the drama the nationality does usually, nay, must show itself in the most marked manner, and the national character of the Germans is modest and retiring” (Lectures 36). “The Germans are a speculative people; in other words, they wish to discover by reflection and meditation, the principle of whatever they engage in” (36). Concerned with a higher object than “the mere passive repetition of the Grecian, the French, the Spanish, or the English theatre, … they are in search of a more perfect form, which, excluding

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all that is merely local or temporary, may combine whatever is truly poetical in all these theatres. In [this] matter, however, the German national features ought certainly to predominate” (36).10 Part of the problem for German dramatic art, he implies, is that the ideas behind it are beyond the reach of other nations. Its abstract, spiritual content is the very essence of German character; German drama should not be occupied with the trivial and the particular, but with the great themes, the moral lessons of history, with the great history of the German spirit. He concludes his series of lectures, however, arguing that in the end historical drama should remain thoroughly national. Friedrich Schiller had already proclaimed that Germany, situated as it is in the middle of Europe, was also the heart of humanity. It was for the Germans to reach the true heights. He claimed that the German people are a true nation in the sense that their nationhood resides in moral character and is not intertwined with a political destiny. In the early draft for a poem to be entitled “Deutsche Grösse,” he suggested that the Germans could become the Greeks of the new age. “This precious possession of ours, the German language, expresses everything, all that is deepest and most fleeting, the spirit, the meaningful soul” (Schiller 2.1:432).11 In England, the interest in literary history tended to focus strongly on the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. But the sense of national identity was largely based on a perception of the contribution of England to the civilized world through the relation of church and state in the “Glorious” Constitution. Coleridge, for example, explores the works of seventeenth-century divines in conjunction with a deep interest and involvement in political history and criticism. In their struggle for supremacy with Utilitarianism, the philosophers of romanticism were deeply critical of those elements within the Enlightenment (particularly the work of the philosophes) which had contributed to it. The influence of French thinkers upon philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment such as David Hume and Adam Smith was seen to have led inexorably to the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. Coleridge constantly emphasized the dangers to the “Spirit of the nation” and to the constitution of the denigration and ignorance of metaphysical realities. His prose works sought to restore language and thought to the sense of spiritual values, the teleology of history, the proper relation of church and state on which, he believed, the health of the nation depended. His detailed historical studies of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the works of Bacon, Shakespeare, and Milton all contributed to his sense of impending threat to the national character and integrity brought about by the abandonment of their ideas and principles. On the other hand, as with almost all the European romantics, his literary interests, philosophical criticism, and historical researches spread far beyond national boundaries. The French romantics were equally anxious to proclaim the virtues of their own national language and literature; and they too laid claim to Europe. Victor Hugo, for example, predicted that “in the twentieth century, there will be an extraordinary nation. This nation will be great, which will not prevent it from being free…. The capital of this nation will be Paris, and it will not be called France at all; it will be called Europe. It will be called Europe in the twentieth century, and, in the following centuries, transfigured even more, it will be called Humanity” (Hugo 289–96).12 The perpetuation of classical values and taste, particularly in the dramatic writing of the eighteenth century, was of particular importance in French literature. Condillac, for example, compared French and Latin. French had “less variety and less harmony…. But it makes us amends on the side of simplicity and perspicuity … it renders us naturally more

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precise, and gradually invests the mind with that character of clearness and simplicity, by which this language is so superior in many respects.” He believed this precision had led to “the progress of sound philosophy,” which more than compensated “for the loss of a few beauties peculiar to the ancient languages” (Condillac, Essay 271).13 In 1784 Antoine Rivarol published his prize-winning Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française (Discourse on the Universality of the French Language) in which he famously argued that French was the heir to the Latin used when Rome ruled the world (Jacob and Gordan 112). But by the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, French writers were on the defensive. The fact that Chateaubriand’s Essai sur la littérature anglaise (Essay on English Literature) focuses on English literature, especially on the work of Milton and Shakespeare, clearly points to the sense of the French romantics that France had lost her cultural dominance in the world: “We are excluded from the new universe in which the human race makes a fresh start”; it is hardly possible, he complains, to hear French spoken except in some small foreign dominion since France has been stripped of her great conquests. German literature has invaded English literature just as, once, Italian and then French had “erupted in Milton’s country,” and the English increasingly now rejected the French school of literature in their fanatical pursuit of novelty (Chateaubriand 2:240, 289, 297).14 Romantic historians reevaluated the literature of past ages on the basis of a new relative sense of aesthetic judgment. One consequence of this development was the revival of interest across western Europe in the works of Shakespeare, which had fallen into disfavour under the dominance of the eighteenth-century French rules of drama. Their revival was partly due to a new interest in common speech — that language “of common men” that Wordsworth valued so much in poetry — and to the vividness, directness, and power that it communicated. In Germany, “it was [G. E.] Lessing who first introduced the name and the works of Shakespeare to the admiration of the Germans” (Coleridge 7.2:209). Herder, Schiller, A. W. Schlegel, and Coleridge were among the host of Europeans who wrote critical essays on the great English playwright. Coleridge noted that, “on the continent the works of Shakespeare are honoured in a double way; by the admiration of Italy and Germany and by the contempt of the French” (Coleridge 5.1:208). According to Coleridge, Shakespeare was the answer to the obsession of the French with the dramatic principle of the three unities. He had more moral force than modern French dramas (Coleridge 5.1:227), and his works reflected the true character of the English nation, of its constitution, and of its dedication to liberty. English drama was in this sense superior even to the great classical dramas: “The origin of the English stage is less boastful than that of the Greek stage: like the constitution under which we live, though more barbarous in its derivation, it gives more genuine and more diffused liberty, than Athens in the zenith of her political glory ever possessed” (Coleridge 5.2:474). In any comparison of European romantic literary historians, the predominance of common interests is striking: for example, in folk idioms, in the relation of language to moral and intellectual character, in the symbolic power of the imagination, and in the expression of true feeling. But significant differences in emphasis reflect national interests. German literary historians concentrated on the restoration of the confidence and spirit of a truly German literature in relation to foreign languages and literatures. The English, on the other hand, sought to reflect upon the literary traditions of an earlier Elizabethan romanticism and of the great

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defenders of English liberty, law, and national religion. French literary historians sought to confirm their own sense of national identity through emphasis on the virtues of reason and civilization in their own literature and their inheritance of the genius of classical Rome. Herder himself had acknowledged those qualities of the French language which justified its claim to be the language of reason. In A. W. Schlegel’s Die Sprachen (The Languages) published in the first volume of the Athenaeum, characters representing both modern and classical languages (English, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Latin) participate in a discussion in which each argues for the merits of his own language. The Frenchman claims superiority over the German on the ground that French contributes to understanding through its natural, orderly progressions (Die Sprachen 46–7). Schlegel’s dscussion neatly encapsulates the competitive spirit that motivated comparisons of national languages and literatures. Differences of approach and emphasis reflected not only national but religious distinctions: both Novalis’s Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe; 1799) and Chateaubriand’s Essai of 1836 argued that Protestantism had contributed to the demise of great art. On the other hand, Martin Luther’s contribution to the German vernacular was noted by many of those who contributed to the historical study of language and literature as the foundation of a truly German literature. In the early nineteenth century, comparative critical studies were encouraged by the realization that a developed and flourishing national literature was one of the prerequisites for a strong sense of patriotic pride and national identity. If Herder provided the original impetus for comparative literary studies with such works as Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur (Fragments on Recent German Literature), the tendency was strengthened by the romantics’ growing sense of the importance of national difference as witnessed by the widespread influence of Mme de Staël’s De la littérature (“On Literature”; 1800), which was indebted to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s recommendation that she study German literature. Although his own efforts concentrated linguistic relations, he drew his own conclusions as to the qualities and significance of national literatures as evidenced, for example, in his correspondence with Schiller during the 1790s. German literature, he proclaimed, was always philosophically inclined, while that of the French tended rather toward fantasy. Although Germans had written no serious prose drama before Goethe thus, perhaps, neglecting the genre, their love of that which is natural and richly substantial was in stark contrast to “the often empty and unnatural artificiality of the French, now and then the English, and even the Greeks” (Humboldt 2:56 ).15 Coleridge was equally confident that “English excels all other languages in the number of its practical words…. In truth, English may be called the harvest of the unconscious wisdom of various nations” (Coleridge 5.2: 481–82). Against the German view that a language of pure descent is superior to “a composite language” like English, Coleridge argued that the English “possess [a] wonderful … variety of modified meanings in Saxon and Latin quasi-synonyms, which the Germans have not” (Coleridge 14.1:320–21). French, on the other hand, he considered good only for “the names of trades” and “military and diplomatic terms.” He acknowledged the “metaphysical and psychological force” of German and judged that Italian is “the sweetest language[,] Spanish the most majestic” (Coleridge 5.1:291). However, even Coleridge admitted that “an aversion to the epigrammatic unconnected periods of the fashionable Anglo-Gallican taste [had] too often made

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[him] willing to forget, that the stately march and difficult evolutions, which characterize the eloquence of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Jeremy Taylor” were, despite their “intrinsic excellence, still less suited to a periodical Essay” (Coleridge 4.1:20). He found Greek far superior to modern languages, only equalled “in the variety of terminations” by German. However, the sound of the German language was judged inferior in other respects: “Nature seems to have dropped an acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian prose is excessively monotonous” (Coleridge 14.2: 173). The idea that some nations’ combination of Christianity and “earnestness of mind” expressed through philosophy and the ideals of freedom and law made them more fully European than others is central to Mme de Staël’s “On Literature.” However much she seems to be giving an objective comparison, she conveys her idea of the superiority of northern literature, which she and many other romantics concluded had descended from Ossian’s work. His poems, she points out, are not as artistically advanced as those of Homer, indeed, the two cannot be compared. “There is no parity, then, between the Iliad and Fingal”16 (de Staël, “On Literature” 178). However, she doubts whether the images of nature in the literature of the south, though more “voluptuous” and “more brilliant in some respects, give rise to as many thoughts and have as immediate a relation to the soul’s feelings. Philosophical ideas go with dark images, as if spontaneously. Voluptuous southern poetry is very far from harmonizing with meditation and inspiring the things reflection should prove; it almost entirely excludes ideas above a certain level” (de Staël, “On Literature” 178). If Ossian is monotonous, the “fault is less common in the English and German poetry that is derived from his work. Culture, industry, and commerce have varied the landscape in several ways” (de Staël “On Literature,” 178).17 One of the most important of literary developments, the intense romantic interest in symbols, was reflected in Creuzer’s work, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (The Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancients; 1810–12), which explored the double nature of the symbol. Just as the language of nature must be interpreted symbolically as a revelation of the divine, so symbols must be created through which the inner life, the thoughts feelings of men and women could be expressed (Fiesel 137). The idea of nationhood and national identity contains paradoxes and apparent contradictions so that the sense of a national spirit and character, like personal identity, could not be adequately expressed in terms of empirical analysis or rational definition. For this reason, the symbol had a vital role in expressions of nationhood and nationalism; it could become an incarnation of the idea of the nation, an embodiment of national spirit. Symbols of nationhood abound in the literature of this period. Sometimes they reflect a genuine philosophical appreciation of the power of the imagination realized in the symbol. More often, together with the mythology of national heroes that appear in every literary form, they simply and directly express a political, cultural, and historical sense of identity and difference. The work of the French romantics, such as Hugo and Chateaubriand, is liberally scattered with references to St Denis, St Joan (particularly in the work of Michelet), to the Oriflamme, and the lily. Many German writers drew on Tacitus’s Germania for their myths of German origin; the oak grove and the element of iron are recurring themes. Roger Langham Brown points out — quoting Erich Heintel’s description of Herder’s view (95) — that every

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nation has its own storehouse of ideas which have been turned into symbols that is its national language. This store has existed through the centuries, has suffered increases and decreases, and has experienced more revolutions and changes (75). Yet, although the symbol becomes, in many instances, an object of national reference, the profound aesthetic and philosophical fascination with the nature of symbols is a European, not merely a national, phenomenon. Coleridge is one of those who finds the symbol to be of universal significance far beyond the often limited outlook of nationalism: since “an idea in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol” it is a universal principle of mind. For Coleridge, as for many of the romantics, “nation” was primarily an idea; that is, “a realizing knowledge, a knowledge causative of its own reality” (Coleridge, “Ideas” 11.131–3). Clearly then, the communication of this universal idea took place through the power of the symbol and the imagination. The power of the particular symbols of particular national identities should not obscure the fact that, in this period, writers across Europe became fascinated by the reconciliation of the universal with the particular. The symbol seemed uniquely powerful to effect this, one form of which was the reconciliation of European with national consciousness. The influence of this great period in literary history on future generations of literary criticism has been enormous. It marked the beginning not only of literary historical criticism and the acknowledgment of the significance of the reader’s response but also of the need for “Otherness” without whose opposition a national literature cannot fully develop. A hundred years later in “The Unity of European Culture,” T. S. Eliot wrote that two conditions are necessary for a national literature to renew its creative activity and linguistic discoveries: it must be able “to receive and assimilate influences from abroad” and “to go back and learn from its own sources.” The “sources which are peculiarly its own, deep in its own history” are equally as important as the common European sources “that is, the literature of Rome, of Greece and of Israel” (Eliot 116). Here Eliot looks only to European literature and in so doing is less bold, less imaginative, perhaps, than the romantics. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, and the Grimm brothers, for example, all recognized the potential enrichment offered by the study of nonEuropean languages and cultures. Yet he captures the essence of the romantic emphasis on a literary dialectic between past and present, between national spirit or genius and the universality of language and imagination.

Notes 1. “Der Genius der Sprache ist also auch der Genius von der Literatur einer Nation” (Herder 1:177). 2. “Denn was war diese erste Sprache als eine Sammlung von Elementen der Poesie? … Ein Wörterbuch der Seele, was zugleich Mythologie und eine wunderbare Epopee von den Handlungen und Reden aller Wesen ist!” (Herder 1:740). 3. “Alle allgemeinen Urteile über die Literatur eines ganzen Landes sind schwer, und unsicher. Wo soll man stehen, um sie zu übersehen: hoch über ihr; oder in ihrer Sphäre? Über ihr: wer kann sich dahin heben? außer der Denkart eines Volks von ihr richtig urteilen? Wer mag es wagen, die Erde, seine Mutter und Nährerin, zu verlassen, und mit Flügeln, die uns die Natur nicht gab, sich in eine luftige Wolke heraufzusetzen, um ein kritisches Meteor vorzustellen?” (Herder 1:371). 4. “Die eigentliche lebendige Cultur der Völker, womit fing sie immer an… ? Mit der Erweckung und Bildung ihrer Sprache…. In den dunkeln mittlern Zeiten, womit fing die Aufklärung des gesammten Europa an? Durch

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Übersetzung der Bibel in … Nationalsprachen (Herder, Sämtliche Werke 24:46). 5. Wenn wir aber in unsrer Sprache Bildung sagen, so meinen wir damit etwas zugleich Höheres und mehr Innerliches, nemlich die Sinnesart, die sich aus der Erkenntniss und dem Gefühle des gesammten geistigen und sittlichen Strebens harmonisch auf die Empfindung und den Charakter ergiesst” (Humboldt 7:30). 6. “Kurz! … eine solche Geschichte suche das, was sie bei den Alten war, zu werden: die Stimme der patriotischen Weisheit und die Verbesserin des Volks” (Herder 1:170). 7. “In der Welt der Sprache, oder welches ebenso viel heißt, in der Welt der Kunst und der Bildung, erscheint die Religion notwendig als Mythologie oder als Bibel” (F. Schlegel 93 [Ideen 38]). 8. “Ein Volk, das ohne poetische Sprache große Dichter, ohne eine biegsame Sprache gute Prosaisten, ohne eine genaue Sprache große Weise gehabt hätte, ist ein Unding” (Herder 1:177). 9. Deutschheit ist Kosmopolitismus mit der kräftigsten Individualität gemischt” (Schlegel, Schriften 648). 10. “Die deutschen sind ein spekulatives Volk, d.h. sie wollen dem Wesen von allem, womit sie sich beschäftigen, durch Nachdenken auf den Grund kommen…. Im Drama [muß und darf] die Nationalität am entschiedensten hervortreten, und die deutsche Nationalität ist bescheiden, sie macht sich nicht vorlaut geltend…. Unsre Aufgabe ist aber nicht, das griechische oder französische, das spanische oder englische Theater bloß leiden zu wiederholen, sondern wir suchen wie mich dünkt eine Form, welche das wahrhaft Poetische aller jener Formen, mit Ausschließung des auf herkömmliche Übereinkunft Gegründeten in sich enthalte; im Gehalte aber soll deutsche Nationalität vorwalten” (Schlegel, Vorlesngen 33–4). 11. “Das köstliche Gut der deutschen Sprache die alles ausdrückt, das tiefste und das flüchtigste, den Geist, die Seele, die voll Sinn ist” (Schiller 2.1:432). 12. “Au vingtième siècle, il y aura une nation extraordinaire. Cette nation sera grande, ce qui ne l’empêchera pas d’être libre…. Cette nation aura pour capitale Paris, et ne s’appellera point la France; elle s’appellera l’Europe. Elle s’appellera l’Europe au vingtième siècle, et, aux siècles suivants, plus transfigurée encore, elle s’appellera l’Humanité” (Hugo 289–90). 13. “Si nous comparons le françois avec le latin, nous trouverons des avantages et des inconvéniens de part et d’autre. De deux arrangemens elle est donc par cet endroit, moins variée et moins propre à l’harmonie. Il est rare qu’elle souffre de ces inversions où la liaison des idées. Par-là elle accoutume de bonne heure l’esprit à saisir cette liaison, le rend naturellement plus exact, et lui communique peu à peu ce caractère de simplicité et de netteté par où elle est elle-même si supérieure dans bien des genres. Nous verrons ailleurs combien ces avantages ont contribué aux progrès de l’esprit philosophique, et combien nous sommes dédommagés de la perte de quelques beautés particulières aux langues anciennes” (Condillac, Essai 250). 14. “nous sommes exclus du nouvel univers où le genre humain recommence”; “La littérature germanique a envahi la littérature anglaise, comme la littérature italienne d’abord, et la littérature françoise ensuite, firent autrefois irruption dans la patrie de Milton” (Chateaubriand 2:240; 289, 297). 15. “die oft leere und unnatürliche Künstlichkeit der Franzosen, hier und da der Engländer und sogar der Griechen” (Humboldt 2:56). 16. “Aucune parité ne peut donc être établie avec justice entre l’Iliade et le poëme de Fingal” (de Staël, Œuvres 4:263–4). 17. “plus brillantes à quelques égards, font naître autant de pensées, ont un rapport aussi immédiat avec les sentiments de l’âme; les idées philosophiques s’unissent comme d’elles-mêmes aux images sombres. La poésie du Midi, loin de s’accorder comme de celle du Nord, avec la médiation, et d’inspirer, pour ainsi dire, ce que la réflxion doit prouver, la poésie voluptueuse exclut presque entièrement les idées d’un certain ordre” (de Staël, Œuvres 4:264).

References Barth, Christian Karl. 1840. Teutschlands Urgeschichte. 2nd ed. Baireuth: Grauischen Buchhandlung. Beiser, Friedrich. 1996. The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Brown, R. L. 1967. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Conception of Linguistic Relativity. The Hague: Mouton. Chateaubriand, René Vicomte de. 1836. Essai sur la littérature anglaise. 2 vols. Bruxelles: Hayman.



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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Works. Eds. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer. Bollingen 75; 1983. Biographia Literaria. Vol 7.1–2. Eds. James Engell and W. Jackson; 1987. Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature. Vol 5.1–2. Ed. R. A. Foakes; 1990. Table Talk. Vol. 14.1–2. Ed. Carl R. Woodring; 1969. The Friend. Vol 4.1–2. Ed. B. Rooke; 1995. Shorter Works and Fragments. Vol 11.1–2. Eds. H. J. and J. R. de J. Jackson. Princeton: Princeton UP. ———. “On the Divine Ideas”; mss. Condillac, Etienne Bonnet de. 1973. Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. Auvers-sur-Oise: Galilée. ———. 1756. Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, being a supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. Trans. Mr. Nugent. London: Nourse. Eliot, T. S. 1948. “The Unity of European Culture.” Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber. 113–28. Fiesel, Eva. 1927. Die Sprachphilosophie der deutschen Romantik. Tübingen: Mohr. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. Trans. W. Glen-Doepel (1975). 2nd rev. ed. Trans. and rev. Joel Wiensheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Sheed and Ward. Grimm, Jacob. 1848. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. 2 vols. Leipzig: Weidmann. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1877–1913. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. B. Suphan. Berlin. ———.1960. Johann Gottfried Herder Sprachphilosophische Schriften. Ed. Erich Heintel. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Humboldt, Wilhelm Freiherr von. 1903–36 Gesammelte Schriften. Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Ed. Albert Leitzmann. 17 vols. Berlin: Behr. ———. 1962. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Schiller und Wilhelm von Humboldt. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. Kaiser, Gerhard. 1973. Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Sakularisation. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Athenaeum. Macpherson, James. 1996. The Poems of Ossian and Related Works. Ed. Howard Gaskill. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Meinecke, Friedrich. 1970. Cosmopolitanism and the National State. Trans. Robert B. Kimber. Princeton: Princeton UP. Möser, Justus in Frederick II, King of Prussia. 1964. De la littérature allemande: Franz-dt. Mit der Möserschen Gegenschrift. Critical Edition. Eds. Christoph Gutknecht and Peter Kerner. Hamburg: Buske. Rougemont, Denis de. 1966. The Idea of Europe. Trans. Norbert Guterman. New York: Macmillan. Schiller, Friedrich. 1983. Schillers Werke. Ed. Norbert Oellers. 42 vols. Weimar: Böhlhaus Nachfolger. Schlegel, A. W. 1969. “Die Sprachen.” Athenaeum: Eine Zeitschrift. Rowohlts Klassiker der Literatur und der Wissenschaft, Deutsche Literature 29. Ed. Curt Grützmacher. 2 vols. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. ———. 1966. Kritische Scriften und Briefe. Vol 5. Vorlesung über dramatische Kunst und Literatur. Ed. Edgar Lohner. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. ———. 1978. Schriften. Eds. Hans Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel. München: Hanser. ———. 1846. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Trans. J. Black. London: Bohn. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1964. Kritische Schriften. Ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch. München: Hanser. Staël, Mme Anne Louise Germaine de. 1820. Œuvres complètes. 14 vols. Paris: Treuttel et Würtz. ———. 1987. “On Literature Considered in Its Relationship to Social Institutions.” An Extraordinary Woman. Trans. Vivian Folkenflik. New York: Columbia UP. 172–208. Tacitus, Publius Cornelius. 1991. Tacitus’ Agricola, Germany, and Dialogue on Orators. Trans. rev., and ed. Herbert W. Benario. Norman: U Oklahoma P. Thomas, Richard Hinton. 1951. Liberalism, Nationalism and the German Intellectuals, 1822–1847. Cambridge: Heffer.



Sir Walter Scott and the Beginnings of Ethnology CAROLYN BUCKLEY-FLETCHER Trinity College

Around the middle of July 1802, a meeting took place between a young Edinburgh lawyer, a border shepherd, and his mother. The lawyer was Walter Scott, who was gathering material for the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. His host was a self-educated poet named James Hogg, who had been copying down ballads from the oral tradition of his family and community ever since coming across the first two volumes of the Minstrelsy in the spring of that year. In Hogg’s thatched cottage his mother, Margaret Laidlaw, recited to their guest the traditional ballad “Auld Maitland.” Scott was delighted and asked if it had ever been in print: O, na, na sir,” she replied, “it never was printed I’ the world, for my brothers an’ me learned it an’ many mae free auld Andrew Moor and he learned it free auld Baby Mettlin, wha was housekeeper to the first laird of Tushilaw. She was said to hae been another nor a gude ane, an’ there are many queer stories about hersel’, but O, she had been a grand singer o’ auld songs an’ ballads. Ay, it is that sir! It is an auld story! But nor that, excepting George Warton an’ James Stewart, there war never ane o’ my sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel’, an’ ye hae spoilt them awthegither. They were made for singing an’ no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never be sung main An’ the worse thing of a’, they’re nouther right spell’d nor right settee down.” (Hogg 136–37)

This meeting well symbolizes the changes taking place in the relationship between the oral and print cultures in England. Scott, self-appointed archivist, historian, and antiquarian and later recognized as one of the fathers of British anthropology and archaeology, is one of the seminal figures in that cultural transition. The same impulse that shaped the emergent social sciences — the impulse to preserve, to record, to commemorate — animates his literary work. In the introduction to The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Scott voices his hope that by “such efforts, feeble as they are, I may contribute somewhat to the history of my native country; the peculiar features of whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving into those of her sister and ally” (cxxii). In the preface to the Waverley novels, he remarks that his fiction begins in the interest of the preservation of ancient manners and customs, concerns shared by history and ethnology. It ends in a reflection and commentary not only on the crisis facing traditional cultures, but on the intellectual dilemmas of his own contemporaries, dilemmas inherent in literate attempts to salvage a largely preliterate past. It is a commentary remarkable for its candor and insight into the enterprise at large. Scott’s role is in part determined by the historical and geographical accidents of his birth. Scott was born in the second half of the eighteenth century to middle-class parents in Edinburgh, a city particularly distinguished by its progressive character in a nation where primitive, even atavistic tribal traditions had persisted long after their eclipse in Europe and England to the

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south, a country also distinguished by its fierce divisions and fiercer loyalties of clan, church, and kin. Scotland was a kingdom uniquely marked by its own internal polarities. Emerging from the northern edge of Europe, where cultures collided head on, where the practices of industrialism and the tenets of the Enlightenment had taken root and had grown with a remarkable rapidity, in seeming inverse proportion to the rapid eclipse, even annihilation of Scotland’s ancient traditions, Scott’s work gives form to the very extremities of his time and place. While the claims of Scott’s birth and history along with the enthusiasms of his contemporaries go far in explaining the subjects of his work, they do not fully account for his manner of rendering of them, but his education does: the comparative method he learned at the University of Edinburgh became the basis for later developments in ethnology and anthropology. (Particularly important in this regard, notes Marinell Ash, was the influence of Ferguson and Dugald Stewart, whose comparative approaches to the study of societies past and present are reflected in Scott’s student work, notably his 1789 paper to the student Literary Society, “On the Origins of the Feudal System,” where Scott argues for the cross-cultural appearance of feudalism in widely disparate cultures [443].) At the time Scott was writing, several distinct approaches to the study of earlier or primitive cultures had appeared. At the opening of the nineteenth century, the antiquarianism and mythography that had dominated much of the eighteenth century began to give way to an early ethnology and a proto-anthropology, which were not, however, fully defined until well into its second half of the century. (John Pilkey describes the position of Scott’s work within larger developments in the nineteenth-century social sciences.) In 1802 James Hogg and Margaret Laidlaw clearly recognized Scott’s leading role in antiquarian and folklore pursuits. By mid-century, his part in the growth of ethnology and archaeology as well as a nascent anthropology was widely, even officially, recognized. In 1851 Daniel Wilson, pioneer of both Scottish and American archaeology, opens The Archaeology and Prehistorical Annals of Scotland in praise of Scott: The zeal for Archaeological investigation which has recently manifested itself in nearly every country in Europe, has been traced, not without reason, to the impulse which proceeded from Abbotsford. Though such is not exactly the source which we might expect to give birth to the transition from profitless dilettantism to the intelligent spirit of scientific investigation, yet it is unquestionable that Sir Walter Scott was the first of modern writers to teach all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught — “that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled with living men.” (xi)

Modern critics have agreed. Pointing to Scott as a seminal figure behind the work of Wilson and others, Marinell Ash seconds Wilson noting that the achievements in early archaeology and related studies “would not have been possible without the intellectual legacy that Scott transmitted to the historians — and prehistorians — of the nineteenth century” (441). In his study of the persistence of the oral tradition in nineteenth-century Great Britain, David Vincent notes the importance of Scott’s contribution to the antiquarian tradition and the archaeological work that followed it. Comparing Scott’s work north of the border to Brand’s in the south, Vincent cites them together as the fathers of British archaeology, pioneers in the development of modern inquiry into peoples and cultures (22). By the middle of the nineteenth century, Vincent continues, “an army of middle-class antiquarians was at work following the guidelines

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laid down by Scott and Brand, and adding to the material collected in their pioneering volumes” (23). Other critics have noted the impress of these developments on Scott’s own work. John Pilkey suggests that “Scott’s good fortune was to stand at a crossroads in the progress of the British interpretation of human origins” (iv), a crossroads where the traditions of the eighteenthcentury British mythographers and antiquarians begin to yield to the emerging social sciences. In a 1986 study, “Dialectic, Rhetoric, and Anthropology in Scott’s Waverley,” Louise J. Smith explores the intersection of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and nineteenth-century anthropological historicism in Scott’s fiction. Both note that Scott’s work is distinctly conscious of its position. Scott’s work bears them out. The obvious text here is Scott’s Antiquary, where these pursuits supply much of the action and character of the novel. The weaknesses of antiquarianism and the frauds of mythography are profiled in the genial caricature of Jonathan Oldbuck and the more grotesque figures of Herman Dousterswivel and his dupe, Sir Arthur. In their persons the novel pokes fun at the credulity of antiquarianism and condemns the pseudo-mythical claims of mythography. While the assumptions of both studies are basically discredited — and by the same agent (Old Edie, who of all the characters has his feet most firmly on the ground) — the distinction is clear. The antiquarian, while crusty and overcredulous in his pursuit of antiquities, shows sound feeling and judgment in all else. Dousterswivel and Sir Arthur, on the other hand, are not attractive characters in any sense. The character of Sir Arthur is distorted by a range of selfish passions; Doustereswivel’s, by pure greed. He is little more than a common swindler. Antiquarianism, if sometimes foolish, Scott shows us, is at least honest in its intentions and is born of a real enthusiasm for history and tradition. Pseudo-mythical pursuits like those of Dousterswivel, which claim to discover or reveal hidden truths or treasures of that past, are, the novel suggests, inevitably tainted with opportunism, self-seeking, and a whole range of base and reprehensible motives. The Antiquary is recognizably Scott’s most self-conscious and critical treatment of contemporary appetites for past and primitive. But Scott’s work is much more than a caricature and commentary on these pursuits. It is not merely reactive, but rather responds to more subtle changes in the intellectual landscape of the European mind. In its texts, the self-conscious activity of the social scientist and scholar seems to merge with the creative activity of the literary artist. Its issue is a new and uniquely malleable genre responsive to the encounters convulsing European society along historical, cultural, and intellectual frontiers. It is a genre that, in the comparative freedom of fiction, explores the subjective experience codified in the “objective” disciplines of history, ethnology, and anthropology. As a historian, antiquarian, and ethnologist, Scott responds to a cultural crisis. As a novelist, he comments on that response by creating a genre that expresses European society’s deepest anxieties about its past and present, anxieties that shape the new disciplines, anxieties that take on tangible form and substance in these texts, and anxieties that are joined in the fictional text with the larger literary conventions of romanticism. In this fiction, the encounter with past and primitive — an experience distanced and objectified in the narratives of history and ethnology — is expressed with a freedom and clarity found nowhere else, and it is consciously linked to an experience now called romanticism. These are narratives of those encounters, which explore their dangers and attractions and strike a deeply responsive chord among Scott’s contemporaries

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by expressing the dilemmas inherent the differentiation of self and other at the heart of work in the emergent social sciences. The genre begins in the play of identities. The first of Scott’s heroes, Edward Waverley is introduced while rapt in daydreams of legendary family heroes — medieval and Jacobite — of Sir Wilibert the Crusader and William Waverley, the young Jacobite — and is drawn irresistibly into the Highlands — a regressive process rendered with an almost archetypal clarity. Waverley passes first from the Hanoverian base at Dundee into the medieval feudal enclave of Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine, and from there into the hands of Highlander and clansman Evan Dhu MacCombich, who leads the youth into the encampment of Donald Bean Lean and his nomadic robber band — a steady progression from the realities of the contemporary world back through time to the cave itself. In the process, Edward’s identity becomes blurred as it merges with that of other atavistic individuals and groups. He puts off his British clothing and assumes the “garb of old Gaul,” the Highland gear of “a son of Ivor” or clansman (Waverley 112). Abandoning king and country, he joins the Highlanders in a rebellion that itself marks a regressive movement in the national and collective psyche. But it all has a distant fairy-tale quality about it — an air of unreality. Amidst the swelling war cry of the attacking clan, Edward Waverley is suddenly seized by a feeling of alienation. Looking at his tartan, his weapons, and his companions in disbelief, he internally dissociates himself from the scene. The remainder of the novel chronicles his return to contemporary society through a kind of depressurization, as he passes through a series of five transitional identities in order to reenter contemporary society safely with position, property, and privilege intact. The novel closes with the image of an Edward pardoned and restored standing in the midst of his wedding party while gazing at a sentimental portrait of himself in rebel’s bonnet and Highland tartan arm-in-arm with his brother in rebellion, Fergus — arch-rebel and last chieftain of the Highland clan of Vich Ian Vohr, a less fortunate figure disemboweled, dismembered, and decapitated. The danger of that encounter is transmuted and framed in the art of portrait and text. The immersion in past and primitive is contained and deliberately mystified by an authorial sleight of hand. Romanticism is implicated in all this. The idealization of past and primitive associated with romanticism is, in fact, the very subject of the first historical novel, Waverley. The titular hero’s adventures chronicle the impulse toward a more primitive past and the harsh chastening of that impulse, of those yearnings for a more primitive — a more “heightened” way of life — which, faced with the barbarities and cruelties native to those traditions and with the equally barbarous and cruel policies of a modern imperialism, draws back in horror. Set in the midst of a world dominated by Machiavellian movements, movements that catch him up, spin him about, and spit him out exhausted, disheveled, gasping for breath, still not knowing what hit him, the protagonist escapes with his life only with the help of a kind of deus ex machina, the intercession of a friend or relation intimate with the winning side. Fergus, his Highland counterpart and “brother” is literally torn to pieces — limb from limb — by the ferocity of history. Edward, the survivor, having seen all this and briefly tasted its horror, is happy to stay by the fireside henceforth, armin-arm with his Rose. His immersion in the landscape of his imagination almost cost him his life. He survives, but lets fall those romantic dreams and embraces the simpler and certainly more conventional life of husband, proprietor, and citizen. His high purpose is abandoned for a

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more pedestrian peace and quiet. Waverley and his literary descendants launch their quest for the past and primitive in the teeth of political, social, and cultural realities that come crashing in on them. Having run the gauntlet formed by the collision of the earlier idealized vision of history with a brutal reality, the hero makes his peace with his own time and place. It is a kind of renunciation of the earlier quest and an acknowledgment of the claims of the present. Dreams of political apocalypse and cultural utopia fade into the blurred outline of memory — into that sentimental portrait of Edward and Fergus, itself a visible symbol of Scott’s own rendering and enframing of the romantic quest of past and present. Springing from a later romanticism, its hopes for social and political utopia chastened and conditioned by the cataclysms through which it had passed — a romanticism whose exaltation of the primitive as a model for modern man had met bitter defeat again and again — the genre is one way in which romanticism assesses itself, acknowledges its own limits, and writes its own eulogy. But the tragedies that close the revolutionary action in Waverley mark the immolation not only of Flora and Fergus as well as the youthful romantic impulse, but also of the primitive, elder culture from which they sprang. The Mac-Ivors are extinct; the apocalyptic and utopian hopes, the dream of reviving an idealized past, are spent. This is the discourse after the flood recording the great changes that had taken place, recording not only the demise of romantic hopes, but also the demise of a culture and people wiped off the face of the earth — the discourse of a nascent ethnology. Scott’s work is not only a part of this, but is also a profoundly self-conscious part tracing the trajectories of all these contemporary approaches to past and primitive — romanticism, antiquarianism and mythography, and the emergence of the modern anthropological disciplines. What gives these novels their wide appeal is perhaps not their conservative “happy” endings, but the element of risk — the threat of annihilation or absorption. Even in the most cautious of these chronicles or adventure stories — novels like Rob Roy or Waverley — the heroes momentarily lose their identity. Their survival hinges on its recovery. He, or more rarely she, must contend with a host of shadow selves, not only the individual double — the hermit, the beggar, the idiot, the outlaw or rebel, the criminal, the traitor, and all the “others,” the marginal figures who populate the text — but also the collective doubles as well — shadow figures of contemporary culture such as the Highlander, Cossack, or Mohican — who are all projections of modern consciousness and culture at risk. What emerges is a kind of shadow play of desire and differentiation, cultural and individual. It is a cathartic experience. Part of what makes the historical novel so dynamic, what gave it such phenomenal force in its own time is its direct representation of this play of identities at the borders of history, culture, and self in the personal experience of the protagonist. There is a focus, familiarity, and intimacy in the fictional reading that reveals what remains unspoken, though not concealed in the scientific text; it reveals the fascination with the other. Indeed, it could not be concealed. It is the mainspring of the narratives concerned with past and primitive, which emerge from the first half of the nineteenth century. In the larger narrative of differentiation, there is a narrative of desire — a hunger for alternate experience — a response to the call of past and primitive. This impulse to explore and define the relationship between self and other, past and present, as well as primitive and modern is at the bottom of the early discourse of the social sciences. Theirs are disguised or distanced

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“scientific” narratives of the conflict and confrontation of identities expressed so freely in the figure and adventures of the protagonist — a youth on the brink of adulthood, the persona of a nation and a culture moving into the modern world — turning back to confront its own past and primitive self. The genre that seems to spring full-grown from the mind of Sir Walter Scott, amateur antiquarian, ethnologist, and historian turned novelist, is an expression of this fascination with the other — past and present — paired with the need to differentiate, to explore the boundaries of the self, a fascination implicit in the emergent discourse of ethnology, history, and psychology. Drawn to the shadow side, venturing into foreign universes, the scientific narratives maintain a cautious distance — through the persona of the historian, the ethnologist and the antiquarian. The novel’s protagonist, noted for his typicality and passivity, emerges as the persona of this modern consciousness — a focal point for the concerns, anxieties, and aspirations of the age, an expression of the emergent, even neophyte consciousness of modern Europe. His desire to explore alternate worlds and alternate experience without losing his own privileged cultural identity is a metaphor for the larger ventures of the intellectual community exploring beyond the boundaries of self, but careful about the safety and integrity of its person and property. The early historical novel is only one episode in a larger chronicle of literary encounters and inversions, but it is particularly intriguing because it emerged roughly simultaneously with scientific “narratives” in ethnology, history, and even psychology, which share a common subject matter — the past and primitive — and a common medium — the prose narrative. It is surely no coincidence that these begin to emerge and take on a disciplinary identity and a common discursive mode at roughly the same time. It is a symptom of an underlying disease in culture and consciousness. The shadow self of man and culture is projected and constructed in a narration of distance and differentiation that becomes “science,” taking on an air of authority and authenticity, and acquiring the directing and ordering potency associated with “disciplinary” activity. Born of the tension between the impulse to recapture a more primitive experience and the necessity to repudiate that condition, a tension spawning a new wave of narrative discourses, both literary and scientific, the historical novel explores in personal terms the workings of larger cultural imperatives and gives a face and a name to the impulse at work in the emergent disciplines. Ethnology, history, and other emergent disciplines like psychology arise as modes of self-definition — communal and individual. They allow contemporary consciousness to observe at a safe distance its own past and primitive experience, while all the while maintaining those boundaries seemingly so critical to modern consciousness and that distance formalized in the concept of scientific objectivity, which affords the individual an opportunity to enter alternate worlds without compromising the integrity of his modern identity — the freedom and detachment of the tourist, the voyeur, the professional, the author. This is the subject of the Waverley novels. Edward Waverley, Frank Osbaldistone, and Darsie Latimer are all implicated. First drawn to the past and primitive, they pull back to regroup seeking a safe distance as those cultures move toward their inevitable end. Theirs is, in this sense, an act of bad faith repeated in text after text across Europe. From where she sat, Laidlaw was right. Scott’s work, however sincere, must remain from her perspective an act of betrayal, albeit a highly self-conscious and articulate one. Committed to commemorating and preserving the forms of a passing culture, Scott’s work is, for all its efforts, predicated on the death of that culture. But from where she sat, Laidlaw was missing



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half the picture. What Laidlaw could not have seen was Scott’s role not only as conservator and commemorator, but as commentator and critic of the whole enterprise. Laidlaw’s accusation was aimed at Scott’s archival work. What might she have said of the historical novel? Perhaps she would have damned it too. Or perhaps she would have said that there at least Scott himself conceded that act of betrayal — that act of bad faith — and that the genre made an honest man of him, if not his generation.

References Ash, Marinell. 1983. “A Past ‘Filled with Living Men’: Daniel Wilson and Scottish and American Archaeology.” Scott and His Influence. Ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt. Occasional Papers 6. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Influence. 443–54. Hogg, James. 1983. Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott. Ed. Douglas S. Mack. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Pilkey, John Davis. 1974. “Walter Scott’s Fiction and British Mythographic and Ethnological Movements.” Diss. University of Kansas. Scott, Sir Walter. 1910. The Antiquary. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. ———. 1813. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Constituting of Historical and Romantic Ballads, Collected in the Southern Countries of Scotland, with a Few of Modern Date, Founded upon Local Tradition. Philadelphia: M. Carey. ———. 1985. Waverley. Ed. Andrew Hook. New York: Viking Penguin. Smith, Louise Z. 1986. “Dialectic, Rhetoric, and Anthropology in Scott’s Waverley.” Studies in Scottish Literature 21: 43–52. Vincent, David. 1982. “The Decline of the Oral Tradition in Popular Culture.” Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England. Ed. Robert D. Storch. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 20–47. Wilson, Daniel. 1851. The Archaeology and Prehistorical Annals of Scotland. Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knoc.

DOCINFO AUTHOR ""TITLE "III. Expansions in Time"SUBJECT "Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, Volume 18"KEYWORDS ""SIZE HEIGHT "240"WIDTH "170"VOFFSET "2">

III. Expansions in Time

Although the idea had been variously raised during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century centuries, Herder’s proclamation that a robust and vigorous sense of national identity could only be sustained by drinking deeply from native springs found a particularly receptive audience. Cultural practices and aesthetic norms drawn from alien traditions may in the short term yield pleasing results but would ultimately emerge as counterfeit and spurious foundations. For many traditions, Herder’s admonitions meant an essential paradigm shift that involved charting a course based on a recovery and recontextualization of local history rather than endeavoring to accommodate themselves to cultural patterns respectfully handed down from classical antiquity. Political conservatism, though admitting of considerable interpretive breadth, is similarly a position that attributes far greater importance to social institutions and initiatives that are understood to have developed in a historically demonstrable manner as opposed to those that arise from the thinking of individual theorists or factions in response to specific concerns. Michael Gassenmeier and Jens Martin Gurr identify Edmund Burke as the father of modern political conservatism and trace the development of his thinking from an early liberalism to his outspoken denunciation of the French Revolution. The impact of his pragmatically grounded defense of time-honored institutions has been considerable in both British and American political thought and is followed up to the redeployment of many of his arguments by the American new conservatives during the closing decades of the twentieth century. For the nations situated on Europe’s northern edge, the challenge of an authentic history was not that of persevering in the defense of venerable institutions but rather that of recouping a sense of their distinctive past that had nearly slipped into oblivion over the course of several centuries. All of the Nordic nations — Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland — emerged from the period of the Napoleonic Wars diminished and dispirited. In “Distorted Echoes: The Mythology of Nordic Nationalism,” Steven P. Sondrup examines some of the varying ways in which they turned to the heroic age of the Vikings as a means of renewing their language, reconfiguring a sense of national identity, and securing a valued cultural patrimony. S. P. S.



Burke’s Conservatism and Its Echoes on the Continent and in the United States MICHAEL GASSENMEIER AND JENS MARTIN GURR University of Duisburg

The Term Conservatism The term conservatism, which in different countries and at different times has undergone a fair range of reinterpretations, designates a political philosophy that attributes incomparably greater value to institutions and practices of society that have evolved historically than it does to the societal models of individual political thinkers. Political thinkers arguing for the dignity and value of forms and methods of government that have evolved historically generally do so on the grounds of a decidedly skeptical and pessimistic image of human nature, which they vigorously and frequently defend against conceptions of the natural equality, rationality, and benevolence of human beings propagated by radicals and liberals (Viereck 8f.). Conservative approaches have played a considerable role in the political and anthropological discourse of all ages, but it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that conservatism was elaborated into a consistent political philosophy in response to the French Revolution. The British MP and writer Edmund Burke is undisputedly regarded as the founder of modern political conservatism (Kramnick 4). The Immediate Impulse for Burke’s Polemic against the French Revolution The immediate impulse for writing his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which within a few years of its publication in 1790 became the prayer book of those opposed to the revolution, was the salutations which the London-based Society for Promoting Constitutional Information and the Revolution Society had sent to the constituent assembly in Paris in October 1789 (Dishman 73–158). These messages were intended both as panegyrics on the French revolutionaries and as warnings to the British politicians reluctant to agree to reforms. Above all, Burke was enraged by the substance and the line of reasoning of a widely debated sermon which Dr. Richard Price, a politically influential Presbyterian divine, had delivered before members of the Revolution Society on November 4 and which he had published in London with the letters of salutation. Dr. Price’s sermon culminated in the following encomium on the French Revolution: What an eventful period is this! I am thankful that I have lived to it …. I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge, which has undermined superstition and error. — I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever; and nations panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the idea of it. — I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute,

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Michael Gassenmeier and Jens Martin Gurr spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice. Their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects…. And now, methinks, I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading; a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience …. Tremble all ye oppressors of the world! … Restore to mankind their rights: and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together. (Price 49–51; Burke, Reflections 157)

This concluding passage in which the political divine envisages a revolution in England modelled on the French in the event that the requested political reforms were not carried out filled Burke with “a considerable degree of uneasiness” (qtd. in Fennessy 100) as he remarks with unsurpassed understatement. But what mainly provoked Burke to react and finally prompted him to write the Reflections was the interpretation of “the principles of the [Glorious] Revolution” that Price outlined to the members of the Revolution Society (Burke, Reflections 99). To Burke, Price’s interpretation of the principles of the Revolution of 1688, which ascribes to parliament not only the right to elect and dismiss the head of state but, in a wider sense, also the right to decide between a constitutional monarchy or a presidential system of government, is nothing but dangerous political heresy that hardly has anything to do with the Glorious Revolution but has all the more to do with the ignominious Puritan Revolution. For, as Burke explains, the “profoundly learned men” (118) who, in the Bill of Rights, formulated the principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, explicitly referred to “the succession of the crown” (100) as well as to the “most sacred rights and franchises” of the British “as an inheritance” (118). The Puritan “Apostle[s] of Liberty” (157), on the other hand, no less eagerly than the French revolutionaries and their British claques, subscribed to a policy of extirpating “superstition and error” (158) and insisted on their supposedly unalienable right to choose their governor and system of government according to their predilections, by means of which they succeeded in ruining the country within a few years (157f.). Burke’s Shift from Radical to Radical Conservative Connoisseurs of the political scene least expected this critique from Edmund Burke, who in the 1770s had acquired a reputation as a devoted reformer. A member of the Commons since 1765, Burke had advocated many liberal reforms. Before Adam Smith he demanded freedom of trade. He attacked the slave trade before Wilberforce. He advocated the abolition of discrimination against Catholics as well as the nonconformists’ claim to full civil rights. He developed plans for a liberalization of the penal law and defended freedom of the press. In his pamphlet, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), he argued against the enhancement of the royal prerogatives pursued by George III in favor of the enlargement of parliamentary influence. In the conflict with the American colonies, he obstinately fought for a compromise by negotiations and repeatedly spoke against the exploitation of Ireland and India (Godechot 52f.). But the British who sympathized with the French Revolution and were surprised or shocked at Burke’s having become an opponent of the Revolution had overlooked two facts: first, the former champion of transatlantic as well as domestic opposition had for years assumed a stance increasingly resembling that of his former political opponents; and second, Burke’s advocacy of

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reform had in no phase of his political career been guided by beliefs comparable to those of the French revolutionaries or their radically democratic sympathizers in England (Godechot 53). Having risen to the position of spokesman for the opposition formed by Lord Rockingham in the House of Commons during the 1770s, Burke more explicitly and vigorously advocated decidedly liberal positions, both in his pleading for more parliamentary competence in the constitutional controversy inaugurated by George III and in his critique of the transatlantic colonial policy of the Crown. By the beginning of the 1780s, however, the days of the liberal Edmund Burke were over: when in June 1780 England found itself domestically destabilized and largely isolated in the web of world powers after numerous defeats in the American colonies and the appearance of varying opposing alliances, an oriflamme calling for change and occasioning a considerable “swing to the right” was unfurled in the metropolis: the revolt of the London street mob, which has gone down in history as the Gordon Riots (Meller 189–214). During this period when London presented itself as a “sea of flames” (Hibbert 35) and the United Kingdom barely escaped the masses’ attack on the foundations of its establishment, Edmund Burke, who had defended himself and his house against the rebels, became a radical conservative, who for fear of the mob’s violence was never again prepared to make a secret of his veneration for the old order (67). Burke’s Verdict on the French Revolutionaries: Hominem Non Sapiunt A key tenet of the Reflections frequently varied throughout the work states that the drafting of a constitution requires exceptional abilities: The constitution of a state, and the due distribution of its powers, [are] a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions. The state is to have recruits to its strengths and remedies to its distempers …. The nature of man is intricate. (Burke, Reflections 151–52)

The key competence required of the architects of a polity is “a deep knowledge of human nature,” which Burke understands to be “intricate,” that is difficult to estimate and to calculate and requiring a social order capable of promoting its “strengths” and of eliminating or at least controlling its “distempers.” It is predominantly in classical antiquity that Burke finds men who considered a thorough study of human nature an indispensable prerequisite for the establishment of a stable and flourishing commonwealth: The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an under-graduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the property itself, all of which

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Michael Gassenmeier and Jens Martin Gurr rendered them as it were so many different species of animals. From hence they thought themselves obliged to dispose their citizens into such classes, and to place them in such situations in the state as their peculiar habits might qualify them to fill, and to allot to them such appropriated privileges as might secure to them what their specific occasions required, and which might furnish to each description such force as might protect it in the conflict caused by the diversity of interests, that must exist, and must contend in all complex society…. It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed very justly, that in their classification of the citizens, the great legislators of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers, and even soared above themselves. (299–300)

With a polemical turn against the members of the French National Assembly whose philosophical and mathematical knowledge he compares to that of undergraduates and excisemen and on the authority of Montesquieu, who admired the British constitution, Burke develops some of his key arguments against the French revolutionaries, who believed that after the overthrow of the old order they themselves could realize the idea of a perfect constitution that they claimed was dictated by no lesser a faculty than unerring reason. Drawing on Montesquieu, Burke argues that political laws cannot and need not be derived from abstract principles of reason. Rather, their adequacy depends upon whether under certain political, social, and economic conditions they serve to constitute and warrant stable social orders. In order to make suitable and reliable laws, legislators need to study the social phenomena relevant to their constitutional system using empirical methods similar to those employed by scientists studying natural phenomena in search of the underlying laws of nature. Put more concretely, what is required of legislators is a careful study of human beings, a study of human nature in a general sense embracing all abilities and limitations of the species and a study of the “second nature” — the differentiations, conditioning, and privileges that citizens acquire during the development of a polity with respect to their different origin, education, cultural surrounding, occupation, and economic status. But as Burke proceeds to make clear with the saeva indignatio of the satirist, the delegates of the constituent assembly in Paris do not have the faintest notion of all this. They have much, but bad, metaphysics; much, but bad, geometry; much, but false proportionate arithmetic; but if it were all as exact as metaphysics, geometry, and arithmetic ought to be, and if their schemes were perfectly consistent in all their parts, it would make only a more fair and sightly vision. It is remarkable, that in a great arrangement of mankind, not one reference whatsoever is to be found to any thing moral or any thing politic; nothing that relates to the concerns, the actions, the passions, the interests of men: Hominem non sapiunt. (296–7)

Elsewhere the National Assembly, whose unfathomable incompetence Burke rarely fails to emphasize, is even portrayed in a nightmarish image of monstrous perversity and infernal anarchy. The Assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty. They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them; and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them; domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and proud presumptuous authority. As they have inverted order in all things, the gallery is in the place of the house. This Assembly, which overthrows kings and kingdoms, has not even the physiognomy and aspect of a grave legislative body — nec color imperii, nec

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frons erat ulla senatus. They have a power given to them, like that of the evil principle, to subvert and destroy; but none to construct, except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction. Who … but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque, and abominable perversion of that sacred institute? Lovers of monarchy, and lovers of republicks, must alike abhor it … notwithstanding the applauses of the Revolution Society. (161–2)

Burke here takes up a literary topos that innumerable writers bent on preserving the status quo have kept alive from classical antiquity down to the student revolts of our own time. But Burke makes the traditional topos yield much more than what the comparison of political revolutions with hollow comedies and vulgar farces commonly conveys (Demandt 355f., 359ff.). By equating the National Assembly with a fair at which an audience of ferocious men and shameless women wrenches a performance from the players turning everything topsy-turvy in order to make themselves the actors in a horror show, Burke suggests the unleashing of a “power … like that of the evil principle” of a satanic destructiveness that cannot be stopped by anyone or anything. Burke’s Anthropology and His Apotheosis of the British Social Hierarchy Burke denigrates the anthropological ignorance of the philosophes, of their “revolutionary disciples,” and “the whole clan of the enlightened among us” and sets against it his own empirical anthropology, which he claims to be the result of scrutinizing historical analysis and unbiased observation of human behavior in his own age. But he does not develop his anthropology in a consistent, let alone in a systematic way. Since he chose to write his Reflections in the form of a letter growing, as it were, by accident into an extensive political treatise (Burke, Reflections 84f.; Dishman 283), his anthropology only gradually takes shape. But a passage from his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) reads like a summary of the relevant remarks in the Reflections: Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites … in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. (Burke, Works 4: 319)

To the delegate to the French National Assembly who echoes the famous complaint in the first sentence of Rousseau’s Du Contrat social (On the Social Contract; 1762) in his demand that humanity be freed from chains, Burke points out the necessities of political control: “Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power … be placed somewhere.” According to Burke, all human beings are driven by cravings and passions that, if given free rein, would undermine the interests and the freedom of the other as well as the existence of the entire body politic. Since the individuals who constitute society are not morally equal but of

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significantly different moral status, human beings cannot possibly be given equal liberties. Without ever making this explicit, Burke proceeds from the assumption that in every society there are individuals easily able to master their “appetites” and “passions” and others who are completely unable to do so with all possible gradations of self-control in between the extremes. To Burke civil liberties are not universal, abstract, and unalienable rights to which all men have equal claim. He regards them as rights to which “men are qualified … in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” To Burke, therefore, the refusal of those in power to grant the “men of intemperate minds” full “civil liberties” has nothing to do with discrimination. On the contrary, it is seen as a differentiation vital to the creation and maintenance of a viable social order. Deficits in self-restraint and self-government in the “men of intemperate minds” must be compensated by the “controlling power” of the state: “men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” In another passage in the Reflections that also speaks of the “men of intemperate minds,” Burke’s apology for the established hierarchical order is carried yet a step further: By having a right to every thing they want every thing. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of the individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle. (151, italics ours)

Having emphasized different meanings of the word want denoting both “desire” and “lack” in the first few sentences and having exploited this ambiguity for the subtly ironic characterization of the people “who want everything,” Burke places both the “liberties” and the “restraints” or “restrictions” in the same category as the “real rights of men” (149), which he had proposed and defined shortly before in the course of his polemical refutation of the “rights of men” (148) as propagated by the “political metaphysic[ian]s” (149). It is to be reckoned among the rights of the “men of intemperate minds,” as Burke’s line of reasoning might be summarized, that certain of their liberties be restricted for only a restriction of their liberties guards them from going astray and ending up on the gallows. And it is to be reckoned among the rights of the “men of soundness and sobriety” that the “men of intemperate minds” be restrained from doing mischief by putting their covetous hands in chains as the only way in which the state can secure the welldeserved liberties and privileges of the former. Another fateful heresy of enlightened philosophy, according to Burke, is the idea of the “intellectual equality of men” upon which the French revolutionaries and the “whole clan of the enlightened among us” (183) base their conviction that — as Richard Price had proclaimed before the Revolution Society — the “diffusion of knowledge” to all social strata would reveal the aristocracy’s and the clergy’s instruments of power to be “superstition and error” and the

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overthrow of despotism would initiate a “dominion of reason and conscience” (Price 3). With more persuasion and broader effect than any other writer of the period, Thomas Paine advanced this campaign of the “diffusion of knowledge” in his polemical treatises appearing between 1776 and 1795. Endowed with an unparalleled susceptibility for their cares and hopes, he encouraged the masses to trust their own reason and judgment and to recognize the pillars of the ancien régime as the roots of all inequality, injustice, and oppression. In his very first work, Common Sense (1776), he claims, “I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense: and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession” (Paine 1: 84), and later in The American Crisis he maintains, “I dwell not upon the vapours of imagination; I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes” (Paine 1: 178, italics ours). This apotheosis of the “self-sufficient reason of [the] individual” propagated by Paine, Price, and other enthusiasts of enlightenment and the denigration of all “custom and tradition” as “prejudice” (Fennessy 35) were to Burke not only a political but also an intellectual horror that provoked him into resolute, often sarcastic, sometimes ironic objections: [In] this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we [the British] are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. (Burke, Reflections 183)

It may well be that the original impulse provoking Burke to this remarkable rehabilitation of “prejudice” and to the equally forceful depreciation of individual “reason” was pure sarcasm, the mere joy of denouncing the author of Common Sense as the propagator of sheer nonsense (Wilkins 110). This view is supported by what is only ostensibly Burke’s self-critical or ironic way of describing himself and the majority of his British compatriots as people who even in an enlightened age have preserved their natural sensibility, their “untaught feelings.” But Burke does not stop at the mere pleasure of polemicizing. His skeptical judgment of man’s individual reason (“the private stock of reason … in each man is small”) is a core idea of his anthropology based, as he tirelessly points out, on the empirical study of human behavior, a core idea that recurs throughout, not just in the Reflections (Burke, Works 6: 147). And his high estimate of the much-denounced “prejudice” logically follows from his conviction that a society can only

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remain stable so long as it supplies its citizens endowed with no more than moderate cognitive resources with general aids to reflection and orientation (“the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages”). His formulation, “prejudice is of ready application in the emergency,” shows that he associates it with the dignity of the example able to serve as a model in future decisions along the same lines, a connotation of the word prejudice derived from the Latin praejudicium (Allport 6). On the other hand, the affective quality suitable for internalization that he ascribes to the word “prejudice” (“Prejudice … has … an affection which will give it permanence…. [It] renders a man’s virtue his habit … [and] his duty becomes part of his nature”) shows that he wants the term to be understood in the sense in which the Scottish sentimentalists understood it. According to their moral philosophy, our understanding of the world and of ourselves is not so much based on intellectual cognition as on our “moral sense” (Tuveson 241). “Prejudice” to Burke is a higher form of “latent wisdom,” an orientation that is acquired by young people in the course of their socialization and proves reliable because it is always available and does not appeal to isolated faculties only, but rather to the entire person: “will, emotion, and the social sense, as well as reason” (Tuveson 133). Even the somewhat surprising extension of the term prejudice to encompass the numerous British institutions is probably to be understood as a polemical move against the sweeping critique of the “component parts of the English constitution,” which Thomas Paine launches in the first chapter of Common Sense (1776) entitled, “Of the Origin and Design of Government in General”: “I know it is difficult to get over local or longstanding prejudices, yet if we will suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English constitution, we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new Republican materials” (Paine 1: 72). And having disqualified the widespread belief “that the constitution of England is an union of three powers, reciprocally checking each other” as “farcical” (Paine 1: 72) and as a “mere absurdity” (73), Paine proceeds: The prejudice of Englishmen, in favor of their own government by King, Lords and Commons arises as much or more from national pride than reason…. Wherefore, laying aside all national pride and prejudice in favor of modes and forms, the plain truth is that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey. An inquiry into the constitutional errors in the English form of government, is at this time highly necessary; … [but we are not] capable of doing it … while we remain fettered by any obstinate prejudice. And as a man who is attached to a prostitute is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favor of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one. (74–5)

That this combination of redundancy and reductionism in Paine’s line of reasoning provoked Burke to the above extension of the concept of “prejudice” to encompass the institutions indiscriminately dismissed by Paine is implied in the introductory sentence of Burke’s defense, which can hardly be read other than as a polemic against such “cabals” (Burke, Reflections 185) as Paine and Price: “instead of quarrelling with establishments, as some do, who have made a philosophy and a religion of their hostility to such institutions, we cleave closely to them” (188). But it is only in the following passage that this is made abundantly clear. Here Burke first

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completes Paine’s incomplete list of the “component parts of the English constitution” by naming them individually: “We are resolved to keep an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy” (188) and proceeds with a successive appraisal of these institutions, which in his Reflections henceforth appear as “our prejudices, not … destitute of reason, but involving in [them] profound and extensive wisdom” (188–9). With the same term Burke uses for experiences and impressions that are acquired in the course of a person’s socialization and whose “reason” and “latent wisdom” he appropriates as moral aids in orientation, he also designates the continuously “meliorated and adapted” (123) institutions of the kingdom to whose “reason” and “profound and extensive wisdom” he ascribes the beneficial effect of so channeling the thought and behavior of all classes that these may be conducive both to the interest of the individual orders and the entire body politic. If Burke begins his appreciation of these institutions with the “church establishment” the “first of our prejudices” (188), he does not fail to give a theological and psychological foundation to his esteem for the Established Church (cf. 187). But his key argument in favor of the value, even indispensability of the “religious system, of which we are now in possession” (189) is its political utility. This religious system on which all the other political institutions of the state are founded and through which they receive their “consecration” (189) endows the office-holders with an understanding of the dignity of their office and the responsibility involved. In the subjects, it instils a feeling of “inferiority” (197) that suggests and facilitates “natural subordination” (372). To the monarchs, who exert their rule as God’s representatives on earth, this is of vital importance since it makes them realize “that they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment, nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid, permanent existence … and to a permanent fame and glory, in the example they leave as a rich inheritance to the world” (189). But this “consecration of the state, by a state religious establishment” (190) is even more important to the free citizens who form the “collective sovereignty” (190) in the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain: “[The] idea that they act in trust; and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author and founder of society … ought even to be more strongly impressed upon the minds of those who compose the collective sovereignty …. They should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole fabric of their society” (190, 192). Finally, the church arguably fulfils its most important function by preaching the “principles of natural subordination” to the majority of the population, to the “men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life” (124) and by giving them “consolation” (372): “The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavor, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice” (372). The conclusions Burke draws from these remarks are obvious: enlightened philosophy with its sweeping critique of the “ancient principles and institutions,” a critique devoid of all respect and understanding, is a disaster. And the French Revolution, which translates these enlightened maxims into practice, is a catastrophe. For what grows from the debris of the old order is not

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the promised “dominion of reason and conscience” as Richard Price has it, but “a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time, poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter” (174). Burke justifies his prophecy with the three words “Hominem non sapiunt,” which he lays like a curse upon the revolutionaries: they are doomed to fail because the egalitarian image of man they proclaim is a “monstrous fiction” (124) and because the radically democratic form of government deduced from it is a “monster of a constitution” (313), which does not turn the ostensibly oppressed masses into free and responsible citizens, but into a “swinish multitude” (173) bent on its foul work until “a popular general … who possesses the true spirit of command” will establish himself as a dictator and usurps universal jurisdiction. “But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master; the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic” (342). Passages such as this one, which only few years after the publication of the Reflections were understood as presentiments of the September Massacres, the rule of terror of the Jacobins and Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power as war lord and absolute monarch, brought Burke the prestige of being regarded as a prophet (Dreyer 39ff.). In truth, these predictions are based on a creed in the philosophy of history that Burke shared with many of his contemporaries and that Gottfried August Bürger in his essay, Die Republik England (The Republic of England; 1793), which he wrote in order to plead for a more balanced and unprejudiced observation and evaluation of the French Revolution, encapsulated in the simple dictum, “Many an event of the future is mirrored in the past” (Gassenmeier, Bürger 43, 46f.). For Burke, this thinking in historical analogies and parallels was dominant from beginning to end in writing his Reflections. What aroused Burke’s fear, made him put pen to paper, and inspired the nightmarish visions of the smashing of all social and cultural assets of civilization that recur throughout in his work is the fact that in the proclamations and actions of the French Revolution he recognized the fundamentalist fanaticism of the Puritan rebels who had plunged England into chaos and submitted it to the reign of terror of a martial despot. Pragmatism versus Mystification in Burke’s Reflections In most of the extended passages defending the British social hierarchy against the critique of enlightened thinkers and those sympathizing with the French revolutionaries, Burke argues largely pragmatically and could rely on the approval of the powerful and the beati possidentes. Using this same pragmatic line of reasoning, he defended the Anglican Church mainly on the grounds that it serves to keep the turbulent masses within bounds by obligating them to “subordination” and “obedience.” But Burke knew of course that by an overwhelming majority of people — whom he bluntly qualified as “men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life” (124) — this pleading for the clergy would not be favorably received in an age “poisoned” by “incendiaries” such as Paine and Price, an age which tended to denounce the aristocracy and clergy as “oppressors” and their claims to power and property as “superstition and error.” Since Burke was well aware of this situation, his Reflections develop a double strategy that is as ingenious as it is intriguing. On the one hand, he pragmatically defends the

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political status quo; on the other, grandiloquent pathos and rhetorical refinement serve to endow it with an aura of sacrosanctity. The central idea that Burke endeavors to restore is the shaken hierarchy of privileges of the great “chain of being,” the conception of the macrocosm as a gradation of beings, a conception that owes its foundation to Plato and Aristotle, its systematic elaboration to neo-Platonism, and its arguably most famous poetic rendering in English literature to one of Burke’s idols, Alexander Pope (Lovejoy 183ff.). Both Burke’s arch-enemy, Voltaire, and his friend of many years’ standing, Dr. Johnson (Lovejoy 252ff.), ridiculed this idea propagated by anti-Enlightenment philosophers, poets, and theologians of the eighteenth century as a scholastic concoction and botchwork of pseudometaphysics. To Dr. Johnson, it was merely a “beautiful fiction,” one “raised by presumptuous Imagination, to rest on Nothing at the Bottom, to lean on Nothing at the Top” (qtd. in Lovejoy 254). Voltaire regarded it as a “great phantom [meant to please] those good folk who fancy they see in it the Pope and his cardinals followed by archbishops and bishops …. O Plato … I fear that you have taught us only fables, and have never spoken except in sophisms. O Plato! you have done more harm than you know” (Lovejoy 252–3). But this rejection did not keep Burke from developing the most remarkable arguments from this empirically, philosophically, and theologically equally untenable model in order to consecrate and sanction the hierarchy. A good number of the ideas Burke develops are strikingly reminiscent of Pope’s version of the “chain of being” in the Essay on Man: Pope’s interpretation of the hierarchical order of the cosmos as the model of the God-given order of society is echoed in Burke’s Reflections wherever he speaks of the “entail” (192), of the “whole chain” (193), or of the “continuity of the commonwealth [which must not] be broken” (193). Pope’s “disposing Pow’r” (Epistle 1: 287), which assigns every human being his or her “own point [and] due degree” (1: 283) in the common “ORDER” (1: 281) and obliges everyone to “Submit” (1: 285), finds a correspondence in Burke’s Reflections, where “subordination,” which on the pragmatic level has been declared politically desirable, is clothed into the phrase “the principles of natural subordination” (372), thus imputing to it the dignity and incontestability of a law of nature. The curse, “Vile worm! — oh Madness, Pride, Impiety” (1: 258), which Pope hurls at anyone who — “absurd[ly] … claim[ing] to “be another, in this gen’ral frame” (1: 263–64) — threatens to break “[a]ll this dread ORDER” (1: 257), finds its correspondence in Burke’s Reflections in the innumerable imprecations against the revolutionaries. Finally, “the care of Heav’n” (2: 266), which keeps the poor in jovial mood in Pope’s poem, returns in Burke’s glorification of the Anglican Church offering “consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice” (Reflections 372) to those struggling in vain, just as it lies behind Burke’s denigration of the anti-clerical critic denounced as the true “oppressor, the merciless enemy of the poor and wretched” (372). But the most ambitious application of the analogy between macrocosm and sociocosm developed in Pope’s version of the “great chain” occurs in the famous “social contract” passage of the Reflections. It is inconceivable why, to this day, this passage is still regarded as “an affirmation and then elaboration of a Lockian idea” (Love 530), although F. J. C. Hearnshaw as early as 1931 proposed a reading significantly different from the established one, which, in his characteristically irreverent manner so appropriate to the passage discussed, he handily expressed in the following formula: Burke’s social contract “is resounding nonsense…. It sublimates

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Locke’s contract theory into limbo” (Hearnshaw 93). As previous critics have shown, Burke in this context does indeed use key terms of Locke’s contract theory developed in the Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) when he speaks of “Society” (194) as a “contract” (194), a “compact” (195), or a “corporation” (195) according to which the rulers are to act in the interest of the commonweal and are accountable to the public. But how little Burke’s social contract theory has in common with that of Locke and other theorists of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries becomes apparent in Burke’s use of the mere terms of liberal and democratic constitutional models that are alien to the concepts developed in the contract passage. For despite Burke’s largely constitutional stance in the better part of his book, here his contract knows nothing of a constituent assembly of citizens, let alone of their right to choose between different forms of government, nor does it hold the executive power accountable to the legislative power, a provision central to Locke’s concept of government. In Burke’s “Society” anchored in the “chain of being,” those in power are accountable only to God: “They are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author and founder of society” (Burke, Reflections 190). All other passages expounding his view of the “contract” also revolve around His will: “Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place” (195). Here, “each contract of each particular state” is explicitly tied to the “chain of being.” For just as “the great primaeval contract of eternal society” has appointed each creature its proper place in the hierarchy of the creation according to an inviolable and unchangeable law, so the “contract of each particular state,” which is “but a clause in the great primaeval contract” irrevocably assigns each human being a certain position and function in a hierarchical social order. According to the will of the omnipotent author of the “primaeval contract,” there can be no alternative: “If that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow” (195). For the rebels, who refuse the “submission to necessity” because they wrongly regard the system of government and the order of society as an “object of choice,” Burke ordains the same fate God ordained for Satan, the prototype of the rebel. They are driven from the “world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence” and are cast “into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.” And into this hell Burke presumably not only wishes John Locke, the originator of the right of resistance and of the idea of choice among different forms of government, but with him all those who were led up the garden path of history leading to anarchy and chaos: Richard Price, Thomas Paine, and the whole Gallic rabble, who, coupling their subversive “political speculations” with “the coarsest sensuality” (Kramnick 143ff.) doubled their burden of sin. By taking refuge in this mystification of the British establishment, Burke seems to admit implicitly that pragmatic and rational arguments are not sufficient to present his apology for the old order — passed off as constitutional patriotism — as the defense of a just cause. More

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precisely, he acknowledges that the apology for the old order can be mounted — if at all — only from the perspective of the elites by whom the claims, expectations, and hopes of more than 90 percent of the British population are unscrupulously declared illusions perdues and therefore simply considered negligible. But this mystification apparently seemed commendable to Burke despite its incompatibility with the essentially pragmatic approach of his apologia. For what Burke intended to make available to the elites, whom he believed to have cause to fear for the survival of the “principle of natural subordination,” was not merely an apology for the status quo in order to strengthen their self-confidence and their will to self-assertion, but also a well of solemn terms, concepts, and ideas from which the higher castes — whom Burke doubted to be intellectually as resourceful as they were influential and powerful — might draw in order to reintroduce “submission” as an inviolable law of nature to their rebellious subjects. Early English Reactions to the French Revolution When Burke’s Reflections appeared in November 1790, they were embraced by the British upper classes. But neither the Pitt government nor public opinion welcomed his biting and uncompromising dismissal of the French Revolution. Burke’s friend and long-standing political companion Charles James Fox considered the fall of the Bastille “the greatest and best event ever to have happened in the world” (Morley 30), and many intellectuals and poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Blake, and Burns shared his enthusiasm. But the view of pre-revolutionary France as a despotic regime and of the revolutionaries as people legitimately struggling for the freedom and economic renewal of their country was also predominant among a large proportion of the politically astute population. Leading British papers commenting on the events in France saw the French as finally bringing the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to their backward country in order to establish a form of government similar to the constitutional monarchy of Britain (Fennessy 3). This widespread opinion was no mere self-complacent fiction. In addition, many other Continental luminaries, such as Voltaire, arguably the most brilliant critic of absolutism, had described England as the truly liberal and tolerant society, which had successfully crowned an unparalleled struggle for liberation with the expulsion of the Stuart tyrants and the liberalization of the economy, the sciences, and religious and intellectual life and had become the model for the nations on the continent striving for political and social reforms (Gassenmeier, Londondichtung 222ff.). The Reception of Burke’s Conservatism in Britain and the United States A number of English radicals, however, regarded both Burke’s depiction of the French revolutionaries and his presentation of the British constitution as downright distortions. They replied with critiques of monarchy and aristocracy and with vindications of the political and social revolution that resulted in one of the most profound controversies concerning the fundamentals of politics in modern history. The spectrum of Burke’s opponents stretched from the radical left-wing populists to liberal humanitarians and included radical Whigs and Dissenters (Butler 2ff.). The most famous pamphlets that emerged from the campaign were Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), her A Vindication of the Rights of

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Woman (1792), Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), and William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) (Butler 72ff., 107ff., 149ff.). With the onset of the Jacobin reign of terror and the increasingly overt imperialist policy of the revolutionary armies culminating in the unprovoked destruction of the Swiss republic in 1798, Burke’s conservative creed gained new currency. Like many other intellectuals who saw their dream of universal liberty perverted into a nightmare of imperialist conquest and oppression, Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth recanted their former trust in the moral and political maturity of the liberated masses. And praising the once derided Burke as the much too long unacknowledged “Son of Genius and Freedom” (Gassenmeier, “Technique” 238ff.), they manifested their revised solidarity with the lower orders of society in post-revolutionary sermons in prose and in verse echoing Burke’s good tidings: society, they preached, is an organism differentiated into various classes, the respective function of which is equally valuable irrespective of whether it is granted or denied the right to vote and to rule. That right, Coleridge argued, was best left in the hands of an ethically trained aristocracy, “that small but glorious band [of] disinterested Patriots … whose mind is habitually imprest with … soul-ennobling views … and [who] may be justly said to dwell in the presence of the Most High.” “To those only,” he continues, “the avowal of political Truth” should be made and “never to the multitude, who ignorant and needy must necessarily act from the impulse of inflamed passions” (qtd. in Gassenmeier, “Taming” 60). Although Burke was praised as one of the great masters of the English language and his teachings as the essence of political wisdom, the romantic myth of Burke the heroic Tory was kept alive by his biographer, George Croly, an Anglican minister who actively and zealously opposed the Chartists, whom he regarded as Jacobins reincarnate. His purpose in writing on Burke during the 1840s was to compile “an anti-revolutionary manual of [his] wisdom” which was hoped to preserve the hierarchical society against the new menace of the working poor (Kramnick 41). In general, however, Burke was perceived rather as a precursor of liberalism and utilitarianism than as the prophet of reaction during the nineteenth century. Emphasizing his opposition to the Crown during the 1770s and his role in the American Revolution, John Morley, his second great nineteenth-century biographer, read Burke with his rejection of natural rights and other abstract principles as the pioneer of constitutionalism paving the way for Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. This embrace of Burke by Morley and other Victorian liberals like Henry Buckle, Leslie Stephen, and William Lecky marks the first step in his bourgeois acceptance (Kramnick 42). The historical process by which the author of the Reflections was enlisted to support the cause of the triumphant bourgeoisie became even more evident in the United States, where the bourgeoisie had established its rule untroubled by aristocratic opposition. Here Woodrow Wilson, the Princeton professor of jurisprudence and political economy and twenty-eighth president of the United States, praised Burke’s “mind [for] work[ing] upon concrete objects,” which he saw manifested in his disclaim for all “abstract reasoning [or] premises” (128) and “system[s]” (141), his preference for “[e]xpediency,” and his “practical and utilitarian” approach to the problems of society and everyday politics (158). Unlike the Victorian liberals who tended to overlook Burke’s tirades against the French revolutionaries, Wilson could also subscribe to Burke’s polemics against the bourgeoisie’s

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revolutionary philosophy and its struggle against the ancien régime, which to him seemed no less “radically evil and corrupting” than it had seemed to Burke in his days (155). Toward the end of the 1920s, however, when the “founder of Conservatism” seemed to be safely established both in Britain and in the United States by scholars like Arthur Baumann (Baumann 37ff.), Robert Murray (Murray 407f.), and Alfred Cobban (Cobban 12f.), his reputation suffered a series of attacks no less destructive than those that the radicals Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin had launched against the Reflections in the 1790s. The target of Sir Lewis Namier and his disciples, the great demythologizers of Burke in the twentieth century, was not, however, the author of the Reflections, but the younger author of the Observations on … the Present State of the Nation (1769) and the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), who had emerged as a leading propagator of party government and major critic of George III. The government of party Burke recommended as an efficient remedy against George III — whom he depicted as arrogating power to himself and trying to dominate both the executive and legislative power — was, to be sure, the government of a particular party, the “body of high-minded men” associated with Burke’s Whig-patron Wentworth, the second Marquess of Rockingham (Dreyer 31f.; Kramnick 112f.). Namier’s professed aim was to dethrone and demythologize Edmund Burke by unmasking his conception of late eighteenth-century history — with his portrait of the ambitious George III striving to corrupt parliament and subvert the Constitution — as a mere fiction (Namier, “George III” 17). His subtexts, however, are far more devastating: by suggesting that Burke was perfectly indifferent toward the sublime ideas and ideals he propagated in his pamphlets and speeches, that they were nothing but clever rationalizations for positions he thought expedient to hold, Namier not only ascribes to Burke a “fertile, disordered, and malignant imagination,” but also depicts him as a downright hypocrite whose lofty ideas are nothing but sanctimonious cloaks thrown over the interests of faction and connection (Namier, “George III” 140f.). While Burke was debunked by Namier’s school in Britain, his reputation was revived to unprecedented heights by America’s “Cold War Conservatives” in the 1950s and by the “New Conservatives” in the 1970s. For Russell Kirk, Lewis Bredvold, Peter Stanlis, or C. P. Ives, the spokesmen (Kramnick 45) of the former, Burke, whom they claimed to have saved Christian Europe from the terror of Jacobinism, became the congenial voice of warning needed during the Cold War to inspire the free world in its struggle against “the threat of world Communism” (Kirk 16ff., 209ff., Stanlis 248f.). And Allen Bloom, Irving Kristol, Jeffrey Hart, and Edward Banfield, the spokesmen of the latter, who indicted the universities of the late 1960s as hotbeds of naive “utopian illusions” (Kristol 144), of a “simplistic image of human nature,” and of a “revolutionary theory [of] freedom” (Hart 224), wove the arguments and keywords Burke employed in depicting the enemies of his consecrated state into their portraits of the young generation, which “has nothing left in God or man against which to measure itself” (Bloom 115ff.). And Edward Banfield, the most academic of the “New Conservatives,” sounds like Burke reincarnate whenever he turns on yesterday’s restless, mindless, and speculative tamperers: A political system is an accident. It is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstance. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident — the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society…. To meddle with the structure and operation of a

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Burke’s Conservatism and Its Echo in France In France, Pierre Gaetan Dupont’s translation of the Reflections appeared as early as 1790. But the book was rather poorly received even by the right (Godechot 64). Burke’s unreserved praise of the British constitution and his fierce criticism of the events in revolutionary France seem to have thwarted a wider appreciation of his doctrine (Zobel-Finger 86). Burke’s impact, however, is claimed to have been felt in the works of the two émigrés, Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, who, like Marx and Engels half a century later, are almost consistently named in one breath (Zobel-Finger 88). But since de Bonald shared the essential views of de Maistre (Godechot 96ff.) and only the de Maistre acknowledged his indebtedness to the author of the Reflections, the question of Burke’s influence in France can only be discussed here with reference to his writings alone. The Savoy-born Joseph de Maistre left his home country — then a French speaking province of Piedmont-Sardinia — after it was invaded by the revolutionary army in 1792. Having spent the first decade of his exile in Switzerland, he moved to the Russian court in St. Petersburg from 1803 to 1817 as the envoy of the king of Sardinia where his restorationist creed was strengthened by the example of the still functioning absolute monarchy. His major work, Considérations sur la France (Considerations Concerning France), first published in Lausanne in 1796 and in London in 1797 (de Maistre 27), is said to echo the whole spectrum of Burke’s Reflections (Artz 66). After reading it, de Maistre wrote to a friend in January 1791: “I cannot tell you how Burke has strengthened my anti-democratic and antiGallican views” (qtd. in Artz 66). Certainly, a first reading of de Maistre’s major work does suggest an affinity with the Reflections: in order to suggest the divine origin and the timeless validity of the hierarchically structured society of the ancien régime, de Maistre employs a variation of Burke’s version of the “chain of being” at the very beginning and, once again in the fifth chapter (31–57). In keeping with Burke’s encomium of the British constitution, he praises the “ancient French Constitution” (71) with the “grand prerogatives” (72) of the hereditary monarch, the “well-founded privileges” of the nobility, and the “rights and duties” of the lower orders (71ff.). Like Burke, he explains and defends the political and social inequalities with an eminently skeptical image of human nature (Weiss 48). He presents the “passions” as tending to “sully and pervert even the most simple creations” (57); he takes the cognitive and creative powers of men in general to be exceedingly limited (31) calling even the reason of the wisest but “a trembling light” (81).1 And regarding the reason and the self-control of the masses as virtually nonexistent (55, 63), he invokes the beneficial effect of prejudices in which he finds the “holiest laws” of religious and secular authorities quasi-internalized (Godechot 90). And recalling Burke’s polemics against the spiritual fathers and the ruthless disciples of enlightened thinking, de Maistre qualifies the philosophes as “a power essentially disorganizing” (57) and ascribes to the revolutionaries a downright “satanic character” (56).2

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At closer inspection, however, parallels between the Reflections and the Considérations indicate how similar language can be used to express widely differing political creeds. With his appeal to the “ancient French Constitution” (71ff.), which he claims does not “result from deliberation” or historical development (62) but is the product of divine influence (62) attributing “legislative power” (72) to the “most Christian king of France” (61)3 for all times, de Maistre propagates a theory of government fairly incompatible with Burke’s principles according to which legitimate authority lies within the strict bounds of constitutional accountability, i.e. within the perimeter laid down in the documents of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (Grab 20). Both writers, it is true, favor tradition against the innovations of 1789 based on “mere abstract reason,” but their traditions differ widely. Burke fights against the allegedly anarchic and terrifying consequences of the revolutionaries’ political and anthropological ignorance and inexperience for the sake of preserving the achievements guaranteed in the Bill of Rights of 1689. De Maistre fights for the sake of reestablishing the absolute monarchy, which Burke criticized as one type of those “simple governments [that] are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them” (qtd. in Preece 257). Burke develops his own intriguing double strategy when he weaves into his pragmatic defense of the political status quo grandiloquent mystifications that endow it with an aura of sacrosanctity. De Maistre elaborates Burke’s persuasive employment of images of divine order into a providentialist theory of history based on the theology of the Old Testament according to which God’s covenant can either be accepted together with a lasting relationship with Him or be rejected thus incurring his hatred and punishment (Clerval 86ff.). Consequently, de Maistre reads political constellations and struggles as acts of a theological or cosmic drama in which order and chaos become visible as emanations of angelic and diabolic powers, while revolutions and restorations are understood as re-enactments of original sin and redemption. Attributing a providential cause to the events in France, he explains the outbreak of the revolution and its expansion across the Continent as the result of the moral and religious decadence of the French and other peoples of Europe. Attracted by the glittering prospects of satanic seducers and lusting after the forbidden fruit of unqualified liberty and independence, the French were drawn into “a fight to death between Christianity and philosophy” (59) because some time, de Maistre prophecies, this struggle will yield a new satanic religion. Before long, however, Christianity will again triumph and restore a renovated and regenerated form of monarchy with a strengthened “theocratic element” (71). Convinced that France was being punished for having suffered the boat of order to be overcharged with the cargo of the Antichrist, de Maistre is not content with the restoration of the ancien régime. He wants to see a new regime set up based essentially on religion, a regime that will owe its unprecedented stability to “a greater number of high dignitaries of the Church in the civil government” (71f.).4 Supported by this “theocratic element,” the restored monarch is to annul the restraints that the regent, Phillip II, and Louis XVI had allowed to be imposed on their prerogative by the parlements, which had increasingly managed to undermine “the unity of power” attributed to the king of the nation in the “divinely inspired … ancient constitution of France” (72) and personified in the late “superb monarch Louis XIV” (73). When de Maistre paid a visit to France and to Louis XVIII, who had been a professed admirer of his Considérations, the restored monarchy turned out to be a great disappointment to him.

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Instead of establishing an absolute monarchy with a strengthened theocratic element, Louis XVIII had instituted a form of government which in de Maistre’s eyes consolidated many of the most lamentable achievements of the Revolution (Weiss 50f.). In his later writings, de Maistre drew the logical conclusions from his contempt for the sort of constitutional state Burke had propagated in his Reflections and Louis XVIII had come near to establishing by failing to scrap the Charter of 1814, which limited his prerogative, by choosing moderate royalists as his ministers, and by dissolving the ultra-dominated chamber to pave the way for the moderate royalists who emerged with a comfortable majority after the elections of 1816. In Du Pape (Concerning the Pope; 1819), written when he was back in Turin, where the restored rulers of Savoy had appointed him head of the judiciary and minister of state, de Maistre characterizes the types of “order” reestablished after the Congress of Vienna as fundamentally defective throughout Europe, renounces his former ideal of absolute monarchy as advocated in the Considérations, and requires the recognition of the Pope as Europe’s lawgiver and final authority. Only the union of earthly and spiritual power in the papacy, de Maistre argued, could end the perilous instability caused by rulers who, instead of ruthlessly outmanoeuvring the “rebellious and insolent fomenters of disorder,” enter with them into the most outrageous forms of compromise. In terms of practical politics, de Maistre proclaims in his last unfinished work, Les Soirées de Saint-Petersburg (The Evenings of St. Petersburg; 1821), the remedy is “more faith and more police,” which combination he summed up in his own frank formula: “the Pope and the executioners,” the former meant to give faith, the latter meant to eradicate the fomenters of disorder (Hackenbroch 124). In the final analysis, de Maistre translated Burke’s mainly pragmatic defense of “an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy” (Burke, Reflections 188) into an — allegedly Christian — reactionary authoritarianism bordering on totalitarianism, which after de Maistre presents itself in a diversified range of appropriations. In the later nineteenth century, it was adapted to industrial France by the clerical restorationist and editor of the influential newspaper L’Univers religieux (The Religious Universe; 1843 ff.), Louis-François Veuillot. And in the twentieth century, it augmented the ideology of Charles Maurras, the far-right founder of L’Action française (French Action), who ably integrated de Maistre’s idea of uniting the European powers under one supreme authority into his philosophy of collaborating with Nazi Germany. Burke’s Conservatism and Its Echo in Germany and Austria In his chapter on the development of conservative thought, Karl Mannheim states: “Germany achieved for the ideology of conservatism what France did for the Enlightenment — she exploited it to the fullest extent of its logical conclusions” and that the main stimulus came from Burke. “Counter-revolutionary criticism … achieved its most consistent exposition on German soil…. Prussia and Austria were the main citadels of conservatism” (Mannheim 82–83). Of the German writers who acknowledged their indebtedness to Burke, Adam Müller paid the most encomiastic homage to the Englishman:

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I say it with pride, he belongs more to us than to the British. I glory in the fact that my own ideas of the State … are hopeful children of his mind. He is recognized in Germany as the most influential and happiest mediator, between separation and unity of powers and of labor, between the principles of nobility and that of the bourgeoisie, and thus, no matter how influential his deeds may have been for Great Britain, his glory belongs to the German sphere. (qtd. in Preece 261)

But Müller not only made himself into a disciple of Burke, he also succeeded in convincing the majority of intellectual historians of the Burkean nature of his thought (Preece 255, 261). Even a brief investigation of Müller’s Elemente der Staatskunst (Elements of Statecraft; 1809), however, will show that he translated Burke’s conservatism into a nostalgic defense of feudalism. In his Elemente Müller presents the contemporary Continental societies as decaying and disintegrating (Müller 72ff.). As the underlying reasons for that progressive decline, the beginning of which he dates back to the 1780s (76), Müller points out an “unreserved idolization of absolute and exclusive private property” (76), a “reckless pursuit for ever more profit and produit net” (76) and a professed “detestation of all forms of moral conduct” in private and social life which had been shaped by Christian instruction and by the “institutions, traditions, customs, and laws of the state” since the Middle Ages (75f.). Great Britain, on the other hand, Müller portrays as the “happy island” (87) that prospered into the “first and foremost of all Christian states” (87) during this period of severe crises in Europe despite the fact that her economy was liberalized to a greater extent than in any other country and that her “international trade, her commerce and her industry were immensely extended and enlarged” (89). The explanation for Britain’s stability and growth is found in the “balanced constitution” of her “organic state” (90), in the equilibrium between “the spirit of feudal law” (89) represented in the House of Lords (91) and “supported by agriculture, real estate, and war” (90) and “the spirit of the right of property” (89), represented in the House of Commons (92) and “supported by industry, trade, commerce, and peace” (90). Since this “balanced constitution,” Müller argues, has kept alive both the “spirit of feudalistic obedience” (92) and the “spirit of feudalistic liberty” (92), Britain allowed the formation of a third estate, which flourishes because it enjoys no more than “limited rights” (99) and which is prepared to “sacrifice its own interests for those of the Commonwealth” because it has always preserved its devotion for “Christian ideas” (99) and regarded the state as consecrated by its religious establishment (96, 99). The logical conclusion of Müller’s comparison between the recent developments on the continent and in Britain is his plea for the restoration of feudalism in the European countries. With its vassals freely accepting personal links and loyally fulfilling civil or military duties and its lords accepting responsibilities for the former and remunerating them in the form of fiefs, feudalism is claimed to be no less than a social embodiment of “the Christian idea of the unconditional reciprocity of human relations to be confirmed, if required, by unreserved selfsacrifice, the most beautiful death” (94). There are aspects of Müller’s Elemente der Staatskunst that may suggest a somewhat closer affinity with features of Burke’s Reflections (Preece 261). Müller’s central message, however, his plea for the restoration of feudalism, is not indebted to Burke, whose defense of the aristocracy is remarkably marginal and has, as Mannheim noted, “too much of a rhetorical flavour” (Mannheim 138) in the Reflections. Even in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), where he presented “the aristocratic principle” as “safeguard

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in a well-balanced system of government against both popular and monarchical despotism” (Burke, Works 3: 86f.), Burke is far from idealizing the nobility or emphasizing the feudal structure of English society. Müller’s idolization of feudalism is homemade German romanticism. It is adumbrated in the Patriotische Phantasien (Patriotic Phantasies; 1778) of Justus Möser, who believed the stability of a state to reside in the power of the institutions that regulate landed property and reduce the influence of economic liberalism and capitalist bureaucracy (Godechot 107), and it is prefigured in Novalis’s Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe; 1799), that most exuberant praise of the harmony of medieval society in which each class had contentedly performed its duties and enjoyed its rights, secure in the knowledge that its social functions were divinely sanctioned and would be divinely rewarded (Weiss 41). What Adam Müller espoused in his Elemente is not Burke, but the romantic dream of a renewed medieval spirituality and a vision of Europe united in one vast political and moral empire under the holy leadership of the Pope, a vision with which not only Novalis but also the major antirevolutionary German romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel, Joseph von Görres, Friedrich von Schelling, and the Bavarian theocrat Franz von Baader were intoxicated (Zobel-Finger 96), long before Joseph de Maistre in his Du Pape translated it into a nightmarish policy of repression. If Karl Mannheim’s dictum, “Burke was anything but what … Gentz and his friend [Adam] Müller believed him to be” (Mannheim 82), is accurate as far as the latter is concerned, it does not do full justice to the achievement of the first German translator of the Reflections. In his later years, Gentz may be said to have “wavered [between] the conservative theory … of Edmund Burke, and that of Joseph de Maistre … realiz[ing] the inadequacy of both, [seeking] for a third, and [finding] rest nowhere” (Mann 279f.). In the 1790s, however, the later confidential adviser to the all-powerful Metternich came closer to a balanced understanding and appropriation of Burke’s conservatism than any of his other German, if not European, disciples. When Gentz translated the Reflections in 1793, he had lost his initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution and had overcome the prejudice he had fostered against “the principles and conclusions” of Burke’s book when he first read it in April 1791 (Träger 861).5 But this does not mean, as R. J. Sweet has argued, that he translated the book above all “because it was a magnificently eloquent tirade against the course of events in France” (Sweet 21). In his introduction to his translation of the Reflections, to be sure, Gentz points out a number of problematic features of the book: he makes no secret of his reservations about Burke’s “elevated stance,” his “unconnected, arbitrary, and frequently irregular sequence of ideas,” and his manner of formulating his opinions “with the voice of thunder,” which may, he owns, “preclude an unbiased reading of the work” (Burke, Betrachtungen xxvff.). That none of these features could preclude a conscientious reading and an unbiased judgment of the book on his own part is documented by his excellent translation, his extensive explanatory and critical annotations, and the five political treatises that Gentz added to the Reflections (Burke, Betrachtungen 122ff.). Here he presented Burke as a defender of the Bill of Rights of 1689, distinguished his stance from those of the propagators of divine right, the apologists of absolutism, and the nostalgic encomiasts of the medieval paradise lost. And Burke’s constitutionalism is shown to be based not so much on the respect for its feudal heritage, but rather on the Whig conceptions of liberty and equilibrium, which allowed the formation “not of an excellence in simplicity, but of one far superior, an excellence in composition,” a balance between contending powers, institutions,

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principles, classes, and individuals on the British isles (Burke, Betrachtungen 202ff.). In later years, Gentz adopted Burke’s conception of liberty in a series of articles, published in English as The French and American Revolutions Compared (1800), in which he interpreted the American Revolution as a defense of ancient liberties and charters against British usurpation and the French Revolution as an unhistorical, speculative, and ideology-laden undertaking (Gentz 1). Gentz applied Burke’s fundamental notion of “balance of power” in his Essay on the Financial Policy and National Wealth of Great Britain (1801), which aroused the admiration of British economists and politicians when translated into English (Godechot 117). For Gentz, the practical politician, Burke’s principle of equilibrium remained the great guiding idea even after Napoleon’s overthrow. He, who had so long and emphatically called the European monarchs to arms against Bonaparte, wished to maintain the defeated empereur on his throne fearing that his fall would result in a new outbreak of Jacobinism in France and in the ascendancy of Russia among world powers. Gentz’s German translation and appropriation of the Reflections, we may conclude, imparted the essentials of Burke’s conservative creed in more authentic terms than any other work of his professed devotees. In the German-speaking countries, however, with their lack of a tradition of freedom and constitutional development, the romantic appropriation of Burke’s conservatism prevailed, which threw overboard his liberal constitutionalism and, overemphasizing his consecration of the organic and hierarchical society, made the nation and its established or reestablished rulers the objects of awe and emotional veneration. Doing so, the romantic “disciples” of Burke supplied the doctrine required to buttress the continuing autocracy of the traditional elites both before and after the defeat of Napoleon. The theories of Burke spread widely both directly as well as indirectly though often in severely distorted fashion. However, one cannot deny their influence at different points along the ideological spectrum from the extreme right through genuine conservatism to middle-of-the-road liberalism.

Notes 1. “Les passions humaines ont beau souiller, dénaturer même les créations primitives”; “cette lumière tremblottante” (de Maistre 57, 81). 2. “une puissance essentiellement désorganisatrice”; “un caractère satanique” (de Maistre 57, 56). 3. “Aucune constitution ne résulte d’une délibération”; “au Roi très-Chrétien” (de Maistre 72, 61). 4. “c’est le combat à outrance du christianisme et du philosophisme”; “élément théocratique”; “un plus grand nombre de pontifes dans le gouvernement civil” (de Maistre 59, 71). 5. “Prinzipien und Sclußfolgerungen” (Träger 861).

References Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley. Artz, Frederick B. 1974. Reaction and Revolution: 1814–1832. New York: Harper. Banfield, Edward. 1964. “In Defense of the American Party System.” Political Parties U. S. A. Ed. Robert Goldwin. Chicago: Rand McNally. 21–39.

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Baumann, Arthur. 1929. Burke: The Founder of Conservatism. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Baumer, Franklin. 1977. Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600–1950. New York: Macmillan. Bloom, Allen. 1969. “The Democratization of the University.” How Democratic is America? Ed. Robert Goldwin. Chicago: Rand McNally. 109–36. Burke, Edmund. 1793. Betrachtungen über die französische Revolution nach dem Englischen, neu bearbeitet mit einer Einleitung, Anmerkungen, politischen Abhandlungen und einem kritischen Verzeichnis der in England über diese Revolution erschienenen Schriften von Friedrich Gentz. Trans. Friedrich von Gentz. Berlin: Friedrich Vieweg dem Älteren. ———. 1866. The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. 6 vols. London: Bell and Daldy. ———. 1969. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Butler, Marilyn. 1984. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Clerval, A. 1983. “Lire Joseph de Maistre.” La Nouvelle revue française. 369: 86–90. Cobban, Alfred. 1929. Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the 18th century. New York: Macmillan. Demandt, Alexander. 1978. Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken. München: Beck. Dishman, Robert B. 1971. Burke and Paine on Revolution and the Rights of Man. New York: Scribner. Dreyer, Frederick A. 1979. Burke’s Politics: A Study in Whig Orthodoxy. Waterloo, On.: Wilfred Laurier UP. Fennessy, R. R. 1963. Burke, Paine and the Rights of Man: A Difference in Political Opinion. The Hague: Nijhoff. Gassenmeier, Michael. 1987. “Wordsworth’s own Account of the French Revolution.” Beyond the Suburbs of the Mind: Exploring English Romanticism. Eds. Michael Gassenmaier and Norbert Platz. Studien zur englischen Romantik 2. Essen: Blaue Eule. 2: 116–36. ———. 1989. Londondichtung als Politik. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1992. “The Taming of Liberty: Visions and Revisions of the French Revolution in Coleridge’s Early Poetry.” Romantic Continuities. Eds. Günther Blaicher and Michale Gassenmaier. Studien zur englischen Romantik 4. Essen: Blaue Eule. 51–64. ———. 1994. “Gottfried August Bürgers Aufsatz ‘Die Republik England.’ “Gottfried August Bürger (1747–1794). Eds. Wolfgang Beutin and Thomas Bütow. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. ———. 1997. “Poetic Technique and Politics in Wordsworth’s Prelude.” Expedition nach der Wahrheit. Eds. Stefan Horlacher and Marion Islinger. Heidelberg: Winter. Gentz, Friedrich von. 1800. The French and American Revolutions Compared. Trans. John Quincy Adams. Presently available under the title Three Revolutions. 1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood P. Godechot, Jacques. 1971. The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789–1804. New York: Fertig. Grab, Walter. 1984. “Politische Ideale und Illusionen konservativer und linksliberaler Denker im Revolutionszeitalter.” Ein Volk muß seine Freiheit selbst erobern. Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg. 15–32. Hackenbroch, M. 1964. Zeitliche Herrschaft der göttlichen Vorsehung: Gesellschaft und Recht bei Joseph de Maistre. Bonn: Bouvier. Hart, Jeffrey. 1967. “Burke and Radical Freedom.” Review of Politics 29.2: 221–38. Hearnshaw, F. J. C. 1931. The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Revolutionary Era. London: Harrap. Hibbert, C. 1958. King Mob: The Story of Lord John Gordon and the Riots of 1780. London: Longmans Green. Kirk, Russell. 1967. Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House. Kramnick, Isaak. 1977. The Rage of Edmund Burke: A Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative. New York: Basic Books. Kristol, Irving. 1972. On the Democratic Idea in America. New York: Harper & Row. Love, Walter. 1965/66. “Meaning in the History of Conflicting Interpretations of Burke.” Burke Newsletter. 7:526–38. Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1942. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Maistre, Joseph de. 1980. Considerations sur la France. Ed. Jean Tulard. Paris: Garnier. Mann, Golo. 1946. Secretary of Europe: The Life of Friedrich Gentz, Enemy of Napoleon. New Haven: Yale UP. Mannheim, Karl. 1953. Conservative Thought. Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology. London: Routledge & K. Paul.



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Meinecke, Friedrich. 1963. Werke. Vol. 1. Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte. Ed. Walter Hofer. 3rd ed. München: Oldenburg. Meller, Horst. 1982. “Die frühe romantische Dichtung in England.” Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Klaus von See. Vol. 15. Europäische Romantik II. Ed. Klaus Heitmann. Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion. 189–214. Morley, John. 1907. Burke. London: Macmillan. Müller, Adam. 1809. Die Elemente der Staatskunst: Öffentliche Vorlesungen im Winter 1808 auf 1809, zu Dresden, gehalten. Berlin: Sander. Murray, Robert. 1931. Edmund Burke: A Biography. London: Oxford UP. Namier, Sir Lewis Bernstein. 1929. The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III. London: Macmillan. ———. 1930. England in the Age of the American Revolution. London: Macmillan. ———. 1958. “The Character of Burke.” The Spectator 19 December. ———. 1962. “King George III: A Study of Personality.” Crossroads of Power. New York: Macmillan. Paine, Thomas. 1894–96. The Writings. Ed. M. D. Conway. 4 vols. New York: Putnam. Pope, Alexander. 1963. The Poems: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations. Ed. John Butt. New Haven: Yale UP. Preece, Rod. 1980. “Edmund Burke and his European Reception.” The Eighteenth Century 21.3: 255–73. Price, Richard. 1789. Discourse on the Love of our Country. Oxford: Woodstock Books. Stanlis, Peter J. 1958. Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P. Sweet, R. J. 1970. Friedrich von Gentz. Westport, CT: Greenwood P. Träger, Klaus, ed. 1979. Die Französische Revolution im Spiegel der Deutschen Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Roderberg. Tuveson, Ernest. 1948. “The Origins of Moral Sense.” Huntington Library Quarterly 11: 241–59. Viereck, Peter Robert Edwin. 1965. Conservatism Revisited. New York: Free Press. Weiss, John. 1977. Conservatism in Europe 1770–1945. London: Thames and Hudson. Wilkins, B. T. 1967. The Problems of Burke’s Political Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon. Wilson, Woodrow. 1896. Mere Literature and Other Essays. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Zobel-Finger, Margrit. 1982. “Konterrevolutionäre Literatur in Europa.” Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Klaus von See. Vol. 15. Europäische Romantik II. Ed. Klaus Heitmann. Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft. 83–102.



Distorted Echoes The Mythologies of Nordic Nationalism STEVEN P. SONDRUP Brigham Young University

By means of language a nation is reared and educated, by means of language it becomes orderly and honorable, obedient, civilized, sociable, diligent, and powerful.1 J. G. Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, “Brief 57”

The centrality of national identity in romantic thought has long been obvious. It, however, is a complex issue involving a wide range of factors that manifest themselves in extremely varied ways throughout Europe as well as North and South America. To be sure, much of the romantic impetus to address national concerns can be traced to Herder — specifically to Von deutscher Art und Kunst, Von Ähnlichkeit der mittlern englischen und deutschen Dichtkunst, and Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität — and more generally to Hamann, whom Herder both critiqued but also promoted as well as to Montesquieu, whom he frequently cites. For the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Herder’s most important contribution was the recognition that the essence of a community was not to be sought in its political institutions or its high culture that were often contaminated by foreign influences of various sorts, but in the literary art of the simple and often remote populations that had maintained contact with their cultural and ethnic roots in ways precluded by the homogenizing international culture of urban centers. The influence of the young Herder on the even younger Goethe during their days in Straßburg is legendary, and the literary fruits of his awakening Goethe’s interest in Shakespeare, the Gothic, and folk literature are enthusiastically celebrated. In many respects, German romanticism is a manifestation of and reaction to the emerging acceptance of the non-classical past as a source of literary inspiration as well as a rallying point for the heightening of national consciousness in both an aesthetic as well as a political sense. The varied responses were, to be sure, complex ranging from enthusiastic endorsement of the uniquely Germanic past in the pioneering philological work of the Grimms or the music dramas of Wagner to the more nuanced and complex thought of Hölderlin and the late Goethe, for example. Although Herder’s influence at home was substantial, his impact outside Germany was also pervasive where it may well have had even greater long term results as a catalyst in the development of new centers of national communalism. The historical and sociological importance of nationalism as well as its conceptual complexity have become even more apparent in the declining years of the twentieth century than they were during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Although Marx predicted movement toward internationalism, the cohesive

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force of nationalism and the idea of nationhood have manifested their thoroughgoing potency vis-à-vis ideologies and political pragmatism even while nations are moving toward various overarching forms of political and economic integration. It is surely to belabor the obvious to point out that both Britain and France, though already politically integrated modern nation-states to which Herder himself even turned with an admiring glance, developed amplified senses of national identity in the revivification of their respective historical uniqueness during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the case of Britain, Percy (Reliquies), Wharton, and MacPherson come immediately to mind; with regard to France, the somewhat later rediscovery of its own richly varied medieval heritage looms large. Smaller ethnic and national communities all across Europe — in both eastern Europe as well as western, in the north as well as the south — also began seeking ways to legitimize claims for independent national political recognition in the distinctive aesthetic glories — literary, architectural, musical, or folkloric — of their past. On the peripheries, these rousings of nationalist sentiments were even more vigorous and variegated than in the well-established cultural centers. Since many nations not situated in the European heartland were struggling to establish not only an identity but also a presence in the growing community of modern nation-states, the stakes were higher. To the east Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Serbian, Bulgarian, Russian, and Romanian cultural as well as political nationalists were energetically promoting the viability of their respective traditions; in the south of Europe, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese partisans were in various ways celebrating and promoting extremely divergent aspects of local culture. In the north, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Faeroese, and Icelandic writers were examining their collective as well as distinctly individual pasts in order to rediscover historical justifications for political and social aspirations. The ends to which they went and the results they achieved must be counted as among the most notable achievements of romantic nationalism and invite particular attention. With regard to the vigorous and consequential implementation of Herder’s social-cultural agenda, northern Europe offers some particularly arresting examples that are in part a result of political and cultural developments that provided an especially hospitable environment for his thought. When the Kalmar Union completely collapsed in 1520, the political unity that had to varying degrees consolidated all of the Nordic area from Finland in the east to Iceland in the west as well as various outpost along the Baltic came to an end. Denmark and Sweden each plotted an individual and self-sufficient course under the direction of relatively strong and independent monarchies. The Danish realm included all of what is today Denmark as well as parts of Germany and Sweden and all of Norway and Iceland along with Greenland and the Faeroe Islands and would eventually also embrace the Danish West Indies, fortifications in Ghana, and a small claim at Trankebar in India; the Swedish sphere of influence extended through most of what is now Sweden and Finland — which in 1155 had officially been made a province of Sweden by King Erik acting in concert with Henry, Bishop of Uppsala — and at various times also encompassed parts of Poland (and between 1784 and 1878 the Caribbean island of Saint Bartholemew). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, each began to formulate narratives chronicling its own historical development often in fanciful and highly imaginative ways. In Denmark the fashioning of a national history is inextricably associated with Iceland. Among the most important early developments in the forging of a proud national past was the 1636

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publication in Amsterdam of Runir seu Danica litertura antiqvissima, vulgo Gothica dicta (Runes or the Oldest Danish Literature Popularly Called Gothic) by Ole Worm and the Icelandic scholar, poet, and priest, Magnús Ólafsson (1573–1636). The title itself reveals the conflation of various concepts that later were more carefully discriminated: the term runes did not designate just inscriptions using letters of the futhark, but ancient Nordic literature generally, and Gothic referred to what in modern parlance would be called Norse. Later in the century, Arni Magnússon, perhaps the greatest collector of medieval Icelandic manuscripts, arrived in Copenhagen where he worked with Thomas Bartholin (1659–90), the son of the well known scientist and publisher, on the anthology of Old Norse texts entitled, Antiquitatum danicorum de causis contemptae a danis adhuc gentilibus mortis, libri tres: ex vetustis codicibus & monumentis hactenus ineditis congesti (Why the Danes Did Not Fear Death during the Pagan Period). In noteworthy contrast to Denmark’s early and thoroughgoing orientation toward the heroic traditions preserved in Iceland, Sweden pursued a rather different course. Like their contemporaries in Denmark, Swedish scholars investigated and published editions of Icelandic texts, but Sweden also fancifully linked its claim to political legitimacy to being the original homeland of the Goths whose conquest of the Roman Empire was indicative of military prowess and valor. The first documented account of an official claim to prominence based on Sweden’s Gothic heritage is a report of an address in 1434 at the Council of Basel by bishop Nils Ragvaldsson in which he claimed priority in seating over the Spanish representative because the Goths, whose presence in Spain had been used to buttress the Spanish prelate’s claim, had migrated there from Sweden. Although doubt had already arisen concerning the historical plausibility of the claim, Johannes Magnus took it up in his Gothorum Sveonumque historia (History of the Goths and the Swedes) published in Rome in 1554. During the period of Sweden’s political and military supremacy in the seventeenth century, assertions of preeminence grounded in a culturally superior Gothic past became even more extravagant, and Sweden’s acquisition in 1648 of the Gothic Bible — the Codex Argenteus, a fourth-century manuscript containing 187 leaves of Bishop Wulfila’s translation of the Bible into Gothic, now in the Uppsala University Library — as a result of military victory near Prague during the Thirty Years War tended to validate that line of thinking. The zenith of the Swedish Gothic fantasy came in the 1679 publication of Olaus Rudbeck’s (1630–1702) Atland eller Manheim (Atlantica or Sweden) to which two further volumes were added while a fourth and final volume remained unfinished at Rudbeck’s death. Rudbeck postulated that Sweden was the world’s most ancient and venerable kingdom from whose Gothic sources all culture and learning flowed to the rest of the world. This unlikely conclusion derives from the speculation that Plato’s Atlantis was actually Sweden. Indeed all ideal communities described in classical literature and especially the Hyperborean Isles were taken as longing portrayals of ancient Sweden. Though the implausibility of Rudbeck’s thesis is obvious to modern readers, his imaginative speculations and linguistic deductions were widely entertained with an almost religious fervor and garnered official state support. With the advent of the Enlightenment, however, more critical historical methods largely discredited such capricious approaches, and Swedish Gothicism migrated from the historical to the socio-literary sphere. The geo-political situation in Scandinavia had remained relatively stable for the nearly three hundred years after the collapse of the Kalmar Union during which these particular facets of an

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orientation toward the past emerged. The situation, however, changed dramatically during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In consequence of an ill-conceived and poorly fought war with Russia during which Sweden sought to maintain its allegiance to Britain and opposition to Napoleon’s Continental System, Sweden lost its sovereignty over the Åland Islands and far more significantly over Finland, which became a relatively independent grand duchy within the Russian empire (Treaty of Fredrikshamn/Hamina, 1809). As a result of Denmark’s failure to support the continental blockade against Napoleon, moreover, the Treaty of Kiel awarded Norway to the Swedish monarch as a partial compensation for the loss of Finland. This course of events left everyone directly involved disspirited, unhappy, and deeply frustrated with regard to a sense of national identity and dignity. The Danes were embarrassed by the loss of Norway; the Swedes were humiliated by the loss of Finland for which the union with Norway did not compensate; the Norwegians and the Finns were disgusted by being used as pawns in the greater European game of power politics that took only scant account of their own nationalistic aspirations; and the Icelanders felt — understandably — marginalized and neglected after suffering enormous deprivations as a result of the interruption of trade during the Napoleonic Wars. Against this background, each of them renewed efforts — whose origins date back centuries — and formulated strategies to ground a new sense of national identity and political resolve in the cultural achievements of the past. Their zeal to achieve the sense of national well being that Herder promised derived from the cultivation of the unique aspects of the indigenous national heritage was often far greater than their historical understanding, and the creativity of their appropriation of history remains far more revealing than the question of the acuity of their vision of their collective past. The past they wanted and imaginatively constructed for themselves, thus, discloses more in this context than the past they actually had. Sweden’s cultural response to the humiliating defeat manifest itself most strikingly among an energetic group of young students in Uppsala who founded the Gothic Society in order to promote the cultivation of the ancient national virtues of courage, valor, and honor, which Herder’s thinking that had made its way to this university city seemed to promise would lead to national renewal. The two most important members of the society were E. G. Geijer and A. A. Afzelius, and the society’s most notable project was the publication of the short-lived journal Iduna, named for the goddess of youth and wife of Bragi, the god of poetry, in Norse mythology. Geijer published a number of poems extolling Norse virtues and became a prominent figure in Swedish cultural politics; Afzelius achieved prominence as a collector of folk tales. Gothicism remained an important tradition at Uppsala, which became Sweden’s most significant center of romantic culture, and from there continued to influence Swedish writers throughout much of the nineteenth century. From the point of view of literary merit as well as enduring importance, the most important advocate of Swedish romantic Gothicism is Esaias Tegnér. His poem “Svea” (1811) so vigorously advocated a military campaign to reclaim Finland — “och inom Sveriges gräns erövra Finland åter” [1:371] (and conquering again bring Finland within Sweden’s borders) — that the venerable Swedish Academy invited him to moderate its inflammatory rhetoric in order to receive a proposed prize lest the government be embarrassed by its strident tone (1812). His masterpiece, however, is certainly the long poem Frithiofs saga, (1825), which Longfellow translated into English in which he endeavors, among many other things, to provide an edifying view of Norse heroism suitable for modern Christian Sweden.

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Denmark, though, is typically mentioned as the country that first responded to romantic influence from abroad and nurtured distinctly romantic native-grown sentiment. With interest in the Nordic past having been sustained by the publication of The Prose Edda (1660), Heimskringla (1633), and Íslendingabók (1733 in Latin; 1738 in Danish) by the indefatigable Peter Frederik Suhm and by the appearance of Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc, ou l’on traite de la religion dex loix, des mœurs et des usages des anciens Danois (Introduction to the History of Denmark in which the Religion, Laws, Customs, and Practices of the Ancient Danes Are Considered; 1755; famously published in 1770 in an English translation by Bishop Percy under the title Northern Antiquities) and the enormously popular Monumens de la mythologies et de la poesie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves (Monuments of the Mythology and Poetry of the Celts and particularly of the Ancient Scandinavians; 1756) by the courtappointed Swiss historian, Paul Henri Mallet, Denmark was prepared to embrace and adapt many of the attitudes and practices central to Herder’s early romantic thinking. This attempt to plumb the depths of the Old Norse literary tradition that was just emerging was characterized by a mixture of philological sophistication that was growing rapidly in its acuity and accuracy of historical vision and a lingering tendency to leap to unwarranted and sometimes amusingly fanciful conclusion. One particularly revealing example can be observed in the Danish appropriation of Beowulf. Responding to this newly emerging need to collect literary monuments that documented the national past, Grímur Thorkelin obtained a travel grant from King Christian and in 1785 went to Great Britain and Ireland, where he remained until 1791 when he was named the Keeper of the National Archives in Copenhagen. Returning to Denmark, he had with him two copies of the composite, eleventh century codex of Beowulf, (CottonVitellius A. xv), one that he had commissioned to be made by a member of the British Museum staff, perhaps James Matthews, known as Thorkelin A (Ny Kgl. Saml. 513) and one he made himself, Thorkelin B (Ny Kgl. Saml. 512). On the basis of his transcription, he prepared the first published edition of Beowulf, De Danorum rebus gestis seculi iii & iv: Poëma Danicum dialecto Anglo-Saxonica published in Copenhagen in 1815. The edition consisted of a printed version of his transcription accompanied by a facing-page Latin translation. From the beginning, the edition has not fared well: critics at home and abroad have noted hundreds of errors and a generally sloppy and slovenly approach to the editing of the text. From a philological point view, perhaps the most important contribution of the edition is that it preserves part of the original manuscript that was subsequently damaged in a fire. The edges of many pages of the original codex were singed in

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1731 and have since fallen off but fortunately not before Thorkelin’s transcriptions were made. Beyond helping to restore what was in the original manuscript, the edition itself is highly problematic, yet its Latin preface reveals an arresting array of assumptions, conclusions, and conjectures that offers considerable insight into the cultural hopes and aspirations of the early years of the nineteenth century. The title Thorkelin gave the volume is also highly suggestive: De Danorum rebus gestis seculi iii & iv — Concerning the Things Done by the Danes during the Third and Fourth Centuries — stresses Thorkelin’s belief that what is now known as Beowulf is best understood as an account of ancient collective Danish heroism rather than an account of the acts of an individual hero. The subtitle, Poëma Danicum dialecto Anglo-Saxonica — A Danish Poem in the Anglo-Saxon Dialect — claims the epic narrative as part of the distinctly Danish cultural heritage even more clearly and explicitly and construes Old English as a dialect of Old Danish or probably more aptly what is typically called Old Norse. Although the events the poem narrates are clearly set in the ancient Danish realm of political and cultural influence, the artistic crafting of the poem is just as clearly the work of an Old English poet — regardless of whether one accepts North Umbria during the vigorous and sophisticated age of Bede, Mercia during the reign of the great King Offa, seventh-century East Anglia, or some other locale as the origin — and it speaks to the poetic sophistication and literary taste of Anglo-Saxon culture. The introduction to the edition, though, is even more specific and wide ranging than the title in laying claim to the poem. Among all the monuments of the ancient Danish world which devouring time has left us, the epic of the Scyldings, now published, stands out as an astonishing achievement. For here we have an overflowing fountain from which can be drawn knowledge about the religion, poetry, and deeds of our people in the third and fourth centuries. (Bjork 298)4

That Beowulf should be regarded as a notable monument of ancient Danish customs and mores is not surprising or problematic. Thorkelin, though, not only views it as a source of knowledge about the national past but also see it indirectly as a national rallying point and source of national pride and confidence. After describing how he was able to gain access to the manuscript version of the poem, he explicitly aligns the poem with the Danish cultural tradition and castigates those who would argue otherwise. That our poem of the Scylding is indeed Danish will be clear to anyone who sees that the author was an eyewitness to the exploits of kings Hroðgar, Beowulf, and Hygelac, and was the eulogizer at the funeral of Beowulf, who died in Jutland in the year of our Lord 340. By Hercules! I am astounded that Hickes attributed to the Anglo-Saxons a song that poured forth from the Danish bard, fired by the flame of hyperborean Apollo. (Bjork 302)5

Thorkelin’s avowal of the poem’s Danish provenance is based on scarcely anything more than bravura and enthusiasm, certainly nothing even remotely resembling careful philological analysis. The assertion though buys into the popular tradition that Beowulf was Oðin’s son, Boe, who according to Suhm had died in 340. His summary dismissal of the respected scholar George Hickes’s attribution of Beowulf to Anglo-Saxon sources is more troublesome. The first recorded reference to Beowulf is in Humphery Waley’s Antiquæ literaturæ septentrionalis liber alter,

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which is the second volume of Hickes’s Linguarum veterum septentrionalium Thesaurus. Thorkelin’s rebuke of Hickes is a result of his uncritical zeal and naive acceptance of a widely circulated notion that all of the major ancient languages of northern Europe could be explained in terms of Danish. Obviously he [Hickes] does not remember that the language spoken by the English before William I had been common to three peoples of the north — all called by one name “Danes” — who spoke slightly different dialects of the same tongue. This fact is as clear as the light of day, even if no other authority could be found for it. For our epic plainly teaches that the Anglo-Saxon idiom is actually Danish, a language cultivated and kept pure even to this day by the inhabitants of Iceland, who dwell almost beyond the path of the sun. (Bjork 302)6

With greater historical distance and more sophisticated philological understanding, it is easy to be amused by Thorkelin’s exaggerations and unwarranted conclusions. Even though in many cases he is simply repeating and in some cases amplifying questionable deductions of contemporaries, he probably could and should have known better. Yet these highly problematic determinations illustrate a desire to requisition the glory of a bygone civilization for contemporary use in establishing a sense of national identity. This uncritical eagerness to lay claim to important cultural monuments of antiquity should not, however, obfuscate a modern effort to understand the eighteenth-century desire to validate a national present on the basis of accomplishments of the past. It not only sought an authentic and unadulterated source of national identity as an indication of cultural well-being as Herder had argued, but also appropriated the accomplishments in order to confirm and justify contemporary claims for attention. Implicit in the claim that Beowulf should be recognized as a Danish cultural achievement are the assumptions that not only the heroic acts of Beowulf himself are distinctive markers of national identity, but also that the purely literary value of the poem also endowed nineteenth-century Danish society with undeniable cultural merit and potential. The traditional account of romanticism’s arrival in more or less fully developed form in Denmark just eleven years after Thorkelin’s return to Copenhagen is striking in its simplicity and directness. The young scholar, Heinrich Steffens (1773–1845), had spent time in Jena beginning 1798 during which he attended the now-famous lectures of Schelling and Fichte and was befriended by Schlegel, Tieck, and Novalis and had, thus, an immediate and first-hand introduction to the principal aspects of early German romanticism as it was articulated in Jena. In 1802, he returned to Copenhagen, where he gave a series of public lectures highly critical of the enduring strains of Enlightenment rationalism and offering ardent endorsement of the major tenets of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, art, and history. The first nine of the lectures were subsequently published in Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger (Introduction to Philosophical Lectures; 1803). Among the members of the audience of the original lectures, however, were two young men who both later became leading figures in Danish cultural life: Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850) and N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872). The lectures had a profound effect on Grundtvig in suggesting new modes of historical understanding, which became particularly important in the ongoing struggle to reconcile his enthusiastic appreciation for Old Norse culture with his commitment to Christian values. Herder’s segmentation of universal history into three principal periods — primal innocence, decline pursuant to the Fall, and eventual achievement of

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a golden age — offered Grundtvig important new conceptual tools for configuring and understanding history, not only local and regional history, but the history of the world and the human family as well. Although his early interests were wide ranging, Grundtvig’s later career concentrated on efforts to reform the Danish State Church and on pedagogy. The impact of Steffens’s lectures on Oehlenschläger, though, is more readily apparent and fully acknowledged. Oehlenschläger not only heard the lectures but also sought Steffens out for an extended conversation, which has become legendary in the history of Danish literature. The result of their contact was to confirm in Oehlenschläger the intellectual and aesthetic viability of his nascent interest in the national past and to energize his resolve. He accordingly reworked poems that were published the following year, Digte (Poems; 1803), and wrote what is one of the most famous poems in Danish literature, “Guldhornene” (The Golden Horns), which relates in ecstatic terms the story of the discovery and subsequent loss of two gold drinking horns fashioned some time around 400 A.D., which came to represent a call to greater attention to and appreciation of the Germanic past. Although the composition of “Guldhornene” is often seen as the beginning of Scandinavian romanticism, its actual import is better understood in symbolic terms. Steffens was not the only purveyor of German romantic thinking in Denmark, and the authors upon whom he had the most profound effect had all shown tendencies toward romantic themes and techniques before he first appeared upon the scene. He nonetheless galvanized tendencies and inclinations that otherwise may have remained dormant and catalyzed a series of reactions extending through much for the first half of the nineteenth century that proved extremely productive in many aspects of Scandinavian cultural life. Oehlenschläger, however, was not so naive as to presume that Norse culture could be transplanted into modern Christian society. He fully apprehended that a vast historical gulf divided the two worlds, yet his understanding of the Norse gods as seen for example in Balder hin Gode (1806) and Hakon Jarl (1807) portrays them as embodiments of eternal values that could conceivably eventually be reconciled with Christian virtue. In responding specifically to inquiries about distinct Nordic virtues, he explains he is awaiting a time when “the holy cross will be fused and become one with Thor’s mighty hammer” (25:147–8).7 Does a nation, even an uncultivated nation have anything more dear that the language of its fathers? In it lives its entire treasury of ideas concerning tradition, history, religion, and principles of life, all its heart and soul.8 J. G. Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, “Brief 10”

Although the cultural-philosophic problems arising from Oehlenschläger return to Nordic myth are not to be dismissed too lightly, the challenge that faced Norwegians was more complex and daunting and of a distinctly immediate and practical nature. Although Norway had been a prominent and independent country during the Viking Age, it lost its sovereignty during the late fourteenth century and remained part of Denmark until 1814 when it was united with Sweden. Having been prohibited from importing grain and other food and from exporting wood and fish during the British blockade, Norwegians suffered enormously from famine and other hardships.

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When word of the provisions of the Treaty of Kiel, which united Norway with Sweden, reached Norway in January of 1814, an independence movement was already well under way. A constitutional assembly met in April and by May had drafted a constitution drawing liberally on that of the United States and France (1791) as well as the thinking of Rousseau and Montesquieu. The constitution was signed on May 17 and Christian Frederik was elected king but to no avail. Although Britain was generally sympathetic to the nationalist aspirations, commitments favoring union had been made to Napoleon’s erstwhile general Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, who had become king of Sweden as Karl Johan. Although the bid for an independent constitution had failed, the nationalist sentiments that it inflamed could not so easily be quelled. Against the background of these political developments, Norwegian writers faced the challenge of providing plays, poems, and narratives of various sorts that addressed the growing need for national self-definition. Like writers all over Europe responding to the same need, they turned to their past and the rural areas that had not been contaminated by the leveling forces of internationalism. Norway, however, faced a distinctive problem in this regard. Having been politically united with Denmark for nearly five hundred years, the language of government, the church, and the educated city dwellers had become ever more like Danish. To be sure, differences remained, but they were minimal. The need for a national language that clearly and unambiguously distinguished the Norwegians from the Danes was acutely felt. Their thinking echoed Herder’s views that it is by means of cultivating a distinct and particular language and its attendant literature that a viable national state is grounded. Two approaches arose in response to this need for a national Norwegian language: a fairly conservative Norwegianization of the basically Danish language advocated by Knud Knudsen (1812–1895) on the one hand or the constitution of a new genuinely Norwegian language out of an amalgam of rural dialects championed by Ivar Aasen (1813–1896) on the other. Knudsen, an educator and linguist, shared many of Aasen’s views on the need for a national language and on particular linguistic adaptations that should be made. But he was not willing to go as far in adopting what cultivated urban dwellers would have thought unnatural or unfamiliar. His reforms that have implications for all aspects of the language can most clearly be seen, however, in terms of orthography and diction. The cumulative result of his efforts gave rise to Bokmål or Riksmål, as the language is more widely known, which is what most speakers typically have in mind when referring simply to Norwegian. It is today one of the two official languages of Norway and is used as a language of choice by more than 80 percent of the population. Its success and preeminence were virtually assured when prominent writers like Bjørnson and Ibsen adopted it in whole or substantial part. Later spelling reforms — those of 1907, 1917, and 1938 — continued along the lines first mapped by Knudsen and have yielded a contemporary language clearly centered on a Norwegian base. The work of Ivar Aasen, though not as far reaching in terms of the contemporary language, is even more interesting from the point of view of the fundamentally romantic impulse of validating nineteenth-century political aspirations in rediscovering the past. Aasen set about the task of shaping a language consistent with the romantic nationalistic sentiments with two purposes in mind: he primarily sought to restore the indigenous system of writing — orthography, diction, morphology, and syntax — that had come rather abruptly to an end at the time of

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Norway’s union with Denmark; he secondarily wanted to establish a language that would more adequately meet the needs of all of his countrymen than the written language of the urban centers. During extensive travel in rural regions, Aasen familiarized himself with the overarching similarities as well as a whole range of minute details from the various distinct dialectics he encountered. After more than four years of traveling and collecting material in southern Norway, examining it in detail, and synthesizing conclusions on the basis of methods and procedures derived from Jacob Grimm and the highly respected Danish linguist, Rasmus Rask, he was ready to suggest norms and standards that were a reconstruction of an ideal or synthetic form of the dialects. His goal was the reconstitution of the language that Old Norwegian would have become if it had not disappeared. Since the project was understood as the continuation of a historical linguistic process, it tended to be more linguistically conservative than any of the dialects individually. What resulted is the other of Norway’s two official languages, Nynorsk or formerly Landsmål, which was first officially recognized in 1885. After its approval and introduction into the school system of Norway, it gradually gained acceptance until 1944 when estimates suggest more than a third of the population used Nynorsk as their primary language. The most important results of Aasen’s work are presented in the grammar, Norsk grammatik (1864) and the dictionary, Norsk ordbok (1873). As early as 1850 with the publication of the preliminary Ordbog over det norske Folkesprog (Dictionary of the Language of the Norwegian People), however, Aasen’s preface makes the inherent worth and dignity he attributes to the language of rural Norwegians clear. The old talk that the language of the peasant farmers is evil and ugly can no longer find any support among linguists, since already even a superficial knowledge of the old language is enough to show that it is precisely the language of the farmers that we must keep if we want to attribute any value to nationalism in language. It is thus to hope that the recognition of the language’s true value will eventually become more and more wide spread and that even the populace will thus be led to give more attention to the language of our fathers and seek to maintain it. (4)9

That noteworthy values relating to national identity can be found in the uncorrupted language of rural people had long since become an important rallying cry for nationalists all over Europe, and efforts to collect specimens of their unique and particular use of language were legion. Herder’s celebration of folk customs and the Grimms’ far more philologically sound methodologies had motivated armies of collectors. None, however, had harbored more far-reaching goals than Aasen. Whereas typically those who endorsed this celebration of rustic language did so with the view to renewing poetic language as a means of resuscitating the national spirit, Aasen’s goals were nothing short of constituting a language that would become the medium not only of literary discourse but also of everyday use by Norwegians from all walks of life. The fact that he was able to formulate a language based on perceived rural discursive practices and standards that won widespread acceptance and eventual legal recognition enduring to this day is a singular manifestation of the romantic commitment to the language of the people with the least contact with homogenizing educational standards. Aasen’s awareness of the wide-ranging implication of his undertaking gradually grew and developed. In the preface to his first grammar, Det norske Folkesprogs Grammatik (Grammar of the Norwegian People’s Language; 1848), he stressed the

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close relationship of the language norms he was advancing to those of other Nordic languages. By 1864 when Aasen wrote his second grammar, entitled simply Norsk Grammatik, he expressed his confidence that it was the only language that fully embodied the cultural heritage of the Norwegian people. At the very end of the grammar, he describes the language as, not only … a priceless memorial from our forefathers, and a clear sign of the people’s rightful position in the genealogy of the related peoples, but … also … the only mode of expression that is completely suited to the people’s thoughts and to the country’s inherited customs. (§399)10

Although the question of a nationally viable language was a concern of romantics in many parts of Europe, none went quite as far as the formulation of what became a new national language intended for general use by the populous. Although Manzoni’s eventual masterful recourse to the Tuscan dialect, for example, went a long way toward establishing it as the norm of literary Italian, it by comparison has probably had fewer far reaching consequences and implications. Although the eventual impact of Aasen’s work was without doubt significant, the means by which it was accomplished are relatively modest. Neither the Ordbog over det norske Folkesproget nor the Norske Ordbog claims to be a definitive historical dictionary of the language. In comparison to the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch or other examples of historical lexicography, they are small indeed. Although Aasen clearly articulates his hope that his dictionaries will become the foundation for future scholarly research, they are intended for practical use in providing a language that both embodies the spirit of the nation and is a serviceable means of communication for people throughout the country. Aasen’s view that his construction of what Norwegian would have been had the course of political history been different was indeed a viable and functional means of communication initially met with some skepticism. In order to demonstrate its practicability, Aasen published Prøver af landsmaalet i Norge (Samples of Norwegian Country Language; 1853), which shows the language’s flexibility in various situations including ordinary discursive prose, conversation, poetry, and his own translations of passages from Shakespeare, Schiller, and Tegnér. Aasen himself was the first poet to use Nynorsk as his medium of communication. As a poet, he was blessed with only modest talent, but his poems show a linguistically inventive mind at work. He also wrote a one act play, Ervinge, (The Heir), which has been something of a favorite among Norwegian amateur theatrical groups, but is today principally of only cultural-historical interest. The most accomplished and well-known writers of Nynorsk are Arne Garborg, (1851–1924) all of whose novels with the exception of Trætte Mænd (Weary Men; 1891) are written in that language, and the novelist, dramatist, and poet Tarjei Vesaas (1897–1970). Aasen, though, was not alone in laying the foundation for an emergent community by defining its language. The Faeroe Islands — eighteen small islands located between the Shetland Islands and Iceland in the North Atlantic — were also empowered during the early nineteenth century with a written language that eventually led to a sense of ethnic identity and a flourishing literary culture. Settled initially by Celts and then colonized by Vikings from western Norway, the Faeroe Islands were eventually incorporated into the Norwegian realm with both church and state affairs being administered from Norway. Like Norway itself, they were in due course integrated into the far-flung Danish empire, and Danish became the language in which official business was conducted.

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The literary heritage of the Faeroes, however, is meager: only two runic inscriptions and a handful of documents from the fifteenth century have survived. Even with the Protestant emphasis on use of the vernacular, the liturgy and the Bible both persisted in Danish even though translations were readily made into Icelandic. Not until Jens Christian Svabo (1746– 1824) devised his own orthography and prepared two collections of ballads (1773 and 1781–82), was anything added to the corpus of Faeroese literature. But growth was relatively rapid. During the summer of 1817, Hans Christian Lyngbye, a Danish biologist, was in the Faeroes studying algae and happened to write down a few fragments of popular ballads he heard. Upon his return to Copenhagen, he presented them to P. E. Müller, a respected philologist who recognized them as bits and pieces of the widely disseminated medieval account of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer. Interest was immediately aroused and additional material was collected enabling Lyngbye to publish his find as Færøiske Qvæder om Sigurd Fofnerbsbane og hans Æt (Faeroese Ballads about Sigurd Fofner’s Bane and His Kin; 1822). With curiosity in the indigenous Faeroese material having been piqued, it is hardly surprising that the Faeroese student in Copenhagen should feel called upon to help in establishing the integrity and viability of their native tradition. Of these, by far the most important is Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb (1819–1909), who, encouraged by the great Danish philologist and folklorist Svend Grundtvig, undertook an extensive project to collect ballads. As a serious collector, he had to come to terms with the fact that there was still no widely accepted written form of the language. Like Lyngbye before him, he had to devise an orthography himself. With more philological sophistication than his predecessor, he patterned the orthography he established on Icelandic. Although Faeroese and Icelandic are closely related, their linguistic development had early on diverged rendering them mutually unintelligible in their modern forms. From a strictly pragmatic point of view, Icelandic, thus, may not have been the best foundation for Faeroese orthography. The spelling that is not strictly phonetic, however, preserves aspects of the language no longer obvious in speech thus making the written language significantly more readily accessible from the point of view of the other Nordic languages. During the 1850s, he published samples of the material that he had been collecting and in 1871 gave his mentor, Grundtvig, his collection of ballads. Grundtvig then eventually published the material under the title Føroya kvæði: Corpus Carminum Færoensium (Faeroese Songs) in fifteen volumes to which a sixteenth and two supplementary volumes were eventually added. The serviceability of the language in varied contexts was demonstrated in Hammershaimb’s volume, in many respects paralleling Aasen’s Prøver, now known as Færøsk Antologi (Faeroese Anthology) that was originally published as six annuals between 1886 and 1891 with the help of his compatriot Jakob Jakobsen, who is still well remembered for his work with Shetland Norn. Hammershaimb’s seminal initiatives proved to be very productive. On December 26, 1888, a manifesto was signed articulating the commitment of those involved to protect and promote Faeorese culture. The manifesto led to the founding of the Føringafelag (Faeroese Society) and eventually the Føringatíðindi (1890; Faeroese Newspaper), the first periodical publication in Faeroese. In succeeding decades, Faeroese literature flourished producing writers with international reputations, among whom Christian Matras, Heiðin Brú, Martin Joensen, William Heinesen, and Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen (although the latter two published in Danish rather than

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Faeroese exemplifying the complexity of Faeroese language politics) are those to have achieved the most obvious level of literary sophistication. These are national pieces that the people sing and sang from which one becomes acquainted with the way of thinking of the people, their language of feeling.11 J. G. Herder, Von Ähnlichkeit der mittlern deutschen und englischen Dichtkunst

Finnish first emerged as a written language during the 1540s with the publication of ABC-kiria (ABC Book; 1543?), Rucouskiria (Prayer Book; 1544), and Se Wsi Testamenti (The New Testament; 1544) at the hand of Michael Agricola (1510?-1557). He had intended to translate the Old Testament as well but was only able to finish the Psalms before his death. Although he is certainly to be credited with the considerable accomplishment of the redaction the Finns’ spoken language, he as a pious churchman regrettably inveighed against the singing of the old epic songs that had originated in a pagan tradition. The songs were suppressed as the work of the devil until the middle decades of the seventeenth century when, as a corollary to their interest in some of the most extravagant claims about Sweden’s Gothic past, Swedish scholars invited clerics in the Finnish-speaking part of the realm to gather any artifacts suggestive of a glorious past and to pay particular attention to the ancient historical songs. Almost as a complement to and certainly in the same spirit as Rudbeck’s fanciful Atland eller Manheim, Daniel Juslenius (1676–1752) wrote a history of Finland’s capital city, Aboa vetus et nova (Åbo Old and New), in which his narrative ranged well beyond even the imagined annals of the city to include the history of the entire nation. According to Juslenius, Finland had its origin in the migration of Noah’s grandson, Magog (the son of Japeth), and had later been the homeland of the Amazon women. Although certainly not credible by historical standards, his work nonetheless drew on and validated indigenous folklore not only vis-à-vis Swedish domination but also in terms of the vast array of national traditions generally. A systematic and intellectually viable study of the Finnish of the nascent Finnish literary tradition and particularly of Finnish folklore had to await the work of Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739–1804), Daniel Juslenius’s great-nephew on his mother’s side. By the 1760s, the cultural allegiance to the Swedish language, culture, and tradition had become particularly strong at the clear expense of Finnish. Although working in general terms within the conceptual world of Enlightenment thinking, Porthan — the brightest star in the Finnish scholarly firmament during the last half of the eighteenth century — began collecting bits and pieces of the epic songs with which he had become acquainted as a young man and saw in them not only a pristine and unspoiled beauty but also a manifestation of the ancient Finnish indigenous spirit. Since Porthan was probably better informed about the major European intellectual developments of the period than any of his compatriots in spite of the fact that he was reluctant to travel, it is not surprising that he reflects important strands of Herder’s thinking in a series of dissertations published between 1766 and 1778 collectively entitled De Poësi Fennica (Concerning Finnish Poetry). Although Porthan’s critical attention was divided between Finnish poetry conceived in terms of established literary standards and that whose origin was in the innate and unspoiled traditions of

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the people, it was the latter that he saw as normative and perceived in them not only a reflection of the past but also a manifestation of the Finnish national spirit free from any foreign tincture. Porthan’s theoretical views were widely influential and formed the intellectual foundation for the folklore collection of one of his close friends, Christfrid Ganander. Although not endowed his colleague’s intellectual capacity or critical acumen, Ganander was the more energetic collector. His most important publication, Mythologia Fennica (Finnish Mythology; 1798), was a compendium of folkloric material — riddles, proverbs, songs, and incantations — organized alphabetically as a kind of encyclopedia. He undertook the task of preparing a Finnish lexicon based in large measure on the samples of folklore that he collected. Although the manuscript was complete in 1787, it was not published until 1937–40 when it appeared in a three-volume edition under the Swedish title Nytt finskt lexicon. Finland’s severance from Sweden and incorporation into the Russian empire was from the Finnish point of view at best a mixed blessing. Although free from the allegiance to Sweden and invited by the czar to join the worldwide community of nations, Finland’s position was precarious and could at any moment revert to one of subservience. Herder’s views, however, were making their way throughout Finland from Germany or indirectly from Sweden — particularly from the Gothic circle around Geijer and Atterbom — and had emboldened a number of young men with patriotic inclinations. They not only read Herder and drew inspiration from him, but also recorded their perceptions in their journals. What they took from their reading was the perception that every nation lives under different geographical, historical, and social circumstances and accordingly develops along different lines and must, therefore, be true to it own particular national spirit. The health of a nation was seen as a function of its adherence to its own destiny, which in turn determined its ability to contribute to the utopian state of Humanität. The immediate implication was that the endeavor to adopt foreign cultural practices — either Swedish or Russian in the case of Finland — rather than nourishing those that are native and intrinsic could yield only an insecure and stifled body politic. These ideas were espoused with patriotic fervor by a group of students at Åbo Academy who were inspired not only by their reading of Herder but the instruction they received from one of Porthan’s students, Pehr Johan Alopaeus, as well as by their reading of Mythologia Fennica. These young men, often known collectively as the Åbo romantics, sought to create an authentically Finnish literature and culture of such vigor and distinction that it would become a source of national pride and a rallying point for nationalist aspirations such that the Swedish-speaking Finns would summon the necessary fortitude and resolve to learn Finnish. The irony implicit in their idealistic calls to action was that they were with few exceptions written in Swedish and emerged from homes whose mastery of Finnish was at best tenuous. This inherent difficulty notwithstanding, they set out on numerous missions to collect material in rural Finland. Although their aspirations were laudable, the results of their labor, which consisted in the main of fragments of longer epics and brief incantations, were meager. On the basis of what they were able to assemble, many educated Finns despaired of Finnish ever being taken seriously as a literary language or becoming a generally accepted language of commerce and culture. Even though the results of their collecting were scant and failed to realize any concrete political change, their work established the necessary theoretical and to an extent methodological foundation for later work.

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Elias Lönnrot (1802–84), a medical student and an energetic Finnish nationalist, in due course followed up the pioneering efforts of the Åbo romantics in a way that led to stunning results. Lönnrot had the good fortune of studying with Reinhold von Becker, the publisher of Turun Wiikko-Sanomat (Turku Weekly News), one of the earliest Finnish-language newspapers, and the author of a variety of articles on various aspects of Finnish culture but, perhaps, most notably a series of articles entitled “Väinämöisestä” (About Väinämöinen), which are more important in terms of their method of concentrating on one particular heroic figure drawn from the folk tradition than in terms of their content per se. Under von Becker’s supervision, Lönnrot wrote his dissertation entitled De Väinämöinen (About Väinämöinen; 1827). Using the procedure that had been pioneered by his advisor, Lönnrot sought to gather together and synthesize everything that had previously been collected from folk singers and published concerning that hero. The following year, 1828, he traveled throughout the relatively remote region of Karelia collecting material he hoped would contribute a heightened appreciation of the Finnish past, which he published in Kantele taikka Suomen kansan sekä wanhoja että nykyisempiä runoja ja lauluja (The Kantele, or Old and Later Poems and Songs of the Finnish People; 1829–31). With the publication of this volume, Lönnrot and a group of friends who shared his commitment to establish a more rigorous sense of Finnish national identity founded the Suomen [Suomalaisen] Kirjallisuunden Seura (Finnish Literature Society), which endures down to today. The society played an immediate and important role in encouraging Lönnrot to continue his collecting by occasionally financing his work and most importantly, though, by publishing the results. Lönnrot’s most significant and productive collecting trips began in 1832 and continued every year until 1840. The 1832 excursion was particularly fateful, though, because Lönnrot for the first time crossed over into Russian East Karelia. Although that region was culturally one with Finnish Karelia, its long history as part of the Russian sphere of political and religious influence was decisive. Orthodox clerics had been more tolerant of ancient customs than their Catholic and later Protestant brothers in the west. In consequence, the long narrative poems that were known previously only on the basis of relatively disjointed fragments emerged in arresting richness. The work Zachris Topelius had already suggested the productivity of this region. A paralyzed country doctor, he had invited traveling East Karelian peddlers to his home, where he transcribed longer epic sequences that he eventually published. East Karelia did indeed prove to be a rich and extensive mother-lode from which a significant part of the material that eventually went into Kalevala derived. Lönnrot had originally planned to publish the material as a fifth volume of Kantele but fortunately wrote to the Finnish Literature Society suggesting publication of the material grouped around individual heroes in a manner clearly reminiscent of his earlier dissertation. With this procedure in mind, he mined previous collections for materials about individual figures and in 1833 publish Runokokous Väinämöisestä (Collected Poems on Väinämöinen) consisting of sixteen poems in just more than 5000 lines which eventually became Alku-Kalevala (Proto-Kalevala). Continuing to gather new material to be integrated into an epic pattern centering on individual heros and eventually including material drawn from other collectors, Lönnrot in turn published Kalewala taikka Wanhoja Karjalan Runoja Suomen kansan muinaisista aijoista (Kalevala or Old Karelian Songs from the Ancient Times of the Finnish Nation; 1835) consisting of thirty-two poems of just over 12,000 lines and finally in 1849 the definitive version of Kalevala, which is sometimes known as Uuden Kalevalan (New Kalevala)

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but more typically simply recognized as the second edition of Kalevala. It consists of fifty poems totaling nearly 23,000 lines. Precisely what this wide-ranging poem is, however, continues to be a matter of discussion. In Lönnrot’s 1835 preface, he explained that the material he had collected was being organized aaround the great heroes he heard mentioned in various songs that he had collected with a view to producing a work that would be for the Finns what the works of Homer and Hesiod had been for the Greeks and the poems of the Edda for the Scandinavians. Even while reading the songs that had been previously collected, especially those collected by Ganander, I wondered whether songs about Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäninen and other of our memorable forefathers might not be found such that from them could also be assembled longer accounts, just as we see that the Greeks and Icelanders and others received songs from their forefathers. (Lönnrot, Kaelwala 1:iii)12

Lönnrot’s explicitly avowed purpose was to provide the Finnish nation with a foundational literary work upon which a sense of distinctive national identity could be established. In addition to the resounding articulation of this point in the preface, he frequently described the goals of his research in letters to various associates in terms of providing a cultural history for Finland that was comparable to that of other nations. He admirably succeeded without question in accomplishing that goal. It would be difficult to name another nation whose sense of its own historical identity is as broadly and deeply involved with any single secular work as is Finland’s with Kalevala. During the years that Finland was moving toward independence from Russia and countering the political implications of Pan-Slavism, the hewn and battered body of Lemminkäninen that his mother rakes from the waters of Tuonela, puts back together, and resuscitates (poems 14 and 15) was understood as a symbol of Finland, which similarly needed to be drawn together and revived with a sense of national independence. During the decades following the publication of Kalevala, its roots took firm hold and quickly became widely dispersed in the soil of Finnish day-to-day life with personal names as well as the names of streets, ships, businesses, and a wide range of other entities being drawn from the cycle of poems. Kalevala is in fact the foundation of a phenomenon that during the 1850s was characterized as Fennomani (Finnomania or, perhaps, more precisely Finnophilia) as evoked in the pamphlet by Emil von Qvanten, Fennomani och Skandinavism (Finnomania or Scandinavianism; 1855). With its growing popularity, it was, moreover, a particularly potent antidote to the various attempts at the Russification of Finland during the 1890s. With the ever more pervasive influence of Kalevala throughout Finland, there also arose a constantly expanding use of the Finnish language in all walks of life: in 1860 Finnish was granted equal status with Swedish throughout the country and by 1880 some university disciplines permitted instruction in Finnish. All of its cultural, social, and political influence notwithstanding, the question of just what Kalevala is still remains. During the last half of the nineteenth century, Finns tended to stress its origin in the collective voice of the ancient Finnish bards. Lönnrot on occasion raised his voice to declare in the clearest of terms that unlike The Poems of Ossian, Kalevala was a genuine expression of reliable folkloristic research on an ancient culture. While not diminishing the central role of Lönnrot’s collection of songs, charms, and incantations, contemporary research into the material he collected has made Lönnrot’s role in shaping that material even

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more prominent. Convinced that the material he collected spoke for a whole nation rather than an individual singer, Lönnrot became something of a singer of these epic songs himself in arranging lines and episodes, imposing a kind of order and epic character derived from his reading of Greek and Latin sources, and filling in himself where his informants failed him. The influence of Kalevala on subsequent Finnish literature has been immense. Juhana Henrik Erkko (1849–1906) drew subject matter from the Kalevala, most notably for his plays Aino (1893), Kullervo (1895), and Pohjolan häät (The Pohjla Wedding; 1902). Although important at the time — indeed Pohjolan häät was written for the dedication of the new National Theater — they are now mostly of literary-historical interest. Eino Leino, a far more accomplished and sophisticated writer and perhaps modern Finland’s most characteristic poet, made more creative use of Kalevala material. Written in terms that invite comparison with the aesthetics of Continental symbolist theater, Tuonelan joutsen (The Swan of Tuonela) offers a haunting portrayal of Kalevala’s domain of death evocatively using the vowel-rich resources of the Finnish language. Leino did not make further use of Kalevala for subject matter, but later having internalized its singular rhythms and resonances, published two volumes of poetry, Helkavirsiä (vol. 1 1903, vol. 2 1916), consisting of long narrative poems that evoke a highly personal mythological world that resonates with the vocabulary, cadences, and meter of Kalevala but never specifically draws it in. The import of Kalevala today does not maintain nor does it need the overtly political dimensions it once had, yet it has continued into the work of contemporary poets, most notably Paavo Haavikko, who has mentioned Kaksikymmentä ja yksi (Twenty-one), Rauta-aika (Age of Iron), and obviously Kullervo as being particularly indebted to Kalevala. The visual arts also were the recipient of numerous impulses emanating from Kalevala. Painters and sculptors alike — among whom J. Z. Blackstadius (1816–1898), R. W. Ekman (1808–1873), and C. E. Sjöstrand (1828–1906) were the earliest and most important — drew influence from the poem and portrayed many of the most dramatic and gripping scenes. By far the most prolific and influential painter, however, was Akseli Gallen-Kallela. He brought a particularly heroic sense to the scenes he represented and had a particular fondness for portraying Väinämöinen’s struggle with Louhi, the Mistress of the North in defense of the Sampo. Among his most important commissions were four frescoes he did for the Finnish pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exhibition, frescoes from the National Theater and the National Museum in Helsinki, and a decorated edition of Kalevala published in 1922. The impact of music related to Kalevala, however, has reached a much broader international audience. The first major composer to set about interpreting the epic musically was Robert Kajanus (1856–1933), whose composition Kullervo (1881) and Aino (1885) attracted appreciative attention; the first opera based on Kalevala was Oskar Merikanto’s Pohjan neiti (The Maid of Pohja; 1898), in the context of which Armis Launis’s opera Kullervo (1917) should also be mentioned. Without doubt, though, most important composer to have taken up Kalevala material was Jean Sibelius. As a young man, he encountered the music Kajanus with whom he became a close friend for the rest of his life. In addition to Sibelius’s well known Op. 7 Kullervo, Op. 22 Lemminkäis-sarja — from which the third movement Tuonelan joutsen (The Swan of Tuonela) is probably the best known — Op. 49 Pohjolan tytär (The Daughter of the Northland

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or sometimes erroneously Pohjolan’s Daughter), and Op. 112 Tapiola, numerous less familiar works also draw specifically on Kalevala. Contemporary Finnish composers have also been fascinated by the theme: Aulis Sallinen’s opera Kullervo, for which he wrote both the music and the libretto based though on a play by Aleksi Kivi, had its debut in Los Angeles in 1992 — on Kalevala day, February 28 — and in Finland on November of 1993; and Einojuhani Rautovaara, a student of Merikanto, is well known for his Sammon ryöstö (The Myth of the Sampo), a work for male choir, soloists, tape, and orchestra. The concept of a language- and literature-based identity that Kalevala so completely embodies had ramifications beyond the boarders of Finland, most directly, understandably, in Estonia, a country whose language and culture are very closely allied with that of Finland. In 1839, just four years after the publication of Lönnrot’s first version of Kalevala, Friedrich Robert Fählmann gave a lecture at Die gelehrte Ehstnische Gesellschaft (The Estonian Learned Society) in Dorpat in which he suggested that a similar project could be undertaken for Estonia centering on the son of Kalev — Kalevipoeg — a figure from the Estonian folk tradition. Like Lönnrot also a physician, he was responding to denigrating characterization of Estonia as a country without a history and hence without an independent destiny. The task of collecting the folk tales and assembling them into a more or less cohesive whole fell to Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald. In 1854, he presented the finished product, Kalevipoeg: Eesti rahva eepos (Kalevipoeg: Estonian National Epic), to the Estonian Learned Society, and it was published between 1857 and 1861 simultaneously in Estonian and German versions. The poem is organized into twenty cantos consisting of 19,000 lines. Its general proximity to Kalevala is obvious in the opening line, “Vanemuine, lend me your kantele!”13 (Kreutzwald 5). The kantele, a five-stringed harp — or perhaps a primitive zither — was plucked as accompaniment to the ancient songs and made famous in Lönnrot’s first publication of the material he had collected, Kantele taikka Suomen kansan sekä wanhoja että nykyisempiä runoja ja lauluja. References to Vanemuine and Ilmarine — Finnish: Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen — appear occasionally throughout the poem, and it contains some of the same narrative sequences as its Finnish predecessor. The closest point of contact, however, is in the eponymous hero Kalevipoeg — Kalev’s son — thus, evidently, the same figure as Kalevala’s Kullervo. The case of similarities, however, must not be overstated because Kalevipoeg is distinctly Estonian, and the characters that appear in both works have their own particular traits and functions in Kalevipoeg. It seems to me we should remain on our path and make out of ourselves what can be made. Let people say what they will about our nation, literature, and language bad or good; they are at least our very own.14 J. G. Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, “Brief 113”

Herder’s argument that the well-being of the body politic is contingent upon its full engagement with its own destiny embodied in the simplest and most unaffected voices resonating throughout the course of its history had particularly far-reaching implications in the Nordic region. Far from being understood narrowly as a mandate to refocus the attention of institutions associated with

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high culture, it became a charge to recover the national past but more importantly to recover languages from the brink of extinction that would come to serve entire nations as vehicles for day-to-day as well as formal and literary expression. The recovery of a past, of a language, and of a heritage literally implied the retrieval and reformulation of a national destiny. In varying degrees, the sense of national identity and pride that derived from the appropriation of a national language in which the past was inextricably encoded led to political realignments: in the case of Norway and Finland new sovereign and independent states and in the case of the Faeroes a heightened degree of independence and a long but still ongoing discussion about national sovereignty. Although Herder’s meditations on the elements necessary for national political well being originally centered on the German-speaking countries in the European heartland, it may well be that Scandinavia can lay claim to their most extensive and far-reaching implementation. Contemporary theorists — Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, for example, among many others — in recent decades have returned to many of Herder’s insights and elaborated them in terms of current cultural and political theory and post-colonial sensitivities. Although the debt to Herder is not always foremost in the minds of modern discussions of nationalism, his foundational presence can scarcely be denied. Although the political and cultural development of the nations in the Nordic region during the nineteenth century is a complex of often divergent factors, it is certainly a telling example of how romantic perceptions of the linguistic and literary foundations of national communalism can lead to dramatic and enduring political results. Notes 1. “Mittelst der Sprache wird eine Nation erzogen und gebildet; mittelst der Sprache wird sie Ordnung- und Ehrliebend, folgsam, gesittet, umgänglich, berühmt, fleißig und mächtig” (Herder 7:305 ). 2. “Min avsikt var att framställa en poetisk bild av det gamla nordiska hjältelivet. Det var icke Frithiof som individu, utan tidevarvet, för vars representant han antages, som jag ville måla…. I sagan förekommer mycket storartat och heroiskt, som gäller för all tider och därföre både kunde och borde bibehållas; men därjämte ett och annat rått, vildsint, barbariskt, som antingen borde helt och hållet avsöndras eller åtminstone mildras. Till en viss grad blev därföre nödvändigt att modernisera” (Tegnér 2:355)” 3. “Hohe, edle Sprache! großes, starkes Volk!” (Herder 2:556). 4. “Inter omnia monumenta veteris orbis Danici, qvæ tempus edax rerum nobis reliqvit, admirabile de Scyldingis Epos publici nunc juris factum eminet. Habemus enim hic irriguos fontes unde religionis poëseoqve notitia, et gentis nostræ rerum seculis III et IV gestarum series deduci possit” (298). 5. “Qvod autem ad Scyldingidem nostram attient, eam vere Danicam esse, nemo non ibit inficias, qvi observaverit auctorem rerum a Regibus hrodgaro, Beowulfo et Higelaco gestarum oculatum fuisse testem, et in Beowulfi exseqviis encomiasten adfuisse. Cecidit autem Beowulfus in Jutia anno æræ nostræ CCCXL. Igitur hercle miror Hickesium Anglosaxonibus tribuisse carmen, qvod vates Danus Appolinis hyperbororei igne calefactus fudit” (302). 6. “Eqvidem non bene meminit lingvam, qva ante Wilhelmum I. utebantur Angli, fuisse communem tribus septentrionis populis, qvi vocati uno nomine Dani, omnes ore eodem dialectice solummodo differente loqvebantur. Hujus si vel aliunde auctoritas nulla peti posset, plena sane hic in aprico cubat. Epos etenim hoc, qvale id nunc habemus, evidenter docet, idioma Anglosaxonicum esse revera Danicum, qvod Islandi extra solis vias fere jacentes hodiedum servant purum, et studiose colunt” (302). 7. “[…] det hellige Kors skal smelte sammen og blive Eet med Thors vældige Hammer!” (Oehlenschläger 25:147–8). 8. “Hat wohl ein Volk, zumal ein unkultiviertes Volk, etwas Lieberes als die Sprache seiner Väter? In ihr wohnet sein ganzer Gedankenreichtum an Tradition, Geschichte, Religion und Grundsätzen des Lebens, alle sein Herz und Seele.” (Herder 7:65).

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9. “Den gamle Snak om Bondesprogets Slethed og Styghed vil ikke længere finde noget Medhold hos de Sprogkyndige, da allerede en kun overfladisk Kundskab om de gamle Sprog er nok til at vise, at det netop er dette Bondesprog, som vi maae holde os til, hvis vi ville sætte nogen Priis paa Nationaliteten i Sproget. Det er saaledes at haabe, at Erkjendelsen af Sprogets rette Værd vil efterhaanden blive mere og mere alemindelig, og at selve Almuen vil derved ledes til at fatte mere Agtelse for Fædrenesproget og søge at holde samme vedlige” (Aasen 4). 10. “ei alene … et kosteligt Minde fra Forfædrene, og et tydeligt Mærke paa Folkets rette Stilling i Rækken af de beslægted Folkeslag, men … ogsaa … den eneste Taleskik, som passer tilfulde til Folkets Tanke og til Landets nedarved Sædvaner” (Aasen, Norsk Grammatik §399). 11. “Das sind Einmal alte Nationalstücke, die das Volk singt, und sang, woraus man also die Denkart des Volks, ihre Sprache der Empfindung kennen lernet” (Herder 2:557–8). 12. “Jo ainaki ajattelin ma ennen koottuja, liiatenki Ganaderin, runoja lukiessa, eikö niitä Wäinämöisestä, Ilmarisesta, Lemminkäisestä ja muista muisteltawista esiwanhemmistamme olisi mahtanut siksikin löytyä, että olisi heistä saanut pitempiäki kertoelmia, niinkun näemmä Greekalaisten, Islandilaisten ja muitten esiwanhempainsa runoja siksi saaneen” (Lönnrot, Kalewala I:III). 13. “Laena mulle kannelt, Vanemuine!” (Kreutzwald, 5). 14. Mich dünkt, wir bleiben auf unserm Wege, und machen aus uns, was sich machen läßt. Sage man über unsre Nation, Literatur und Sprache Böses und Gutes; sie sind einmal die Unsern.” (Herder 7:614).

References Bartholin, Thomas. 1689. Antiquitatum danicorum de causis contemptae a danis adhuc gentilibus mortis, libri tres: ex vetustis codicibus & monumentis hactenus ineditis congesti. Hafniae: Literis Joh. Phil. Bockenhoffer. Bjork, Robert E 1996. “Grímur Jónson Thorkelin’s Preface to the First Edition of Beowulf, 1815.” Scandinavian Studies 68.3: 291–320. Føroya kvæði: Corpus Carminum Færoensium. 1944–72. Eds. Sv. Grundtvig and J. Bloch. København: Munksgaard. Erkko, Juhana Henrik. 1893. Aino. Helsinki: Otava. ———. 1895. Kullervo. Helsink: Otava. ———. 1902. Pohjulan häät. Helsinki: Otava. Ganander, Christfrid. 1789 [1960]. Mythologia Fennica. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. ———. 1997. Nytt finskt lexicon. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Haavikko, Paavo. 1974. Kaksikymmentä ja yksi. Helsinki: Otava. ———. 1984. Rauta-aika. Helsinki: Otava. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1991. Johann Gottfried Herder Werke. Eds. Martin Bollacher et al. 10 vols. Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker 64. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Hickes, George. 1970. Linguarum veterum septentrionalium Thesaurus 2 vols. Oxford:1703–05. Rpt. Menston: Scolars Press; Hildesheim: Olms. Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhald. 1997. Kalevipoeg: Eesti rahva eepos. Talinn: Avita. Leino, Eino. 1999. Tuonelan joutsen: Sota valosta Väinämöisen kosinta Karjalan kuningas Helsinki : Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. ———. 1994. Helkavirsiä. Helsinki: Otava. Lönnrot, Elias. [1827]. De Väinämöine priscorum Fennorum numine, Åbo: Joh. Christoph. Frenckell & Filii. ———. 1829–31. Kantele taikka Suomen Kansan sekä Wanhoja että Nykyisempiä runoja ja lauluja. 4 vols. Helsinki: Wasenius: K. E. Holm. ———. 1835. Kalewala taikka Wanhoja Karjalan Runoja Suomen Kansan muinaisista ajoista. 2 vols. Helsinki: Frenckellin. ———. 1849. Kalevala [Uuden Kalevalan]. 2nd ed. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Lyngbye, Hans Christian, ed. and trans. 1822. Færøiske Qvæder om Sigurd Fofnerbsbane og hans Æt. Randers: Elmenhof.



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Magnus, Johannes. 1554. Gothorum Sveonumque historia. Romae: J. M. de Viottis. Mallet, Henri Paul. 1755. Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc, ou l’on traite de la religion dex loix, des mœurs et des usages des anciens Danois. Copenhague: Berling; 1787–88. 3rd rev. ed. Genèvre: Baude and Paris: Buisson; translated in 1770 as Northern Antiquities. Trans. Thomas Percy. London: T. Carnan. ———. Monumens de la mythologies et de la poesie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves. Copenhague: Philibert. Oehlenschläger, Adam. 1851. Digtervæker og Prosaiske Skrifter. 38 vols. Kiøbenhavn: Andr. Fred. Høsts Forlag. Porthan, Henrik Gabriel. 1983. [De Poësi Fennica.] Suomalaisesta runoudesta. Helsinki: SKS. Qvanten, Emil von. 1855. Fennomani och Skandinavism: Om Finnland och dess sednaste utveckling. Stockholm; another version appeared under the pseudonym Peder Särkilax with the title Fennomani och Skandinavism: Kunna Sverige och Finnland åter förenas. Stockholm: Haeggström. Rudbeck, Olaus. [1679] 1698. Atland eller Manheim. Upsala. Steffens, Henrik. 1905. Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger 1803. Ed. B. T. Dahl. København: Gyldendal Tegnér, Esaias. 1923. Samlade Skrifter. National Upplaga. 2 vols. Stockholm: Norstedt. Thorkelin, Grímur Jónson. 1815. De Danorum rebus gestis seculi III & IV: Poëma Danicum dialecto AngloSaxonica. Copenhagen: T. E. Rangel. Worm, Ole. 1636. Runir seu Danica litertura antiqvissima, vulgo Gothica dicta. Hafniae: Melchior Martzan Aasen, Ivar. 1848. Det norske Folkesprogs Grammatik. Kristiania: Werner. ———. 1850. Ordbog over det norske Folkesprog. Kristiania: Werner. Reprint 2000. Eds. Kristoffer Kruken and Terje Aarset. Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget. ———. 1853. Prøver af Landsmaalet i Norge. Christiania: Werner. ———. 1864. Norsk Grammatik. Christiania: Malling. Reprint 1965. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. ———. 1873. Norsk Ordbog med dansk Forklaring. Christiania: Malling

DOCINFO AUTHOR ""TITLE "IV. Expansions in Space"SUBJECT "Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, Volume 18"KEYWORDS ""SIZE HEIGHT "240"WIDTH "170"VOFFSET "2">

IV. Expansions in Space

Although an understanding of the west European cradle of romanticism — Germany, France, and Great Britain — is critical for grasping the tradition’s genesis and initial patterns of dissemination, the transformation and fulfillment of fundamentally romantic premises on the European periphery as well as the encounter with the foreign and even the exotic are crucial for fully acknowledging the breadth and diversity of the movement. The experience of the foreign as recorded in travel narratives appropriately complements the romantic validation of the local and indigenous throughout Europe. Travelers were able not only to extend their understanding by personal acquaintance with distant climes, but also to see native traits in terms of greater contrast. They were also famously able to disguise their critiques of oppressive practices at home under the pretense of describing foreign manners, customs, or political realities. Recognizing that changes in taste during the late eighteenth century gave a new impetus to travel for the sake of broadening one’s horizons, Mircea Anghelescu points out that travel accounts have much in common with novels, which themselves have often been cast in the form of depictions of journeys. Romantic travelers from Goethe, Heine, Lamartine, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, Nerval, Dumas, and Hugo through Karamzin, Golescu, Barit¸iu, Bolintineanu, Mesonero Romanos, and Bretón de los Herreros to Southey, Thackery, and Dickens are discussed in terms of the contrasting assumptions they brought to their peregrinations abroad and the impact that travel had upon their thinking in terms of balancing the competing demands of the local as opposed to the distant and exotic. It has often been conventional wisdom to view the literature of the western hemisphere — that of North and South America — in ways that tend to minimize its dependence on and interaction with European traditions. Countering this lamentable segregation, Joselyn M. Almeida examines how literary developments in the United States and in Latin America during the first half the nineteenth century engaged fundamentally romantic issues. Almeida takes a broad and encompassing view of the struggles for Latin American independence from Spain and aligns the revolutionary fervor that swept across the region beginning with the revolt of Túpac Amaru in 1781 with a broad-based transvaluation of social norms and conventions that embodies the spirit of romanticism. These revolutions not only sought political and cultural independence from Spanish colonial dominion but also validated the importance of divergent local and indigenous cultures. These histories, politically oriented documents of many kinds, and attempts at independent self-definition are all animated by the selfsame spirit that sustained struggles for local autonomy and individual agency in Europe ranging from the boisterous Tyrannenhaß of the Stürmer und Dränger through the varied calls for liberty in France to the summons to national liberation and unity in Greece, many sectors of eastern Europe, and parts of the Nordic region. S. P. S.



Romantic Travel Narratives MIRCEA ANGHELESCU University of Bucharest

Since seminal works of literature across the world and throughout time have often been formulated as initiatory journeys, literature has long had a special relationship with travel: Homer’s Odyssey, Camões’s Os Lusíadas, Fénelon’s Télémaque, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and many others. Even Don Quixote is the description of such a journey. On other occasions, the journey itself has inspired travelers to descriptions so dramatic and impassioned that belletristic literature rapidly has appropriated them as its own even though they were not initially conceived with that intent. Among these are Xenophon’s Anabasis, Marco Polo’s Milione, the Arabic Aja’ibu-l Hind, Stendhal’s and Journal d’Italie, which are all travel diaries or memoirs of high literary repute because of their narrative quality, their gripping sense of adventure, or their fascinating and colorful description. The long-standing tension between travel literature and belletristic literature that uses the pretext of travel has resulted in the intimate intertwining of the two domains, as man’s curiosity about the unusual or at least different has continued to grow. Influenced by the reading of other travel books as well as literature with travel as its subject, authors of travel narratives began paying ever more attention to descriptions and to elements of stylistic refinement, so their work began to be read not only as a source of information but also as entertainment. According to some, the decline of the narrative fiction in antiquity as well as the medieval chivalric romance goes hand in hand with increased interest in travel literature, which, in its turn, may have contributed to the development of the novel. “The journey has provided an example of the margin of the novel of another conception of the narrative: no longer an artistic fiction portraying the idealized behavior of disembodied heroes but of real settings meticulously described, or of true adventures where the extraordinary goes side by side with the trivial, … a style without affectation but with a familiar tone” (Chupeau 548).1 A shift in the readers’ interest to accounts of the unusual, which draw inspiration from the foreign rather than the mythological-historical imaginary occurred during the eighteenth century, a century throughout which interest in travel heightened significantly. The changes in taste, however, are not primarily a question of structure, but rather a matter of a growing emphasis on descriptions of other settings. The fact that the picture becomes more and more colorful and its description more and more detailed does not essentially modify its quality. Ultimately the traveler realizes that his enterprise is fundamentally narrative and as such not far removed from the novel. When declaring his intention to allow the reader to share all the details of his journey in his famous Journey from London to Genua, the Italian-English Joseph Baretti begins by describing the people in the stagecoach by which he is traveling: “The coach contained six people; and all six proved agreeable company to each other, though collected by mere chance: three women on one side, and three men over against them. This begins to look like a novel”

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(Baretti 1, 4; emphasis added). But the proximity and even the interference of the two genres does not entirely transform the traveler, his sensitivities, or receptivity. The Grand Tour — travel to the Continent, particularly to France or Italy — was during the eighteenth century a regular part of the education of many young Englishmen. Some of the expeditions of the more adventurous or of those allegedly involved in diplomatic missions reached the far side of the Mediterranean, Egypt, Syria, or the coasts of the Black and Caspian Seas. Their descriptions of areas and peoples they visited are often vivid and interesting and awoke the curiosity of scientists and politicians who already saw Russia as a future European power. The tradition of this type of travel, so well illustrated by delightful books like Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy or Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, began to decline toward the end of the century, primarily because of a change in the identity of the traveler. The English penchant for travel was adopted on the Continent, and among the travelers heading south to pay ritual visits to the Swiss Alps or the open air museums of Italy were a growing numbers of Germans, French, and even — at the end of the century — Russians, among them the playwright, Denis Fonvizin. At the same time, the means of travel began to change in part as a result of the Napoleonic Wars or the obstacles they occasioned. The new mode of travel had already arisen when the first consul stepped on the deck of L’Orient ready to leave for Egypt. Knowledge of the new mechanism and incentive for travel did not come from the travelers themselves, since they were unaware of the changes. The reasons romantic heroes gave for leaving their homes effected a change of habits and tastes in a society which was itself changing. Chateaubriand’s René, for example, departs in order to escape the burden of a doomed and forbidden love; Mme de Staël’s Oswald flees from the woman who cannot be his, not to escape his pain, but to be consumed by it in a locale congenial to his feelings: “to travel is as one might say one of the saddest pleasures of life…. Oswald felt a doubling of his sadness while crossing Germany to reach Italy” (de Staël 1:655)2; and Byron’s Childe Harold, who “was sick at heart,” consumed by vices and dissipation, leaves because his homeland had become a prison for him: “Then loathed he in his native land to dwell/ Which seemed to him more lone than eremite’s sad cell” ([I:4:35–6] 2:9) Similarly, dark feelings and melancholy account for the journey to foreign shores of Panayotis Soutsos’s “traveler” (1831) to Naples, of Juliusz Słowacky’s hero traveling under a satanic hold (Podroz do ziemi swietej z Neapolu, 1836), and of D. Bolintineanu’s Conrad, a former revolutionary in his native Valachia, who now “Banned in his country aimlessly does roam/ Wherever a sweeter horizon seems to beckon” (Bolintineanu 2: 125).3 The search for love makes Eichendorff’s hero — enigmatic and eternally lost — head south, toward sunny Italy (Aus dem Leben eines Taugenicht; 1826). Whatever the concrete justification for the flight that constitutes the narrative line in each text — novel or poem — it arises from an almost unbearable feeling that leads the hero to take the road that opens before of him. The rationale is neither curiosity nor tradition (like the guilds that require aspiring masters to take an initiatory journey), but an impulse arising from the core of his being or a yearning difficult to elucidate in terms of rational or logical principles. Goethe is surely among the earliest European sojourner to travel and see so differently from those who preceded him. He draws the attention of the reader to the fact that his travel accounts are not the verbal equivalent of an album depicting places and things he can portray in terms of a simple

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description. The converse is rather the case. The author starts traveling under the imperious influence of childhood memories — some etchings of Rome hanging in his parents’ home — and an inexplicable urge to see those places becomes unbearably pressing. “At first I could no longer look at any Latin book, no drawing of an Italian region” (Goethe 11:98)4 that might recall unfulfilled passion. Arriving in Rome, he was overcome by a feeling of enchantment, almost of magic, of a spell that brought the frozen etchings of his childhood to life: “All the dreams of my youth I now see alive before me, the first copper engravings that I remember (my father had hung the views of Rome in a reception room) I see now in fact” (Goethe 11:126).5 The diffuse and inexplicable feeling that had fed his growing urge to visit Italy became clear only when he saw the realities of the Eternal City. It was as if Goethe had not just seen these monuments for the first time, but was seeing them again after a long time. The strong appeal he felt cannot be justified as mere curiosity or a temporary fixation, but rather only by the temptation to return to a place where it seemed he had once been. His relationship to the city came as a revelation rather than empirical knowledge: Had I not made the decision I am now carrying out, I would have gone completely to pieces: the eagerness for such a journey to see these objects with my own eyes had risen in my spirit. The historical knowledge did not lay claim on me: the things stood a hand’s width from me but separated by an impenetrable wall. It is now for me almost as heartening if I were seeing the things for the first time, but as if I were seeing them again. (Goethe 11:98–9)6

The irrepressible wish to travel to a certain place can be found in other writers of the period such as Karl Philipp Moritz. Upon seeing the English coast for the first time, he declares that the sight of “the happy shores of that country … has, for many years, been my most earnest wish, and whither I have so often in imagination transported myself” (Moritz 9). Finding himself in a situation for which he had longed, in 1811 Lamartine wrote: “All my life, the Orient had been the dream of my haunted days of autumn or winter in my native valley…. I needed to touch, to work in my hand a piece of this land” (Lamartine 1:14–5).7 The desire for intimate knowledge of something different from one’s quotidian experience and comparable to a past or ideal image justifies J. J. Ampère’s interest in the northern countries: “I always felt attracted to these countries, that seem so remote to us. I was curious to see this great and melancholy nature of the north, to contemplate, amid their deserts, these Germans, still pure, that Tacitus would almost recognize” (Ampère 54).8 The insistent need for experience and firsthand knowledge of a geographic locale emerges from a more general, uniquely modern aspiration to experience reality through the senses and to refer it to previous experience in order to determine the attitude toward it that best suits one’s personality. In short, man at the end of the eighteenth century began needing to differentiate the marks on the whole chain of his becoming, which Arthur Lovejoy called “a process of increasing diversification” in the perception of the world and which also constitutes, among other things, the foundation of the romantic sensibility (Lovejoy 296). Thus what interests Goethe the traveler as well as his contemporary reader was his own individual response to what he experienced — a landscape, a work of art, or a historical monument — which was fundamentally different from that of others but which remained in the background because personal experience can be interpreted in such divergent ways:

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Mircea Anghelescu I immensely enjoyed the opportunity to examine the wares gathered here, but the eagerness and impatience that always accompany me allow me no pause, and I hurry on my way. But I take consolation in the fact our statistical age all this has found its way into print and one can keep oneself well informed by occasional recourse to books. But now I am only interested in direct expressions, which no book or statistic could offer. (Goethe 11:25)9

Further on Goethe points out that “everything is instructive and meaningful. But dearest to me is that which I carry in my soul” (Goethe 11:165).10 A few years later, the reaction of a Russian traveler, Nikolai Karamzin, was not very different. In March 1790, the future historian of the Muscovite Empire arrived in Paris, the city that attracted the interest and admiration of the whole Western world. Perhaps in my attempt to describe Paris in writing … at least in its essential features, I should start — as the ancients used to say — with Leda’s eggs … translating from Julius Caesar, the first ancient writer who mentions Paris … talking to the scholarly dust of these authors … etc. But I think I can hear your answer: We can read Saint-Foix and his Essais sur Paris and learn everything you could tell us about the ancient history of Paris; you just tell us your impressions of the town and how it looks now, we do not ask for more. And so … leaving aside all that belongs to the past, I shall only speak of the present. (Karamzin 217–8)11

Thus already by the end of the eighteenth century, the reason for reading travel narratives could no longer be found in the search for information about other parts of the world, but only in the appreciation of their indirect reflection in the mirror of a particular personality. The reader no longer understands his reading in terms of an objective mediation of information, but rather primarily as the revelation of a sensibility that communicates and interprets unfamiliar experiences. With all the naivety characteristic of the age, Karamzin brought “canonical” reading on his travels in order to assess his reaction against the received interpretations of famous natural settings. He leaves Lausanne with La Nouvelle Héloise in hand and follows in the footsteps of Rousseau’s heroes in order to experience for himself their state of mind in the precise setting described in the book: “Stopping in the shadows of the chestnut trees in the park, I looked at the cliffs of Malery, from which Saint-Preux, in despair, wanted to throw himself in the lake and where he wrote to Julie” (Karamzin 150).12 In Weimar, he found a site “on the wild, dark banks of the small river that flows rapidly, where, surrounded by its babble, I sat on a mossy stone to read my first book by Fingal” (Karamzin 71).13 He also verifies what Rousseau said about the influence of high mountains on man’s thoughts and finds that he is right: “Here mortal man comes to understand his superior fate; he forgets his earthly fatherland and realizes that he is a citizen of the world” (Karamzin 134).14 Referring to the same subject a few years later, however, Chateaubriand contradicts Rousseau without naming him: “Unfortunately the spirit of man is independent of the atmospheres of locations; a heart laden with pain is no less heavy in the high places than in the valleys” (Chateaubriand 4:322).15 Sensible men are looking for a relation between the elevation of the spirit and that of the places. In the spirit of the perfect sincerity requiring a faithful narration of what is seen without inventing anything (as formulated in the foreword to Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem), the traveler cannot help but see in the ruins of ancient Greece through which he has so often walked the shadow of a past that he expects to come to life at any moment out of the darkness of ages.

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The hill on whose foot I found myself resembled the hill on which the city of Sparta had stood …. As soon as I reached the peak, the sun rose behind the Menelaus Mountains. How beautiful the spectacle was! But how sad, too…. A mixture of admiration and pain arrested my walk and my thoughts; all around me, the silence lay deep; I wanted at least to make the echo speak in places in which human voice no longer resounded. I cried with all my might: Leonidas! No ruin echoed this great name, and Sparta itself seemed to have forgotten it!” (Chateaubriand 69)16

Although full of scholarly quotations and archeological considerations, his book is far from a pedantic memoir. Chateaubriand advisedly recommends that it be read as an account of the impressions he experienced and collected in the immediacy of his surroundings: “I shall give account of my journey and my emotions in Athens, day by day and hour by hour …. Once again, this Itinerary should be seen much less as a voyage, but rather as the memories of one year of my life” (Chateaubriand 85).17 The realization that a personal response to the past and not just the past per se is important follows from the fact that in the course of time the object of historical admiration changed. Instead of Greek and Roman antiquities, eventually medieval ruins awakened the same sentiment. The patriotic feelings of the scholar had not yet emerged but followed later as can be deduced from the fact that one of the first admirers of the French ruins of Normandy was a foreigner, a Dane, Hector Frederik Janson Estrup (1794–1846), who exclaims in 1819: “Splendid ruins! Why does one then go to Italy to contemplate the remains of antiquity? … How the ruins of Christian temples surpass the beauty of the pagan temples!” (Estrup 61).18 Just one step separates this attitude from that of Stendhal or Victor Hugo, who on 16 August, 1835, wrote to his wife: “I have seen Rouen. Tell Boulanger that I have seen Rouen. He will understand what that means. I have seen everything…. The ministry of justice, the GrosHorologe, Saint Ouen, Saint Maclou, … the fountains, the old sculptured houses, and the great cathedral” (Hugo 1076).19 This feeling of exhilaration of the traveler who discovers unimagined and previously ignored beauty in his domestic aesthetic tradition justifies an essentially cultural patriotism that can only be countered by a patriotism that is essentially sentimental and nostalgically colored by the memory of his native landscape. Karamzin, for instance, often takes the opportunity to remember his native land. “The flat country attracted me with its novelty. I remembered Russia, my dear homeland, and she seemed not so far away” (Karamzin 193).20 And to evoke the natural beauties not found outside Russia, he writes of feelings that inspire him to lyric flights seldom found in any other context: “Nowhere is spring so charming as in Russia. The shroud of snow of the winter tires the eye, the soul longs for a change and, suddenly, the loud voice of the skylark sounds in the air” (Karamzin 291).21 Another Russian traveler, the playwright Fonvizin, uses his trip at approximately the same time to learn “to be more indulgent toward those inadequacies that offended [him] in [his] own country” (Wilson 32). Many years later while studying economics in Germany, the Romanian George Barit¸iu found in the famous Rhine Valley only an opportunity to dedicate a hymn of praise to his native Transylvania and to its beauty from which he was separated: What more can I say about the Rhineland, which has already been described so enthusiastically by many others? Truly, it is very beautiful and has in itself something attractive that makes

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Mircea Anghelescu parting from it difficult; but for a Transylvanian, believe me, the Rhine with all its beauties can only make one love one’s homeland more fervently than ever before seeing the much-praised and acclaimed lands of the Rhine. For me, at least, the Rhine has no natural beauty that is not equaled or surpassed by those in my country. (Barit¸iu 49)22

The beauty of a landscape no longer depended on conformity to widely accepted aesthetic standards. The romantic appreciates nature in terms of the way it vibrates sympathetically with his own sensibility, and this harmony gives the impression of the romantic’s perfect accord with the infinite dimensions of nature. The beauty of nature thus becomes a state of mind. As Goethe says, “And now when it turns to evening, a few clouds rest on the mountain in the gentle breeze, in the sky more stand quietly than glide by, and right after sundown, the chirping of grasshoppers grows louder, one feels then at home in the world, and not as if passing through or an exile” (Goethe 11:26).23 The poet becomes inextricably integrated in the multifarious and resplendent aspects of nature and feels an expansive sense of exhilaration in surveying the workings of the natural world of which he has become an integral part. What had changed was not the inherent character of the landscape but rather the experience of the beholder who perceived more because his practiced intellect and a more richly receptive spirit were better able to observe and judge. Again Goethe was the first modern traveler to relate the beauty of the landscape to a work of art and to correlate the foremost features of the setting with the preeminent aspects of the soul. Not only can certain qualities of the natural landscape be better and more pregnantly defined by references to works of art (“the fragrance of the day that one only knows from the paintings and drawing of Claude [Lorrain] drifts across the earth” [Goethe 11:174]24), but nature itself is conceived as a work of art. This view leads to a state of mind conducive to the confluence of art and nature because the beauty of natural landscapes does not impede the development of the poetic sense but rather promotes it. The same conception arises both with references to the visual arts, as during Karamzin’s trip to Frankfurt, or to literary sources, as when the Russian traveler considers a stormy night worthy of Ossian’s lyre. A few years later, the outline of buildings in the distance seems to Chateaubriand to be drawn by the hand of a painter, “the towers and distant edifices appeared as faded sketches of a painting” (Chateaubriand 4:294),25 and the remains of calcified lava on the slopes of the Vesuvius appear to be those that inspired Dante’s terrible visions described in Inferno: “Dante had, perhaps, seen them when he painted in his Inferno these burning sands where eternal flames slowly descend in silence like snow in the Alps without wind” (Chateaubriand 4:298).26 From this juncture forward, the comparison of natural scenes with aesthetic representations became a commonplace among romantic travelers, and frequently the description of landscape details is replaced by a comparison or reference to a poetic text considered particularly apt to suggest the whole complexity and subtlety of the feelings aroused in the beholder’s heart. Heine follows this procedure in Die Harzreise: when climbing the Brocken, he cannot but think of the national tragedy Faust: Eine Tragödie. Heine’s text is a clear illustration of the way in which romantic travelers tended to replace the description of natural details with expressions of a vivid imagination. What began as a mere comparison was gradually transformed into a personification, and the travel accounts themselves finally became lyrical texts as is the case with the description of his journey through the Harz. Here, for example, he passes through a forest and describes a playful mountain brook, the Ilse: “The happiness, naïveté, and grace with which the Ilse rushes

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over the adventurously formed boulders that are found in its path is indescribable” (Heine 6:131).27 Gradually the description is transmuted into a personifying metaphor: “The Ilse is a princess, who laughing and radiantly runs down the mountain. How her white gown of foam gleams in the sun shine” (Heine 6:131).28 At the end, the river becomes the sweet voice of a flute in an eight-stanza poem: I am the Princess of Ilse And live in the Ilsenstein; Come along to my castle, We want to be blissfully happy. (Heine 6:132)29

But romantic travelers were not merely searching for the picturesque and sparsely populated places where their imagination could turn the bubbling mountain springs into a sweet voice or the Vesuvian rocks into the terrifying scenery of the Inferno. The landscape enriched by men’s presence and cities inhabited by a busy, diverse, and self-absorbed crowd began to capture the interest of travelers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were eager to learn about the ways of the people in places they were visiting. They were not just taken with accounts of exotic countries like Alexandre Dumas’s portrayal of Tunisia or Gérard de Nerval’s of Cairo, but also with descriptions of neighboring countries like the depiction by the Spanish traveler, Mesonero Romanos, of the Parisian population during his 1840 journey or that by Nerval of the Austrian capital where he tried recognize the distinguishing characteristics of different ethnic groups — Hungarians, Austrians, Valachians, or Croats — seen on the streets or in the taverns. But the romantic writer’s journey is also an endless source of observations of these peoples’ life and the colorful nuances of the sociality of the streets and markets. The descriptions of such a journey then became the actual reportage of more or less interesting case histories, some of which are sketched replete with extensive details while others are just mentioned. Such are Stendhal’s travels, where, alongside witty descriptions and observations, one can find many local stories: “the story of a poor maker of clogs named Maradin,” the story of a nun who built a nunnery, of a rich dandy, of an unhappy love affair of a young widow who kills herself when left by her lover, and of two lovers caught in bed (Stendhal 64–71, 178–87, 197–203, 211–13).30 And Stendhal is certain that these local low-life happenings, this gossip, and these tales, which do not always have great human significance, are what can mirror the specific time and place: “that which the fools wrongly understand by the term gossip is on the contrary the only story that well paints a country in this century of affectation” (Stendhal 174).31 These stories are not encountered in Paris, but in the provinces, which are truly representative of France: “You can spend twenty years in Paris and not know France; in Paris the foundation of all the stories is vague…. In your little town of ten thousand souls, on the contrary, you can … acquire an adequate certitude concerning most of the facts upon which you should base your judgment” (Stendhal 175).32 Nerval follows a similar procedure in his Voyage en Orient, and Dumas almost stifles the description of the journey proper by stories — either heard or read — which spring from any pretext and are usually found in one of his many parentheses. These anecdotes and digressions are introduced in the fashion of the well-known episodic Oriental stories: “During the first quarter. You don’t know what a quarter is, Madame? Let me explain to you, then….” or: “a

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chest, all in nacre and pearls, a chest five feet long and two feet wide, a real chest from the Arabian Nights. You remember of course, dear Madam: one of those chests which the sultans in Baghdad used” (Dumas 71, 164).33 The eastern European traveler also observes people and places, but he usually relates what he sees (as in Karamzin or Fonvizin’s letters) to what he left home but not without an acute and understandable feeling of guilt and inferiority usually mixed with a didactic purpose. The traveler from eastern Europe, moreover, adds study to the many other justifications for travel. Probably the most striking example is the Romanian boyar Dinicu Golescu, who in his Însemnare a ca˘la˘toriei mele (Notes on My Travel; 1826) describes his sojourns in Austria, Germany, northern Italy, and Switzerland and dwells particularly on the practical and organizational aspects of these countries. He often writes about the museums in Vienna, Dresden, and Milan in order to discuss the moral aspect of the paintings, which he praises and compares to the situation back home. Dinicu Golescu is, according to his own statements, an ignorant, uneducated boyar from eastern Europe, who lived in the darkness of the wilderness and in accordance with old barbarian custom abused the peasants on his estate in order to extract an ever greater income. But when he saw the wealth and order of the western countries, state institutions working for the benefit of the public, impartial justice (the emperor of Austria, it was claimed, lost a suit brought by his gardener because justice was on the gardener’s side), and the well-organized daily life — the cleanliness, the nightly supplying of cities in order not to disturb daily activities, cheaper transport using artificial canals, and other technical improvements — he changed and promised the reader that he would henceforward endeavor to implement what he saw. Dinicu Golescu’s travels in the west were real, but his travel accounts are not. Golescu was not in fact as uninformed as he claims, and documents attest not only to his charitable disposition before the journey, but also to enlightened motivations. Moreover, many of the episodes in the book are obviously fictional, e.g. the incident in which the English traveler asks him why he is taking notes in Greek and not in his own language. The reason was that — acquainted with Rousseau’s work — Golescu, the author of a general program for social, moral, and economic reform in his own country, was writing not only a travel book, but also a real philosophical novel like those popular during the previous century — Emile or Candide, for example. In so doing he was laying out the contours of an ideal world by means of fragmentary references to what he had seen (or wanted to see) on his journey across western Europe (Anghelescu 25–31). Like many other contemporaneous eastern European works promoting moral and social improvements (as Count Szechenyi’s in Hungary for instance), Golescu’s book is organized around edifying examples of the most varied aspects of a civilized state embodying justice, rational structures, and the consideration of the general interest rather than around a sequential recording of impressions. As in the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce by Abbot Barthélemy, a book translated into Greek and Romanian during the eighteenth century and widely disseminated, the reader of Golescu’s accounts is challenged by a travel narrative to consider the most appropriate forms of state institutions. Upon his return home, Golescu himself in fact launched an effective reform program precisely congruent with the issues and observations portrayed in the narration of his journey. Using the convention of seeing excellence in other countries in order to lend his own

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impulses the prestige of something directly experienced, Golescu is unknowingly following the road of unreserved admiration of everything foreign — the road of xenophilia — which most romantic playwrights ridiculed in fashion, manners, and language. In both the large and small countries of eastern Europe — Fonvizin in Russia, Alecsandri in Romania, Nágy Ferenc in Hungary — as well as in the west, the aping of foreign customs became standard vaudeville comedic fare: Franco-mania in English and Anglo-mania in France. This tendency represents the beginning of the collapse of a model afforded by the romantic journey in its first stages, a model eroded by its own excesses. The interest and admiration of anything new, unusual, or original, which is the basis of this kind of journey (ethnographism, costumbrismo, the local touch), began to acquire manneristic contours and gradually developed into the parody of its earliest manifestations. The idea of originality implying novelty and difference, as opposed to what is old and familiar, cannot be applied to a popular movement or orientation assimilating large groups of supporters. The romantic quest for original perceptions, characters, habits, or clothes soon degenerated into either a cliché or an aberration. The romantic traveler sought an itinerary of locales characterized by originality, a quality conspicuously absent from the earlier eighteenth-century journey to a large degree preoccupied with archaeological erudition. The romantic expedition therefore sought out the village, not the city; it ventured into the suburbs or the slums, not the trim and well-manicured center. It looked for lowly, impoverished areas, which are axiomatically traditional and closed to foreigners, not the prosperous, open and cosmopolitan precincts. It looked for the villager, the highlander, or the sailor, the man who lives secluded or in contempt of the law, not the urban dweller or the cosmopolitan bourgeois; the smuggler, the poacher, the forester, the hermit, the guide, but not the merchant, the intellectual, or the religious devotee. But all these characters upon whom the traveler casts a hurried and superficial glance have as a common denominator minimal relevance: once the first specimen of any particular category is found and described, all the subsequent descriptions are doomed to be redundant. Thus the “characteristic” scenes and characters, which repeat themselves to exhaustion in the descriptions of journeys during the first half of the century, devolve rapidly into clichés. Herein also lies the source of the legitimate grievances and justified dissatisfaction of these characters and peoples who saw themselves reflected in a mirror that diminishes and falsifies: “Diaries … that they call travel impressions, wherein every word is an error, every paragraph a dream, and every page an even worse affront against those same people whom the author, while traveling, went along praising with his genteel phrases, in order later to injure them with his pen … and to speak of that which they neither understand nor have studied nor observed” (Segovia 12).34 This practice also precipitates inevitable descriptive stereotypes that lapse into mannerisms, since an obligatory vocabulary ensues and a canonical group of details must be noted as Ramón de Mesonero Romanos pointed out with deft irony in his preface to the 1840 journey in France and Belgium: “The painter has placed before his view the most beautiful landscapes, the glistening air, the intoxicating sky, the waterfalls that dissolve into pearls, the green plains whose boundaries merge with the horizon, the high mountains that rise to lose themselves among the clouds, the rushing streams, serpents of silver” (Romanos 251).35 Subjected to and mediated by the increasingly homogenous and cliché-ridden passions and interests of European travelers, these countries — including Spain — yielded to the conventional modes of presentation. The journey, thus, becomes a matter of

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pedestrian and prosaic protocol here as well and yields the same results that invite ironic caricature. The satirical poet observes “la mania de viajar,” (the mania for travel) which has gone so far that Bretón de los Herreros observes that the Spaniard who does not travel is disparaged (Bretón de los Herreros 128).36 The ironic perspective on the whole did not need to wait for this relatively late moment, a time of devalorization of a discursive practice smothered by its own popularity: as early as the end of the eighteenth century among the English travelers, several examples of this depreciatory treatment of landscapes, nature, and people emerged, which more typically would have been cast in such a way as to attract admiration and interest. Robert Southey, for instance, sent letters from Spain, where he notices especially the unpleasant and uninteresting landscape, the dirt, and even the fact that he is annoyed by the country’s being inhabited by foreigners: “Other places attract the eye of the traveler, but Coruna takes his attention by the nose…. [T]he filth of the streets [is] so strange and so disgusting to an Englishman; but, what is most strange, is to hear a language which conveys to me only the melancholy reflections that I am in a land of strangers.” Even the usual invocation of the painter is used here ironically: “Oh, the misery of the night! I have been so flead, that a painter would find me an excellent subject for the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew!” (Southey 4–5). This disappointed attitude is more and more frequently part of the typical travel narrative, conforming to the expectations of readers accustomed to accepting the obligatory extension of descriptions of the picturesque, the original, and the unpredictable. The absurdity of expecting something unpredictable to happen is illustrated by the accounts of Berlioz’s travel in Germany. Traveling in 1843 from Frankfurt to Stuttgart, he was vexed by not finding anything worth relating, nothing picturesque, or even upsetting: “In traveling all around, I did not have any impressions at all that I can relate to you: not even the least romantic site to describe, no dark forest, no remote chapel, no raging torrent, no grand nocturnal sounds” (Berlioz 1:63).37 Gérard de Nerval had the same experience traveling in the highly praised landscape of Switzerland. He was profoundly disappointed by the impressions it made on him and the consequent frustration of his expectations. The landscape seemed to him a strident, counterfeit, and dull papier-maché setting: “I have told you how unworthy the city itself is of its fame and its marvelous location. I have looked for … all the medieval picturesqueness with which our opera set designers have poetically endowed it: all of that is nothing but a dream and an invention: in place of Constance imagine Pontoise” (Nerval 23).38 The traveler who is disappointed in his expectations always tends to notice the inconveniences and the lack of comfort of the journey. Full of false expectations, Adelbert von Chamisso set out on the Russian frigate Rurik in 1816 for a journey around the world. After his illusions were shattered, everything grew annoying: the ship seemed to be “a prison” or “a sarcophagus.” He was disturbed by being “cramped” and by the everyday “boredom,” even though he makes interesting observations about the fauna and nature in general on the islands he visits and about the languages of the indigenous population (Blamberger 38–9). Like Southey in Spain half a century earlier, Dickens had just as disenchanting an experiences on his trip through Italy, a country whose population he disliked along with the ever-present dirt. The contrast between what he had expected to see and what he saw can only be articulated in the ironic mode: “Their habitations are extremely filthy, and their usual occupation on a fine Sunday

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morning is to sit at their doors, hunting in each other’s head.” He observes even more acerbically: “The peasant women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly washing clothes in the public tanks, are in every stream and ditch, that one cannot help wondering, in the midst of all this dirt, who wears them when they are clean” (Dickens 59). Famous ruins lie before him but do not elicit any admiration, but rather evoke only a self-ironizing observation about the tourists who make such an effort to visit sites so void of interest to him: “For twelve miles, we went climbing on over an unbroken succession of mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin. Tombs and temples, overthrown and prostrate, small fragments of columns, friezes, pediments; great blocks of granite end marble; mouldering arches, grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a spacious city from lay strewn about us” (Dickens 206). Like everything “original,” exotic images are only impressive the first time they are seen. Thackeray notes: “The first day in the East is like that. After that there is nothing. The wonder is gone.” The friend with whom he is traveling is watching the shore of Smyrna from aboard the ship which had brought them there. He is watching with apathy and a distinct lack of interest because the miracle of this discovery had been exhausted the first time. “Smith looked at these wonders quite unmoved; and I was surprised at this apathy: but he had been at Smyrna before” (Thackeray 130–1). Educated with delusive reading at an impressionable age and attracted by the colorful descriptions of places which ignite the imagination, these travelers no longer experience Goethe’s revelation with regard to Rome. Since, on the contrary, their ingenuity is overtaxed by spectacular exaggerations and fairytale images from the Arabian Nights and similar fiction, reality proves disappointing since it is much inferior to their expectations: “If they love the odd and the picturesque, if they loved the Arabian Nights in their youth, let them book themselves on board one of the Peninsular and Oriental vessels, and try one dip into Constantinople or Smyrna. Walk into the bazaar and the east is unveiled to you …. The beauty of that poetry is, to me, that it was never too handsome; there is no fatigue of sublimity about it” (Thackeray 131). The fact that the real landscape is perceived as less than imagined is characteristic of the continuous overtaxing of the object of romantic interest and admiration. Even though at the beginning of the romantic era Goethe identifies with the scenery of Rome and William Beckford feels the impulse to leave his coach in order to bring offerings to the local gods as a sign of gratitude (Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, 1783), toward its end, the encounter with foreign reality is rather disappointing; and the attitude of the writer, like that of the intellectuals with whom he travels, leaves no room for doubt: “My sensation with regard to the Pyramids was that I had seen them before, then came a feeling of shame that the view of them should awaken no respect. Then I wanted (not really) to see whether my neighbors were any more enthusiastic than myself: Trinity College, Oxford, was busy with the cold ham; Downing Street was particularly attentive to a bunch of grapes …. But, the truth is, nobody was seriously moved” (Thackeray 228). After half a century, the capacity for observation had not changed much: Custine and Nerval were looking for new experiences and local color but did not find them, just as Ann Radcliffe had been similarly unsuccessful in 1784 in the Netherlands. Thackeray and Dickens bantered about the people and lamented finding nothing to admire in the still highly reputed places they visited, just as Southey had in 1798. During the 1840s, however, these accounts had

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a completely different meaning from those identical in form made before 1800. The new generation grounded its disappointment in the disparity between the world of imagination and the infinitely more modest experience of reality and not on the mere observation of certain differences as had their precursors. The outward expression of this disappointment became ironic, parodic, and fundamentally self-critical, but not contemptuous. In spite of their apparently conceited and unkind personalities, the observation by Dickens, Nerval, Thackeray, and Dumas are not different from those made by eastern travelers who went to the West in order to admire its accomplishments, among them the Romanian Dinicu Golescu and the Poles Fryderik Skarbek and Jozef Kraszewski. Their reactions express acceptance of a new community just beginning to assume its spiritual shape, albeit in a caustic way. The authors find that the world is truly divergent and people from diverse places are indeed different. They acknowledge this fact readily or reluctantly — but in the end accept it — thus revolutionizing the history of human contact. Dickens concludes Pictures from Italy with warm words of hope for the people of the country: “Let us part from Italy with all its miseries and wrong affectionately, in our admiration of the beauties, natural and artificial, of which it is full to overflowing, and in our tenderness towards a people naturally well-disposed, and patient, and sweettempered…. The good that was in them ever, is in them yet” (Dickens 262–3). Thackeray closes with the vision of people belonging to many religions, who are after all worshiping the same God, and the admonition: “Cavil not, you brother or sister if your neighbour’s voice is not like yours; only hope that his words are honest … and his heart humble and thankful” (Thackeray 255). Discovery and understanding of the other, however, are not just a fashion or the result of evolution in the field of literary study but are rather a necessity during the entirety of the epoch. This necessity revolutionized politics first and foremost and occasioned the birth of new institutions, among them the enormously influential French periodical, Revue des Deux-Mondes, whose first publication in 1823 was motivated by just the need to look to others and understand them. These are not the administrative theories of which France has the greatest need, it is practical administration. It is important to know well what takes place and has taken place among other people, not to adopt their institutions except those that would be able to apply themselves to our customs, to our character, to the progress of our light…. Such is the enormous gap that this review is destined fo fill…. After so many false books, the most original that can be published must be one that is true…. Politics as we understand them consist of the rights of the people and of the public rights. It deals with the powers which every country can have at its disposal, with its general and local institutions, … and with the public spirit, and with hate and with rational affections. In one word, with everything that constitutes the organization of the lives of people. (Revue des Deux-Mondes, 1:1–2; 1829)39

In their own way, the travel accounts written at the beginning of this century express the same need to understand and know the other, a process extending well beyond the compass of literature but one in which literature is profoundly implicated — a procedure that eventually bends back upon itself in that knowing the other results in self-knowledge as well. This perception, perhaps, explains why frequently the last place these romantic travelers discover is their own country. Stendhal traveled throughout France after having written his book about journeys to Italy; Mesonero Romanos stopped in Madrid after his trip to France and Belgium,

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and Thackeray records his trips to London and across England after having journeyed in France and the Orient.

Notes 1. “Le voyage a donné exemple, en marge du roman, d’une autre conception du récit: non plus une fiction artistique peignant les conduites idéalisées de héros désincarnés, mais des dehors réels et soigneusement décrits, des aventures véritables ou l’extraordinaire côtoie le trivial … un style sans recherche et un ton familier” (Chupeau 548). 2. “voyager est, quoi qu’on puisse dire, un des plus tristes plaisirs de la vie …. Oswald éprouva donc un redoublement de tristesse en traversant l’Allemagne pour se rendre en Italie” (de Staël 1:655). 3. “Proscris din a sa ¸tar˘a / Oriunde îi surîde un cer senin s¸i dulce” (D. Bolintineanu 2:125). 4. “Schon einige Jahre her dürft’ ich keinen lateinischen Autor ansehen, nichts betrachten, was mir ein Bild Italiens erneute” (Goethe 11:98). 5. “Alle Träume meiner Jugend seh’ ich nun lebendig, die ersten Kupferbilder, deren ich mich erinnere (mein Vater hatte Prospekte von Rom auf einem Vorsaale aufgehängt) seh’ ich nun in Wahrheit” (Goethe 11:126). 6. “Hätte ich nicht den Entschluß gefaßt, den ich jetzt ausführe, so wär’ ich rein zugrunde gegangen: zu einer solchen Reise war die Begierde, diese Gegenstände mit Augen zu sehen, in meinem Gemüt gestiegen. Die historische Kenntnis förderte mich nicht; die Dinge standen nur eine Hand breit von mir ab, aber durch eine undurchdringliche Mauer geschieden. Es ist mir auch jetzt nicht etwa zumute, als wenn ich die Sachen zum erstenmal sähe, sondern als ob ich sie wiedersähe” (Goethe 11:88). 7. “Toute ma vie, l’Orient avait été le rêve de mes jours de ténèbres dans les brumes d’automne et d’hiver dans ma vallée natale…. J’avais besoin de remuer, de pétrir dans mes mains un peu de cette terre” (Lamartine 1:14–5). 8. “Je m’étais toujours senti entraîné vers ces pays, qui nous semblent si reculés. J’étais curieux de voir cette grande et mélancolique nature du Nord, de contempler, au sein de leur déserts, ces Germains restés purs que reconnaîtrait presque Tacite” (Ampère 54). 9. “Ich hatte große Lust alle die Produkte zu beleuchten, die hier auf einmal zusammengefunden werden, doch der Trieb, die Unruhe, die hinter mir ist, laßt mich nicht rasten, und ich eile sogleich wieder fort. Dabei kann ich mich trösten, daß in unseren statistischen Zeiten dies alles wohl schon gedrückt ist und man sich gelegentlich davon aus Büchern unterrichten kann. Mir ist jetzt nur um die sinnlichen Eindrucke zu tun, die kein Buch, kein Bild gibt” (Goethe 11:25). 10. “Von vielen anderen Sachen sammelt’s sich auch um mich, und nichts Vergebliches oder Leeres, welches hier unmöglich wäre; alles unterrichtend und bedeutend. Am liebsten ist mir denn aber doch, was ich in der Seele mitnehme, und was, immer wachsend, sich immer vermehren kann” (Goethe 11:165). 11. “AD4>4<"bF\ 2" B,D@ F H,<, RH@$Z BD,*FH"&4H\ %"< A"D40 N@Hb … B@ 8D"6>,6 <,D, & (:"&>ZN ,(@ R,DH"N, *@:0,> :4 b >"R"H\, 8"8 (@&@D4:4 )D,&>4,, F b4P 9,*Z … ? A,D,&,FH4 :4 >,8@H@DZb [sic] <,FH" 42 2"B4F@8 _:4b O,F"Db (B,D&@(@ 42 *D,&>4N !&H@D@&, JB@<4>"`V4N @ A"D40,) … ? ?F:,B4H\ :4 (:"2" &"T4 JR,>@` BZ:\` F4N !&H@D@& … ? a F:ZTJ @H&,H &"T: “;Z BD@R4H",< E,>H-KJ", ,(@ Essais sur Paris, 4 J2>",< &F, H@, RH@ HZ <@0,T\ F8"2"H\ @ *D,&>@FH4 A"D40"; F8"04 >"< H@:\8@, 8"8@& @> B@8"2":Fb H,$, & >Z>,T>,< F&@,< &4*,, 4 $@:,, >4R,(@ >, HD,$J,<.” 3 H"8, … $J*J (@&@D4H\ @$ @*>@< >"FH@bV,<” (Karamzin 217–8). 12. “?FH">@&bF\ B@* H,>4` 8"TH">@&ZN *,D,& (J:\$4V", F<@HD,: >" 8"<,>>Z, JH,FZ ;,:\,D4, F 8@H@DZN @HR"b>>Z6 E,>-AD, N@H,: >42&,D(>JH\Fb & @2,D@, 4 @H8J*" B4F": @> 8 _:44” (Karamzin 150). 13. “)484,, Z, $,D,(" FHD,<4H,:\>@ H,8JV,(@ DJR\b, B@* TJ<@< 8@H@D@(@, F,& >" ,, BD@R4H": b B,D&J` 8>4(J K4>(":"” (Karamzin 71). 14. “1*,F\ F<,DH>Z6 RJ&FH&J,H F&@, &ZF@8@, @BD,*,:,>4,, 2"$Z&",H 2,<>@, @H,R,FH&@ 4 *,:",HFb (D"0*">4>@< &F,:,>>@6” (Karamzin 134). 15. “Malheureusement l’âme de l’homme est indépendante de l’air et des sites; un cœur chargé de sa peine n’est pas moins pesant sur les hauts lieux que dans les valées” (Chateaubriand 4: 322). 16. “La colline au pied de laquelle je me trouvais étoit comme la colline de la citadelle de Sparte…. Comme j’arrivois

178

Mircea Anghelescu à son sommet, le soleil se levoit derrière les Monts Ménélaious. Quel beau spectacle! Mais qu’il étoit triste …. Un mélange d’admiration et de douleur arrêtoit mes pas et ma pensée; le silence étoit profond autour de moi; je voulus du moins faire parler l’echo dans les lieux ou la voix humaine ne se faisoit plus entendre, et je criai de toute ma force: Léonidas! Aucune ruine ne répeta ce grand nom, et Sparte même sembla l’avoir oublié!” (Chateaubriand 4: 69).

17. “Je rendrai compte de mes courses et de mes sentiments à Athènes, jour par jour et heure par heure …. Encore une fois, cet Itinéraire doit être regardé beaucoup moins comme un voyage, que comme les mémoires d’une année de ma vie” (Chateaubriand 4:85). 18. “Des ruines splendides! Pourquoi donc s’en va-t-on en Italie contempler les restes de l’Antiquité? … Combien les ruines des temples chrétiens ne dépassent-elles pas en beauté celles des temples paiens!” (Estrup 61). 19. “J’ai vu Rouen. Dis à Boulanger que J’ai vu Rouen. Il comprendra tout ce qu’il ya dans ce mot…. J’ai vu tout…. Le palais de justice, le Gros-Horloge, Saint-Ouen, Saint-Maclou, … les fontaines, les vieilles maisons sculptées et l’enorme cathédrale” (Hugo 1076). 20. “%4* B:@F8@6 2,<:4 $Z: *:b <,>b >@&. a &FB@<>4: C@FF4`, :`$,2>@, @H,R,FH&@, 4 <>, 8"2":@F\, RH@ @>" J0, >, *":,8@” (Karamzin 193). 21. “=@ >4(*, &,F>" >, 4<,,H FH@:\8@ BD,:,FH,6, 8"8 & C@FF44. #,:"b @*,0*" 24"8@>,P JH@<:b,H 2D,>4,; *JT" 0,:",H B,D,<,>Z, 4 2&@>8@6 (@:@F 0"&@D@>8" D"2*",HFb >" &ZF@H, &@2*JT>@6” (Karamzin 291). 22. “Ce s˘a-t¸i mai însemn despre ¸tinuturile rhenane, pe care alt¸ii ni le descriu cu atîta entuziasm? Ce e drept, ele sunt foarte frumoase s¸i au în sine ceva atr˘ag˘ator, încît nu-t¸i vine us¸or s˘a despart¸i de ele; îns˘a pentru un transilv˘anean, crede-m˘a, Rhinul cu toate frumuset¸ile sale nu poate face mai mult decît fusese aceea mai nainte de a privi l˘audatele s¸i descîntatele plaiuri rhenane. Cel put¸in pentru mine Rhinul n-are nici o frumuset¸e natural˘a c˘areia asemenea sau mai fermec˘atoare s˘a nu fi aflat în scumpa mea patrie” (Barit¸iu 49). 23. “Und nun, wenn es Abend wird, bei der milden Luft wenige Wolken an den Bergen ruhen, am Himmel mehr stehen als ziehen, und gleich nach Sonnenuntergang das Geschrille der Heuschrecken laut zu werden anfängt, da fühlt man sich doch einmal in der Welt zu Hause und nicht wie geborgt oder im Exil” (Goethe 11:26). 24. “Über die Erde schwebt ein Duft des Tages über, den man nur aus Gemälden und Zeichnungen des Claude kennt” (Goethe 11:174). 25. “Les clochers et les édifices lointains paroissent comme ébauches effacées d’un peintre” (Chateaubriand 4:294). 26. “Le Dante les avoit peut-être vus lorsqu’il a peint dans son Enfer ces sables brûlants ou les flammes éternelles descendent lentement en silence, comme di neve in Alpe senza vento” (Chateaubriand 4:298). 27. “Es ist unbeschreibbar, mit welcher Fröhlichkeit, Naivität und Anmuth die Ilse sich hinunter stürzt über die abentheuerlich gebildeten Felsstücke, die sie in ihrem Laufe findet” (Heine 6:131). 28. “Die Ilse ist eine Prinzessinn, die lachend und blühend den Berg hinab läuft. Wie blinkt im Sonnenschein ihr weißes Schaumgewand!” (Heine 6:131). 29. “Ich bin die Prinzessin Ilse, / Und wohne im Ilsenstein; / Komm mit nach meinem Schlosse, / Wir wollen selig seyn.” (Heine 6:132). 30. “L’histoire d’un pauvre ouvrier de sabots nommé Marandin” (Stendhal 64–71, 178–87, 197–03, 211–3). 31. “Ce que les sots méprisent sous le nom de commérages est, au contraire, la seule histoire qui, dans ce siècle d’affectation, peigne bien un pays” (Stendhal 174). 32. “Vous passeriez vingt ans à Paris, que vous ne connaîtrez pas la France; à Paris les bases de tous les récits sont vagues …. Dans votre petite ville de dix mille âmes, au contraire, vous pouvez … acquérir une certitude suffisante à l’égard de la plupart des faits sur lesquels vous devez baser votre jugement” (Stendhal 175). 33. “Pendant le premier quart. Vous ne savez pas ce que c’est un quart, Madame? Permettez-moi de vous l’expliquer.” Or “Un coffre, tout en nacre et en écaille, un coffre de cinq pieds de long sur deux de large, véritable coffre des Mille et un nuits. Vous vous rappelez, madame: un de ces coffres à l’aide desquels les sultans de Baghdad” (Dumas 71, 164). 34. “Diarios … que ellos llaman impresiones de viajes, en donde cada palabra es un error, cada párrafo un sueño, y cada pagina tal vez mas grávido contra aquellos mismos pueblos a quienes el escritor mientras viajaba iba adulando con sus frases cortesanas, para luego injuriar los con a pluma … y de hablar de lo que no entienden ni han estudiado, ni han observado” (Segovia 12).

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35. “El pintor ha puesto delante de su vista los más bellos paisajes, la atmósfera brillante, el cielo nacardo, la cascada que se deshace en perlas, la verde pradera cuyo límites se confunden con el horizonte; la elevada montaña que va a perderse entre las nubes; el arroyo veloz, serpiente de plata” (Mesonero Romanos 251). 36. “El español que no viaja se denigra” (Bretón de los Herreros 5:128). 37. “En la parcourant, je n’ai point eu d’impressions que je puisse vous raconter: pas la moindre site romantique à décrire, pas de forêt sombre, pas de chapelle isolée, point de torrent, pas de grand bruit nocturne” (Berlioz 1:63). 38. “Je t’ai dit combien, en approchant, on trouvait ensuite la ville elle-même indigne de sa renommée et de sa situation merveilleuse. J’ai cherché … tout ce moyen-âge pittoresque dont l’avaient douée poétiquement nos décorateurs d’opéra: eh bien, tout cela n’était que rêve et qu’invention: à la place de Constance, imaginons Pontoise” (Nerval 23). 39. “Ce ne sont pas les théories administratives dont la France a le plus besoin, c’est l’administration pratique. Il importe donc de bien connaître ce qui se passe ou ce qui s’est passé chez les autres peuples, afin de n’adopter de leur institutions que ce qui pourrait s’appliquer à nos mœurs, à notre caractère, aux progrès de nos lumières …. Telle est l’immense lacune que cette revue est destinée à remplir …. Après tant de livres faux, le livre le plus original qu’on puisse publier doit être un livre vrai …. La politique, comme nous l’entendons … se compose du droit des gens et du droit publique, elle s’occupe … des forces dont chaque pays peut disposer, de ses institutions générales et locales … de l’esprit public, des haines et des affectations nationales; en un mot, de tout ce qui constitue l’organisation et la vie des peuples” (Revue des Deux-Mondes 1:1–2).

References Ampère, J. J. 1833. Littérature et voyages: Allemagne et Scandinavie. Paris: Paulin. Anghelescu, Mircea. 1991. “Utopia as a Journey: Dinicu Golescu’s Case.” Synthesis 18: 25–31. Baretti, Joseph (Giuseppi Marco Antonio). 1770 (1970). A Journey from London to Genoa: through England, Portugal, Spain, and France. London: T. Davis and L. Davis; (Fontwell, Sussex : Centaur Press). Barit¸iu, George. 1947. “Suvenire din c˘al˘atoria mea.” Întîiele c˘al˘atorii în Apus ale lui George Barit¸iu. Ed. Olimpiu Boitos¸. Sighis¸oara. Beckford, William. 1989. Voyage d’un dormeur eveillé. Trans. Roger Kann. 2 vols. Paris: Corti. Berben, Jacqueline. 1980. The Quest for Self-Knowledge: A Morphology of the French Romantic Voyage to Spain. Dissertation. U Texas, Austin. Berlioz, Hector. 1844. Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie: Etudes sur Beethoven, Gluck et Weber. 2 vols. Paris: J. Labitte. Blamberger, Günter. 1987. “‘ Ein Anderer ist nun der wirkliche Angang’: Peter Schlemihl e Ad. von Chamisso, pellegrini nel mondo.” La Letteratura di viaggio: Storia e prospettive di un genere letterario. Ed. Maria Enrica d’Agostini. Milano: Guerini. Bolintineanu, Dimitrie. 1982. Opere. Ed. T. Vârgolici. 2 vols. Bucharest: Minerva. Bretón de los Herreros, Manuel. 1851. Obras completas. 5 vols. Madrid: M. Ginesta. Burkot, Stanisław. 1988. Polskie podróz˙opisarstwo romantyczne. Warsaw: Pan´stwowe wydawnictwo naukowe. Buzard, James. 1993: The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918. Oxford: Oxford UP. Byron, George Gordon Noël. 1980–93. The Complete Poetical Works/ Lord Byron. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. 7 vols. Oxford: Claredon P. Chateaubriand, François René. 1843. Œuvres complètes. Vol. 4: Voyage en Italie. Paris: Firmin Didot Frères. Chupeau, J. 1977. “Les Récits de voyage aux lisières du roman.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 77.3–4: 536–53. Claudon, Fr. 1986. Le Voyage Romantique. Paris: Philippe Lebaud. Dickens, Charles. 1846. Pictures from Italy. Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors 103. Leipzig: Tauchnitz. Dumas, Alexandre. 1990. Le Véloce. Paris: François Bourin. Estrup, H. F. J. 1911. Journal d’un voyage en Normandie, 1819. Copenhagen: J. Estrup.



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Goethe, J. W. von. 1982. Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Erich Trunz. 14 vols. Hamburg: dtv. Heine, Heinrich. 1973–96. Heinrich Heine: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke. Ed. Manfred Windfuhr. 16 vols. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. Hugo, Victor. 1967. Œuvres complètes. Vol. 5. Édition chronologique publiée sous la direction de Jean Massin. Paris: Le Club français de livre. Karamzin, N. ;. 1984. A4F\<" DJFF8@(@ BJH,T,FH&,>>48". Eds. J. Lotman, N. Marchenko, and B. A. Uspenskij. Leningrad: Nauka. Lamartine, A. de. 1835. Voyage en Orient. 2 vols. Bruxelles: J. P. Meline. Lovejoy, Arthur. 1942. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Mesonero Romanos, Ramon de. 1967. Obras. de Don Ramon de Mesonero Romanos. Ed. Carlos Seco Serrano Vol. 5. Recuerdos de viaje por Francia y Bélgica. Madrid: Atlas. Moritz, Karl Philipp. 1795. Travels, Chiefly on Foot, through Several Parts of England in 1782. [Translated by a Lady]. London: G. G. and J. Robinson. Nerval, Gérard de. 1956. Œuvres. Vol. 2: Voyage en Orient. Eds. Albert Béguin and Jean Richer. Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard. Segovia, Antonio María. 1851. Manual del viajero español de Madrid a París y Londres, precedido de una mencion histórica de los viajes más célebres de los tiempos antiguos y modernos. Madrid: Gabriel Gil. Southey, Robert. 1799. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal. 2 ed. Bristol: Briggs and Cottle for T. N. Longman and O. Reeves. Staël, Mme de. 1836. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Firmin Didot Frères. Stendhal. 1932. Mémoires d’un touriste. Ed. Louis Royer. Paris: Champion. Thackeray, W. M. [1908]. A Legend of the Rhine: Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo. Ed. George Saintsbury. The Oxford Thackeray 9. Oxford: Oxford UP. Wilson, Reuel K. 1973. The Literary Travelogue: A Comparative Study with Special Relevance to Russian Literature from Fonvizin to Pushkin. The Hague: Nijhoff. Wolfzettel, Friedrich 1986. Ce désir de vagabondage cosmopolite: Wege und Entwicklung des franzözischen Reiseberichts im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer.



Romanticism and Nonfictional Prose in Spanish America 1780–1850 JOSELYN M. ALMEIDA Boston College

While history has rightly placed Simón Bolívar (1769–1830), “el Libertador” (the Liberator), at the forefront of the revolutions that altered the map of the Spanish empire during the 1810s and 1820s, Túpac Amaru’s (c.1752–1783) rebellion in 1781 heralds the transition from the period of alumbramiento (Enlightenment) to romanticismo. In Amaru’s attempt to restore the Incan homeland to its rightful owners, he includes “Spaniards, Creoles, Mestizos, Zambos and Indians … because they are all countrymen and compatriots, since they were born in our territories, and from the same origin of the naturals, and have borne equally the said oppressions and tyrannies of the Europeans” (Monguió 455).1 Amaru’s formulation of whom should be included as the rightful owners of Peru, as opposed to the “tyrannical and oppressive” Europeans, articulates the principle of jus solis, that “endows a person with the nationality of a place in which he [she] first saw the light of day” (Green 735). The articulation of the jus solis for all Peruvians implied a self-governing territory, the territory that would substantiate a right that Amaru saw as natural. Indeed, as early as 1822, Alexander von Humboldt observed that Amaru’s rebellion had been discounted as a legitimate revolt because the white criollos racialized it rather than seeing that Amaru was fighting for all Americans against Europeans and not just pitting indigenous peoples against white colonials (Humboldt 3: 438–9). Enlightenment ideas of the right to self-government thus began to be realized in Latin America with Amaru’s revolt. Most accounts and literary histories interpret Amaru’s uprising as a racial war rather than a bona fide attempt at independence, yet it is clearly in the spritit of revolutionary transvaluation, that we have come to identify as romantic. Even before Humboldt in his Personal Narrative linked Amaru’s revolt to the wars of independence that were to follow, the uprising was not lost on a contemporary across the Atlantic, Helen Maria Williams (1761–1824), who used the event as material for the articulation of the poetic values of the new aesthetic in the epic romance, Peru (1783). Her choice places Amaru within the chronology of European romanticism and complicates the notions of belatedness which pervade Latin American literary historiography. At the same time, the Latin American optic, which sees the first wave of romanticism as lasting until well into the century, tells much about the continuing vitality of this intellectual movement. Establishing a chronology for Latin American romanticism is further complicated by the fact that Hispanic literary history measures its time by generations, a designation that presents its own challenges. While there is consensus that the end of the alumbramiento and the first stirrings of independent thought come with the expulsion of the Jesuits by Charles III in 1767, the transition from alumbramiento to romanticism in Latin America is less defined for most critics (Anderson 191). The initial organizing work of Henríquez Ureña suggests a period of intellectual independence (1800–30) and romanticism and

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anarchy (1830–1850). According to this view, romanticism proper begins with the generation born during the first decade of the 1800s, one that produced most of its work after the Wars of Independence were finished. Yet these schemes do not account for principal figures like Bolívar, who embodies romanticism, and whom Giuseppe Bellini considers the inaugural figure of the movement in Spanish America (Bellini 199). Figures of the political stature of Francisco Miranda (1750–1816) or literary and philosophical scope of Andrés Bello (1781–1865) also fall outside this temporal demarcation. Miranda decided to leave his career as an officer in the Spanish army to fight alongside George Washington and later in the French Revolution in order to garner French, British, and North American support for the cause of Spanish American independence. Andrés Bello, who befriended the Spanish exile, José Blanco White (1775–1841), was probably encouraged by Blanco White’s earlier publication of El Espagnol (1812–14) to start the Biblioteca American (1823) considered by many the originative moment of Latin American letters. Their lives and writings are an example of how romanticism cross-pollinates the Americas and Europe in the period that immediately precedes the generation of 1800. This essay will examine non-fiction in Spanish America from 1780 to 1850 and follows Anderson in suggesting that while romanticism achieves its full expression after 1800 in Spanish America, its first stirrings are felt in the eighteenth century (Anderson 215). Amaru’s revolt finds resonance in romanticism because it was a revolutionary event; the same can be said of the general climate of ideas surrounding. Spanish American nonfiction that falls between the beginning of European romanticism around the year 1780 and the fall of the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877) in 1851 can be considered romantic. In the first of these two stages, from 1780 to 1830, non-fiction is dominated by ecclesiastic writing, travel writing, political prose, scientific treatises, and histories. Prose exhibits all its force from 1830 to 1850 in the genres of autobiography, the cuadro de costumbres (a nonfictional description of local customs), journalism and essays, literary and aesthetic criticism, and legal and social treatises (Anderson Imbert 239). The impulse behind this writing is the creation of nationalistic literatures that express the regional character of each new state, but that also draws upon the idea of America as a shared continent and a sense of being americanos.

From Alumbramiento to Revolución In Latin American prose before 1800, achieving a greater awareness of the territory of America as separate place from Europe, clearly goes hand in hand with developing an identity that protests against its colonial status. The scientific activity of naturalists like José Celestino Mutis (1732–1802), whose botanical library Humboldt compared to Joseph Banks’s in London, begins to name and define continental flora and fauna from a Creole standpoint. As Zea suggests, “The American flora, fauna, earth, and sky became the object of his [the naturalist’s] knowledge, … They very soon passed from the problems of a naturalist to problems of a political nature. America was not inferior to Europe simply because it was different” (Zea 16). The Diccionario geográfico-histórico de las Indias Occidentales o América (The Geographical and Historical Dictionary of America and the West Indies; 1786–1789) by Colonel Don Antonio de Alcedo y

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Bexarano (1735–1812), emerges as the lexical and geographical counterpart of Mutis’s Linnean classifications of flora and fauna. The Diccionario’s entries include the names of towns and cities with population estimates for each, salient geographical features, and notable historical events. In some definitions, Alcedo takes the opportunity to make political commentary, as in the entry for “Negros.” He begins his definition with facts that Edward Long or Bryan Edwards might have included in their works. “Negroes,” he writes, are “different nations of various kingdoms and provinces of Africa, who, although not aborigines of America,” nonetheless, “have a place in this history, as forming a principal part of the inhabitants of these regions” (Alcedo, Dictionary 3: 377).2 Significantly, however, Alcedo’s awareness of the presence of Africans in America goes beyond the racial, and he continues to describe the vital role that they play in the economy of the Americas. “For these are the people who labour in the mines, who cultivate the land, who are employed in all the servile offices in America, in the dominions of Spain, Portugal, France, England, Holland, &c…. where they are treated and considered as slaves with the greatest rigour and in humanity, and as though they were not rational creatures” (3: 377).3 In a moment that anticipates late twentieth-century assessments of Las Casas by critics like Antonio Benítez Rojo (1989), Alcedo criticizes the friar’s suggestion to Charles V to bring Africans to the Americas for hard labor, “as though, forsooth, this part of the human species should, on account of their difference of colour, want the privileges of humanity” (3: 377).4 Alcedo’s remarkable insight into the logic for the existence of otherwise unjustifiable economic and legal differences in the colonies during the Enlightenment sets him apart from other European and American commentators on the subject of slavery. More important, however, is Alcedo’s realization that the name Europeans give to Africans denotes inequality and perpetuates slavery. Alcedo links the act of the colonizer’s naming of the Other with the act of the Other’s subjugation, and writes the Diccionario as an answer to Europe’s naming and definition of America. It is an open act of protest. The Creoles begin to name and define the reality around them rather than accept the nomenclature assigned by Europeans. Mutis and Alcedo’s work is more remarkable when considered in the light of what Gerbi has called the querelle d’Amerique, which coincides with the expulsion of the Jesuits by Charles III in 1767. The works of Cornelius De Pauw (1737–1799), Abbé Raynal (1713–1796), and William Robertson (1721–1793) argued to some extent that Native Americans and Americans of European descent were innately inferior to Europeans and that America had “unwholesome” and “pernicious qualities” (Robertson 4: 17). Father Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–1837), who was among the Jesuits exiled to Italy, is at the forefront of the American side of the querelle. His Storia antica di Messico (Ancient History of Mexico; 1780–1781) became an immediate voice in the debate and was translated into English in 1787 by Charles Cullen, who points out that notwithstanding Robertson’s efforts, “the want of many essential documents which are preserved in archives of the new world, and other disadvantages … has left the American side of the picture still greatly in the dark” (Clavijero in Cullen 1: iv). Clavijero’s clarification of the theories that De Paw, Raynal, and Robertson promoted begins with an argument against the notion that Native Americans and Creoles are inferior by insisting on the claim that Mexico has within the history of the world. This claim is consistent with the idea that his writing is “to serve to the utmost of my power my native country”

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(Clavijero 1: vii). History and patria go hand in hand for Clavijero. He specifically challenges Raynal’s dismissal of the historicity of the founding of Mexico and of the fact that Moctezuma was the ruler when the Spanish arrived. “If there is reason, however, to doubt of all the ancient history of the Mexicans, the antiquity of most other nations in the world will come equally into question” (Clavijero 1: xxvi). Clavijero calls into question the notion that America’s history comes into being with European intervention and also points to Raynal’s flawed logic, which suggests that because the Americas are not knowable through European methods, they do not have a history. Clavijero exposes Raynal’s double standard by showing that the same holds for ancient European civilizations: they are just as unknowable as the American, yet they are given a place in history. Clavijero’s correction of European misreadings of America continues with Robertson, who is “more moderate than Raynal” but “has fallen into more errors and contradictions while he endeavored to penetrate further into the knowledge of America and the Americans” (Clavijero 1: xxvi). Robertson, like other writers on the Americas, relies on “what was already written in Spanish,” and ignores “many histories and memoirs written by the Indians themselves,” which Robertson cannot “read” (Clavijero 1: xxv, xxvii). In this indictment, Clavijero exercises selfdetermination in dictating the terms in which the history of Mexico and the Americas in general may be read. He posits and then proves that there are things that escape the European reader and radically shifts the burden of proof from European sources to those indigenous or Creole origin. Creoles are in the position of determining what may or may not be said about them and of being the authority on their own situations. Part of this authority comes from experience; one of Clavijero’s main complaints is that most of these writers have not been in the Americas. The other source authority is the ability that he sees in the Creole to interpret a series of discourses that may seem incommensurable at times — like indigenous texts and Spanish chronicles — an ability that only comes by belonging in some way to both groups. Writing from Italy, he recognizes what is now known as mestizaje as a cultural element proper to Mexico and strives for this perspective to have a legitimating say. As Sánchez-Barba suggests, Clavijero’s experience of writing his history in exile “strongly posits one of the first manifestations of the romantic conflict” (Sánchez-Barba 299).5 Whereas Clavijero rendered his understanding of Mexico from the vantage point of his exile in Italy, Alonso Carrió de la Vandera (c. 1715–1778) articulates his understanding of place in the Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes … sacado de las memorias que hizo don Alonso Carrió de la Vandera … por don Calixto Bustamante Carlos Inca, alias Concolorcorvo (The Guide for Blind Travelers … from the Reminiscences of don Alonso Carrió de la Vandera … by Calixto Bustamante Carlos Inca, alias Concolorcorvo; 1776). This peculiar work, a travel book that includes jokes, anecdotes, political opinions, satires, and cuadros de costumbres, guides the visitor through the main postas or mail stations between Buenos Aires and Lima. Concolorcorvo, a man who traces his lineage to the Incas and actually accompanied de la Vandera during the latter’s official duties throughout the mail route, was believed for years to be the indigenous author of the work. His persona is the reader’s learned, amenable, and opinionated guide through a terrain that is both literal and literary. “Travelers (and here I include myself) are to historians what seeing guides are to the blind…. [Historians] … select the memories of the most reliable and talented travelers. I do not pretend to put myself in the first category, because my observations

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are designed to give unseasoned travelers an idea of the royal road between Buenos Aires to Lima, with some practical advice” (Carrió de la Vandera 22).6 Concolorcorvo’s practical information ranges from demographic details about each city to advice on modes of transportation and victuals for the thirty-six-day journey through mountainous territory. As he notes aspects of the landscape or characteristics of the different cities, he takes the opportunity to dispel misconceptions that he finds objectionable in trying to arrive at an American viewpoint of the world. He is not impressed, for example, by the London Gazette’s report of the amount of meat consumed by aristocrats, since in Buenos Aires even the most common gauderio (a type of lawless cowboy) eats as much in a day. Concolorcorvo summarily dismisses what he sees as non-Spanish European foppery and criticizes American institutions and practices. The self-criticism turns suspect, however, when he begins to discuss the conquest and the status of the indigenous population. He defends the Spanish against charges of cruelty claiming that their detractors are “jealous of the glories of the Spanish” (Carrió de la Vandera 171). Industry and commerce are among the benefits that the Spanish bring to the Americas, since the Indians “never knew nor do they know how to benefit from mines” (Carrió de la Vandera 170). Critics who believed that the historical Concolorcorvo had written the Lazarillo found such passages puzzling at best or had simply taken them at face value. Why would an indigenous person justify the conquest? These questions have become even more pressing since the discovery of Carrió de la Vandera’s false attribution of the work to Concolorcorvo. De la Vandera not only listed the wrong person as author, but changed the date of publication by three years: although the work was printed in 1776, the first edition is dated 1773. It has been suggested that Carrió de la Vandera acted out of fear of censure, but if that was his motive, why would he endanger the life of the man who befriended and guided him? Both positions may make more sense if the work is read in the revolutionary context of romanticism and as a very complex gloss of the challenge of expressing the point of view of an Americanized Spaniard. If Carrió de la Vandera wanted to avoid censure, Concolorcorvo is a cover of sorts; yet making a descendant of the Incas the author of the work is the more radical choice. Concolorcorvo is the authoritative voice in the text, while Carrió de la Vandera, who figures as a visitor in the narrative, can only ask questions. The Lazarillo maps the mail route, and, moreover, becomes a space for self-definition. Concolorcorvo, like Clavijero, discusses “mi patria” (Carrió de la Vandera 170). History bears testimony to the radicalism of Carrió de la Vandera’s choice: a few years later in 1781, Túpac Amaru, who claimed royal Incan descent like Concolorcorvo, led the revolt against the Spanish.

Revolutionary Crossings The efforts toward self-definition generated in part by the querelle d’Amerique, the influence of the revolution in the United States in 1776, the fermenting French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution and the growing unrest of the colonies under the reforms of Carlos III compelled several key figures in the wars of Latin American independence to travel or live in Europe and the United States where they garnered support for their cause and often published books and treatises. Some of these writers began their activities in the Americas, but were exiled for

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political or religious reasons. Fray Servando de Teresa y Mier (1763–1827) merits mention in this context. Anderson Imbert and others have alluded to the fact that if Mier had not written any fiction, his life was certainly worthy of it. He went into exile after preaching a sermon in 1794 in which he claimed that San Tomé had preached Christianity in Mexico even before the Spanish had arrived thus challenging the claim that Mexico owed Spain any loyalty on account of its evangelization (Anderson 190). In exile, he was intellectually active meeting José Blanco White later in London and publishing two pamphlets in response to Blanco White’s El Espagnol: Carta de un Americano al Español sobre su número XIX (1812) (Letter from an American to the Español Regarding its Nineteenth Issue) and Segunda Carta al Espagnol sobre su número XIX (1809) (Second Letter to the Español Regarding its Ninth Issue). While in London, he also published Historia de la revolución de Nueva España (1813) (A History of the Revolution of New Spain) under the pseudonym José Guerra. From England he went to the United States and returned to Mexico in 1821. While Mier was in exile for his political views, Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816), whose life has a dimension that can only be hinted at in these pages, developed those ideas after he left his native Venezuela to serve in the army of Charles III. Miranda’s acute military and political mind and his personal charisma secured him the attention of figures such as Catherine the Great and William Pitt. He undoubledly prepared the way for the better known Simón Bolívar. Miranda’s talent and abilities were only matched by his relentless campaign for Latin American independence, which he began in the United States in 1784 after leaving his military appointment. In 1785, Miranda arrived in London where he met key figures and began circulating the idea of Latin American independence. He then left for Italy, Greece, and Constantinople where he was invited to visit Russia. After remaining in Catherine the Great’s court from 1787 to 1788, he returned to western Europe and to London in 1789 where he met Sir George Yongue, then British minister of defense. In 1790 he obtained a meeting with Pitt and interested Pitt in the fate of Spain’s American colonies by promising England “great commercial advantages” in exchange for military support against Spain (Miranda, January 28 1791). This fateful meeting began England’s complex backstage involvement in Latin American affairs, and Pitt, like Canning and Castlereagh later, showed interest in supporting Latin American independence in exchange for British benefit as long as the British were not perceived by the international community to be committed to the cause. After Pitt initially showed some interest, Miranda received no definite response. Miranda then went to France in 1792 and accepted the post of field marshall in the French Republican Army that José Servan, the revolutionary minister of war, offered him. Miranda excelled in the field, but when Jacobin and Girondine tensions divided the revolutionary party, he was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror. (During his imprisonment, he became acquainted with Helen Maria Williams.) He obtained his release, and lived in Paris until he was accused of being in league with the British. In 1798, Miranda returned to London and resumed discussions with Pitt. During this early period in London, he financed the posthumous publication of Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán’s (1748–1798) Carta a los Españoles-Americanos, 1799, (Letter to the Spanish Americans), and organized “la Gran Reunión Americana” (the Great American Convocation), a secret society that held its first meeting that year, and in which he called for the independence and confederation of territories between Mexico and Cape Horn. As Rozos Prieto

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points out, Miranda’s pro-independence activities attracted so much attention in Great Britain that the government suggested he leave the United Kingdom (Rozos Prieto 46). But Miranda remained and cultivated friendships with William Burke and James Mill, both of whom published articles in favor of Latin American independence, while Miranda continued making the case to Pitt and other members of government that a free Latin America was in the interest of Britain. His acquaintance with Mill and Burke resulted in an article in the Edinburgh Review discussing the Carta a los americanos, which Miranda published in 1799 and republished in 1809 in London. Titled “Emancipation of Spanish America,” the article outlines Miranda’s views and repeats the arguments he had been making to Pitt. “The brilliant prospects which seem to be opened up for our species in the New World … present, at the present hour, a subject of contemplation to the thinking part of the British public” (Mill 279). Mill gives an overview of Spanish-British relations, and of British policy in the Americas factoring in the loss of the thirteen colonies and Sir Home Popham’s failed invasion of Buenos Aires in 1806. Mill ponders the effects of independence in Spanish America and suggests several constitutional models. In light of the difficulties Bolívar would encounter later regarding political organization, Mill’s words and Miranda’s foresight in this instance are almost prophetic. “It is one thing to form a constitution; — it is another thing, and a very difficult thing, to administer a constitution….” (Mill 303). He suggests the British support an independent Spanish America noting the commercial advantages that the British stand to gain from it, “which will flow spontaneously in such abundance” (Mill 312). But perhaps the strongest argument Miranda made to Mill and the British government at that juncture concerned Napoleon’s impending invasion of Spain. The prospect of Napoleonic control of Spain and its overseas possessions was an imminent threat. Aside from British designs on South America, José Bonaparte’s control of Spain probably assured Simón Bolívar’s and Andrés Bello’s audience with the British government. Miranda followed the proceedings closely, and Bolívar determined that he should return to Venezuela to proclaim its independence. Andrés Bello remained in England and began his long residence there, which lasted until 1829. Miranda returned to Venezuela with Bolívar after publishing five issues of El Colombiano (The Colombian) during 1810 and supervising a translation of Alcedo’s Diccionario, which was published from 1812–15. Miranda likely used his connections to help Bolívar publish in the Morning Chronicle of September 5, 1810, Carta de un español de Cádiz a un Amigo suyo en Londres (Letter to a friend in London from a Spaniard from Cadiz). The letter protests the Spanish embargo on Venezuela enacted by the Regency, the interim body that governed Spain during the Napoleonic invasion, 1807–13. It argues for free trade, and veils its threat of revolution under the persona of a politically astute and concerned Spaniard. “I believe with near certainty that the British Cabinet might have completed commercial stipulations with the government of Caracas; and that therefore, it will not allow that these agreements are interrupted by an illusory embargo” (Bolívar, Ideas 219).7 The letter finally suggests that the British, who at the time were supporting Spain against Napoleon, would interfere in favor of the injured Venezuelans. The British did not interfere, however, at least not in the way Miranda and Bolívar expected it. Miranda died imprisoned in Spain after being captured by the Spanish army in Venezuela. Bolívar, who had been frequenting European capitals since 1799, continued to cross paths with

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the British until the end of his life. The Manifiesto de Cartagena, 1812, (Cartagena Manifesto), Carta de Jamaica, 1815, (Letter from Jamaica), and the Discurso de Angostura, 1819, (Speech Before the Council of Angostura) outline his views on the reasons for the independence of Latin American territories and its subsequent republican aims. The Letter registers several themes that Bolívar and Miranda had outlined while in London: the vastness of a “varied and unknown country such as is the New World,” and the need for Europe to defend the Americas because it was in its own interest, “because the balance of power demands it, and because this is the legitimate and secure way of securing overseas commercial posts” (Bolívar, Doctrina 55, 59).8 In his introduction, Bolívar presents the Americas in a familiar light to Europeans, adopting even Francisco Clavijero’s opening in the History of Mexico. Like Clavijero, Bolívar claims difficulty in responding to a friend’s query because he lacks materials, but goes on to offer his views on the Latin American situation citing Humboldt, whom he had befriended in Europe. As Mary Louise Pratt points out, Bolívar knew von Humboldt’s work contributed to the popularization of South America and the Caribbean in Europe. The Letter, however, makes clear that the independence movement in Latin America had moved beyond a rhetorical phase. Bolívar addresses the concrete problem of the type of government that will benefit the new nations. In light of the instability in Venezuela since he and Miranda declared independence in 1811, he deems representative governments inadequate, “until our countrymen acquire the talents and political virtues that distinguish our brothers in the North” (Doctrina 67).9 The system of government that would prevail after the wars became Bolívar’s principal concern. Though the Speech Before the Council of Angostura, 1819, may be at times “grandiose and grandiloquent,” as Bellini calls it, it reveals the depth of analysis Bolívar had developed since the Letter in 1815 (Bellini 199). In the Speech, he gives an overview of world government citing the systems of Rome, France, and England among others. Bolívar admonishes the Venezuelan senate to pick a type of government that is suited to the needs of the Venezuelan people as opposed to adopting a foreign one. He notes the difficulty of selecting a proper government for Venezuela on two accounts: the lack of real democratic models and the population of Venezuela. Bolívar continues to believe that a purely representative government like the one in the United States is a premature experiment for a republic whose population is “heterogeneous” and whose “complicated artifice becomes dislocated, divided, and dissolves at the slightest alteration” (Doctrina 111).10 He suggests that legislators carefully review the British Constitution but not imitate it. His tone grows urgent toward the end of the speech. “To lead our nascent Republic out of this chaos, all our moral faculties will not be enough if we cannot make one body from the mass of peoples” (Doctrina 121).11 Bolívar’s attempt to carry into practice the political theories he outlined in the Letter and later in the Speech has been at worst seen as a betrayal of his revolutionary ideals and at best as an unavoidable but necessary exercise in power. Leopoldo Zea notes how “in the name of liberty Bolívar imposed his power upon the peoples whom he had liberated” (Zea 16–7). Such assessments often miss, however, the scope of the challenge that Bolívar faced: to bring political and economic stability to the newly liberated republics amidst the development of internal factions of landowners vying for power. José Blanco White, a crucial figure in bringing Anglo-Hispanic interests together, was one of the first to consider the merits of Bolívar’s achievement. After ceasing to publish El Espagnol in 1814 in which he had translated for South American readers texts as diverse as chapters from

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von Humboldt and part of the British Constitution, he published a life of Bolívar in 1824 in the New Monthly Magazine thus contributing to the continued visibility of Latin American affairs in the eye of the British public. At that juncture, Bolívar still believed in his mission. After the revolutionary convolutions of two decades and disappointed hopes, he concluded before dying, they had plowed the sea (Prieto Rozos 103).

Nation Building The question that Bolívar raised in 1815 — how the new republics were going to be governed — was to reverberate through Latin American letters throughout the 1850s and dominate much of the nonfiction writing during the revolutionary years and beyond. The development of a romantic aesthetic that reflected American reality rather than British or French models went hand in hand with the question of self-determination. Journalistic satire was one of the primary means of addressing the first. José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776–1827), best known for his novel El Periquillo Sarniento, 1816, published several newspapers. El Pensador Mexicano, 1811–1814, (The Mexican Thinker), La Alacena de Frioleras, 1815–1816, (A Cupboard of Trifles), Cajoncitos de la Alacena, 1815–1816, (Boxes in the Cupboard), El Conductor Eléctrico, 1820, (The Electrical Conductor), Defensa de Francmasones, 1822, Conversaciones del Payo y el Sacristán, 1824, (Conversations Between a Farmer and a Sexton) and Correo Semanario en México, 1826, (Mexico’s Weekly Post). Mixing high and low styles in a mode reminiscent of Sterne, Fernández de Lizardi addresses a variety of readers, quoting from classical authors like Horace, Ovid, Seneca, and Cicero one minute and popular sayings the next. His writings give a sense of the difficult political climate following the revolution. “When I began to write, praises were heaped on me, since I dealt with the pernicious effects of the … previous government … but as soon as my pen touched the sore spots of our civic vices, the devil took my fame…. The same Pensador is now said to be so idiotic he cannot even speak Spanish properly” (Lizardi 3: 452).12 Censure continued to be a danger into the 1820s when advertisements appeared indicating that the printer refused to print the paper under government orders (Lizardi 4: 405). Fernández de Lizardi, however, did not relent because, as Bellini writes, “he had his sights on the renovation of society from within” (198). A similar reformist spirit informs the writings of Esteban Echeverría (1805–1851), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–1888), and Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884). Echeverría, who consciously set out to become a romantic poet and published several poems, is better known for his prose and for forming the Asociación de Mayo (The May Association) in 1838, to which these three Argentinian writers belonged. Thanks to Echeverría, writes Anderson Imbert, “a generation of young romantics who were educated by the same books, were linked by the same attitude toward history, witnesses of their national catastrophes, became coherently organized during the 1830s and stands out in Latin American literary history” (Anderson 243). Early in Clasicismo y romanticismo (Classicism and Romanticism; 1823), a critical survey of eighteenthand nineteenth-century literature in Europe, Echeverría attempted to locate Latin America within these currents and suggests that “We must know … what literary doctrines we follow, professing those which are in accord with our condition, lighting the way to an original and fecund

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literature, for as Hugo says, romanticism is liberalism in literature” (Echeverría 55).13 Echeverría articulates aesthetically what Bolívar counseled politically in his Speech Before the Council of Angostura. The aesthetic, however, could not be divorced from the political. The national catastrophe against which Echeverría and others protested was the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the caudillo who came into power in 1829 and sought to resolve the tensions between Argentinian provinces after the revolution via increasingly undemocratic measures. El matadero, 1839, (The Slaughterhouse), considered by some a short story and by others a cuadro de costumbres, compares Rosas’s government to a slaughterhouse. Echeverría did not publish this during his lifetime, but he did not remain silent about his views. In September of 1837, Echeverría gave the “Discurso de introducción a una serie de lecturas en el ‘Salon Literario’” (Introductory Speech to a Lecture Series in the Literary Salon), and the May Association came into being. Echeverría surveys the history of the wars of independence and their outcome; he finds it sadly wanting. Vestiges of revolutionary zeal have become brute force serving as a tool for despotism (Echeverría 151). Echeverría calls on young people to use reason to counter senseless violence. They must reevaluate laws, the press, and educate the general populace if literature and philosophy were to move beyond an “embryonic” state and if the goals of the revolution were to be achieved. In 1846, he writes his culminating political essay “Dogma socialista” (Socialist Doctrine), in which he restates these goals: “Democracy as tradition, principle and as an institution” (171).14 Echeverría wrote the Dogma in exile, one which he shared with Alberdi in Montevideo until the former’s death in 1851. Alberdi had been forced to leave Buenos Aires in 1838 because of his involvement in the Association but more pointedly as the result of the biting social commentary, which he published in La Moda 1837–1838 (Fashion) under the pseudonym of Figarillo, or Little Figaro. In the first issue, “Mi nombre y mi plan” (My name and my plan), he purports to write on subjects that “no one cares about” such as fashion, literature, and customs. When he explains why took the name from Agustin Larra, a Spanish satirist, he begins his subtle satire of Rosas’s protectionist policies and the latter’s fanatical rejection of everything foreign: “In this Hispanic American society, everything that is not Hispanic cannot be American” (Alberdi 8, 9).15 His irony becomes more acerbic later in the year when he reviews Schlegel and discusses an intruding Englishman, “a certain Shakespeare” (Alberdi 243, 249) and political work, Las bases (The Foundations; 1853), which influenced the outcome of the elections of 1853. For Alberdi, “the dilemma was between the past and the future … to remain in a world of the past or to be like the great nations that represented occidental progress, The United States and England” (Zea 122). Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who eventually served as president of Argentina, 1868–73, and is the most renowned of the group, interpreted the dilemma between past and future as that between civilization and barbarism, an opposition which von Humboldt first formulates: “It is less difficult to acquire a knowledge of the configuration of coasts bathed by the ocean, than of the sinuosities of that interior shore, on which barbarism and civilization, impenetrable forests and cultivated land, touch and bound each other” (von Humboldt 3: 421). In Civilización y barbarie: vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga, 1845, (Civilization and Barbarism: Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; 1868), Sarmiento takes Humboldt’s observation, and maps the Argentinean landscape in terms of this dialectic identifying the European oriented

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city with civilization and the country, which preserves native customs, with barbarism. He narrates the story of caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga, who dominated the political scene until Rosas had him assassinated and took over. The book, as Anderson Imbert notes, is not a history, or an essay, or a sociological treatise, but rather a compendium of all these genres. Although Sarmiento complicates the dialectic, as he further notes, the dialectic civilization/barbarism became the axis upon which Latin American reality was measured until the last thirty years of the twentieth century. “Everything civilized which the city contains is blockaded there [in the country] … and any one who should dare to appear in the rural districts in a frock-coat, for example, or mounted on an English saddle, would bring ridicule and brutal assaults upon himself” (Mann 14).16 (Echeverría’s hero in El Matadero, meets his end because, among other things, he is dressed en frac.) From 1845 to 1847, Sarimento traveled through Europe and published Viajes (Travels), upon his return. Even as he became involved with political office, his literary production continued. He published Recuerdos de provincia (Provincial Remembrances; 1850) and Campaña en el Ejército Grande (Campaign in the Ejército Grande; 1852), about his role in Urquiza’s army. Sarmiento maintained his belief in the superiority of European ways and in the promise of progress that he believed came with them. As Mary Louise Pratt points out, “Sarmiento presided over a series of genocidal campaigns against the Pampas Indians and the further break-up of independent gaucho society” (Pratt 193). Almost as a tempering influence on Sarmiento stands the figure of Andrés Bello, whose long career spanned most of the nineteenth century. Bello spent the agitated years of the wars of independence in London (1810–1829) returning in 1829 not to his native Venezuela but to Chile, where he worked actively in education and eventually founded the University of Chile and served as its first president from 1848–1865. While in London, he published the Repertorio Americano (American Repertoire; 1823), which contained the poem “La agricultura de la zona tórrida” (“Agriculture in the torrid zone”) considered by many the originative moment of Spanish American literature. What is of interest in terms of this essay, however, is the Bello who returned to Chile and published the Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos, (Grammar of the Spanish Language 1847), a number of essays and speeches discussing the pedagogical program of universities in Latin America, and his posthumous philosophical work, Filosofía del entendimiento (Philosophy of Understanding; 1881). He also found time to revise Chile’s Código Civil (Civilian Code). A man who had a tremendous range of experiences and capacities, Bello advocated a tempered Americanism, one conscious of its material and social dimensions. “Learn to judge for yourselves,” he advised young Chileans in 1848, so as not to be “an exotic plant which still does not take its nourishment from the soil which sustains it” (qtd. Zea 102). Bello’s words reveal an understanding of the Latin American problem of self-definition during the first half of the nineteenth century, which began during the enlightenment and continued as it profited from European romanticism. He seemed to have understood that either strictly Eurocentric or Americanist points of view would skew rather than bring into focus the horizon that Latin Americans were drawing from themselves. Bello, like most Latin American writers in this period, proposed no easy answers to the dilemma. He advocated self-directed inquiry and analysis as a means to chart the course ahead, one of the more enduring legacies of romanticism on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Notes 1. “haber tomado por acá aquellas medidas que han sido conducentes al amparo, protección, y conservación de españoles criollos, mestizos, zambos e indios … por ser todos paisanos y compatriotas, como nacidos en nuestras tierras, y de un mismo origen de los naturales, y el haber padecido todos igualmente dichas opresiones y tiranías de los europeos” (Amaru in Monguió 455). 2. “Negros: Nación de gentes, o por mejor decir, naciones de varios reinos y provincias del África, que aunque no son aborígenes de América, les damos lugar, porque forman la principal parte de los habitantes de estas regiones” (Alcedo, Diccionario 18). 3. “[Éstos] son los que trabajan las minas, los que cultivan la tierra, y los que se emplean en todos los oficios serviles en la América, en los dominios de España, Portugal, Francia, Inglaterra, Holanda, etc…. donde son tratados con el mayor rigor e inhumanidad, como si no fueran de la especie racional” (Alcedo, Diccionario 18). 4. “como si esta parte del género humano debiera carecer de los privilegios de la humanidad por la diferencia del color que les da el nombre” (Alcedo, Diccionario 18). 5. “plantea agudamente una de las primeras manifestaciones del conflicto romántico” (Sánchez-Barba 299). 6. “Los viajeros (aquí entro yo), respecto de los historiadores, son lo mismo que los lazarillos, en comparación de los ciegos…. Aquellos [los historiadores], como de superior orden, recogen las memorias de los viajeros más distinguidos en la veracidad y talento. No pretendo colocarme en la clase de éstos, porque mis observaciones solo se han reducido a dar una idea a los caminantes bisoños del camino real, desde Buenos Aires a esta capital de Lima, con algunas advertencias que pueden ser útiles “ (Carrió de la Vandera 27). 7. “Creo positivamente que el Gabinete Inglés habrá hecho algunas estipulaciones comerciales con el Gobierno de Caracas; y por consiguiente que él no permitirá que estos convenios sean interrumpidos por un ilusorio bloqueo” (Bolívar, Ideas 219). 8. “Así, me encuentro en un conflicto, entre el deseo de corresponder a la confianza con que Vd. me favorece y el impedimento de satisfacerla, tanto por la falta de documentos y libros cuanto por los limitados conocimientos de un país tan inmenso, variado y desconocido como el Nuevo Mundo…. La Europa misma, por miras de sana política, debería haber preparado y ejecutado el proyecto de la independencia americana; no sólo porque el equilibrio del mundo así lo exige; sino porque éste es el medio legítimo y seguro de adquirirse establecimientos ultramarinos de comercio” (Bolívar, Doctrina 55, 59). 9. “en tanto a que nuestros compatriotas no adquieran los talentos y virtudes políticas que distinguen a nuestros hermanos del Norte, los sistemas enteramente populares, lejos de sernos favorables, temo mucho que vengan a ser nuestra ruina” (Bolívar, Doctrina 67). 10. “La diversidad de origen requiere un pulso infinitamente firme, un tacto infinitamente delicado para manejar esta sociedad heterogénea cuyo complicado artificio se disloca, se divide, se disuelve con la más ligera alteración” (Bolívar, Doctrina 111). 11. “Para sacar de este caos nuestra naciente República, todas nuestras facultades morales no serán bastantes si no fundimos la masa del pueblo en un todo” (Bolívar, Doctrina 121). “Cuando comencé a escribir, como traté de los perniciosos efectos del despotismo del antiguo gobierno de la península, llovían sobre mí los aplausos; … pero en cuanto tocó mi pluma las llagas de nuestros vicios cívicos, se llevó el diablo mi fama … ya es ese mismo Pensador tan idiota que ni hablar sabe la lengua castellana” (Lizardi 3: 452). 12. “Sin embargo debemos antes de poner mano a la obra, saber a qué atenernos en materia de doctrinas literarias y profesar aquellas que sean más conformes a nuestra condición y estén a la altura de la ilustración del siglo y nos trillen el camino de una literatura fecunda y original, pues, en suma, como dice Hugo, el romanticismo no es más que el liberalismo en literatura” (Echeverría 55). 13. “Queríamos entonces como ahora la Democracia como tradición, como principio y como institución” (Echeverría 171). 14. “Yo no me ocupo sino de frivolidades, de cosas que a nadie van ni vienen, como son las modas, los estilos, los usos, una que otra vez las ideas, las letras, las costumbres, y así, cosas todas de que los espíritus serios no deben hacer caso … Tiene además mi nombre el caro privilegio de ser español de origen; porque en esta sociedad hispano americana, todo lo que no tiene origen hispano tampoco logra hacerse americano” (Alberdi 8, 9).



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15. “Saliendo del recinto de la ciudad todo cambia de aspecto … Todo lo que hay de civilizado en la ciudad está bloqueado allí, proscrito y afuera; y el que osara mostrarse con levita, por ejemplo, y montado en silla inglesa atraería sobre sí las burlas y las agresiones brutales de los campesinos” (Sarmiento 27).

References Alberdi, Juan Bautista. 1986. Escritos satíricos y de crítica literaria. Buenos Aires: Academia Argentina de Letras. Alcedo y Bexarano, Colonel Don Antonio de. 1812. The Geographical and Historical Dictionary of America and the West Indies. Trans. Add. G. A. Thompson. 5 vols. London: Carpenter. ———. 1789. Diccionario geográfico de las Indias occidentales o America. 4 vols. Madrid: Atlas. Anderson Imbert, Enrique. 1886. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. 12 vols. Vol. I: La Colonia: Cien años de República. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Bellini, Giuseppe. 1997. Nueva historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Madrid: Editorial Castalia. Bolívar, Simón. 1985. Doctrina del Libertador. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho. ———. 1990. Ídeas de un espíritu visionario. Caracas: Monte Avila. Carrilla, Emilio. 1964. La literatura de la independencia hispanoamericana. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires. ———. 1958. El romanticismo en la América Hispánica. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Carrió de la Vandera, Alonso. 1942. Lazarillo de Ciegos Caminantes: Desde Buenos Aires hasta Lima 1773. Buenos Aires: Solar. Clavijero, Fr. Francisco Javier [Clavigero, Francesco Saverio]. 1787. The History of Mexico. Trans. Charles Cullen. 2 vols. London: Robinson. Echeverría, Esteban. 1991. Obras Escogidas. Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho. Ferns, H. S. 1960. Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon P. Goic, Cedomil. 1988. Historia y crítica de la literatura hispanoamericana. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica. Gómez Robledó, Antonio. 1958. Idea y Experiencia de América. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Green, L. C. and Olive P. Dickason. 1989. The Law of Nations and the New World. Edmonton: U Alberta P. Henríquez-Ureña, Pedro. 1946. Literary Currents in Hispanic America. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Humboldt, Alexander von. 1818. Personal Narrative of the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent 1799–1804. Trans. Helen Maria Williams. Vol. 4. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees. Lazo, Raimundo. 1967. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana, 1790–1914. México: Editorial Porrúa. Lizardi, Fernández de. 1970. Obras: IV: Periódicos. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Mann, Mary. 1868. Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants or Civilization and Barbarism. London: Haffner P. Mill, James. 1809. “Emancipation of Spanish America.” Edinburgh Review. Miranda, Francisco de. 1982. América Espera. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho. Monguió, Luis. 1978. “Palabras e ideas: ‘Patria y Nación’ en el virreinato del Perú.” Revista Iberoamericana 104–5:454–5. Prieto Rozos, Alberto. 1990. Bolívar y la Revolución en su época. Habana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes, Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Robertson, William. 1803. The History of America. London: Strahan. Sánchez-Barba, Mario Hernández. 1978. Historia y literatura hispanoamericana (1492–1820). Madrid: Editorial Castalia. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. 1990. Facundo: Civilización y barbarie:Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga. Ed. Roberto Yahni. Letras Hispánicas 323. Madrid: Cátedra. Sweet, Nanora. 1997. “Hitherto Closed to the British Enterprise: Trading and Writing the Hispanic World Circa 1815.” European Romantic Review 8.2: 139–47. Williams, Helen Maria. [1786], 1994. Poems. London: Woodstock Books. Zea, Leopoldo. 1970. The Latin American Mind. Trans. Abbot and Dunham. Oklahoma: U Oklahoma P.



V. Expansions of the Self

The centrality of the self, the ego, or the individual perceiving consciousness in romantic literature of many kinds is widely attested. Its import is nowhere more philosophically central than in Fichte’s analysis of the transcendental ego principle, which served as the philosophical foundation for much of the theorizing of the Schlegels while they were still in Jena. Kant’s proclamation of the impossibility of the self’s presentation to the self and Kierkegaard’s passionate assertion of its unfathomability further suggest the varied ways in which the concept of the self was philosophically problematized. Well-known romantic narratives portray the afflictions and vexations of the sensitive soul — most famously in Die Leiden des jungen Werther, Ultime lettere di Jacapo Ortis, and René — while other works depict exuberant responses to the egoistic imperative as illustrated by Don Juan. One of the most obvious and widespread manifestations of self-reflexivity is to be found in the diary or personal journal. Romantic diaries present a wide range of subjects reflecting on their own situation in life as well as their own modes of perceiving themselves. The way in which the self of a journal is configured is largely a function of the context in which one began keeping a journal and varied from one cultural tradition to another. A number of fundamental questions arise from an interrogation of the authorial voice. Among such queries posed by Frederick Garber in “Allegories of Address: The Poetics of the Romantic Diary” are: Who then is the “I” that speaks? More basically, what does the speaking? What is its role, its function? What does it do with its speaking? What does it do aside from speaking? In responding to these question, he examines many of the characteristics of the diaries of Thoreau, Delacroix, Byron, John Stuart Mill, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Dorothy and William Wordsworth and the divergent cultural and intellectual traditions out of which they worked. In terms of its fundamental self-reflexive gesture, the autobiography is closely related to the journal. Whereas the journal may or may not anticipate readers other than the author, the autobiography is typically addressed to a broader reading public. Although the autobiography is a mode of self-expression with a long and venerable history dating back to antiquity, it emerged during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a particularly apt mode of self-exploration and presentation. Eugene Steltzig examines the fundamentally different assumptions and strategies that undergird Rousseau’s Confessions, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, while situating these widely appreciated works with regard to lesser known autobiographies of Chateaubriand, George Sand, Stendhal, De Quincey, and Silvio Pellico. One of the frequently implicit designs of the romantic autobiography was to chronicle the educational and spiritual development of the subject. This widely attested interest in portraying how richly varied life experience contributes to cultural maturation gestures toward the facets of autobiography that it shares with the Bildungsroman and other broadly cultural concerns with changing educational paradigms. The numerous fictional accounts of a hero’s development into an integrated and contributing member of society are well known, but those dealing with women that take into account the gendered meaning of individualism are conspicuously less common. Non-fictional text — essays, pamphlets, editorials, proposals, reports, treatises, manifestos,



196 lecture notes, and letters — however abound and offer penetrating insight into the period’s conception of the substance and means for appropriately educating women and the rhetorical arguments advanced in its support. Margaret R. Higonnet and Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos analyze a rich array of these texts acknowledging the contrasting gender-specific concepts of Bildung. Although important aspects of the discussion centering on women’s education arose within late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistemologies and theories of mind, the French Revolution and Rousseau’s widely-read Émile were decisive turning points. The political, social, and intellectual traditions of France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia were strikingly divergent, but in different ways all responded to the arguments articulated in various discursive forms suggesting that the well-being of the nation would be enhanced by educating women to fulfill their roles in society. S. P. S.



Allegories of Address The Poetics of the Romantic Diary FREDERICK GARBER SUNY-Binghamton

“What are you doing now?” he asked, “Do you keep a journal?” — So I make my first entry today. Thoreau 1: 5

The date of this first entry in Thoreau’s Journal is 22 October, 1837. The “he” was most likely Emerson, who had recently published a small book called Nature and was already somewhat of a guru to young intellectuals. Thoreau’s entry shows his awareness (tinged with ironies; no one got ahead of Thoreau) that he would need to keep a journal to please Emerson. But in fact, his history shows that, before meeting Emerson, he had already thought out the matter and knew that diary-making would be a project for him. At Harvard he had taken Edward Tyrrel Channing’s course on rhetoric for which, on 17 January 1835, he wrote an essay “On Keeping a Private Journal” (Thoreau, Essays 8–9). His local predecessors and many contemporaries knew the advantages of such a project. Writing a diary was so much a part of New England intellectual tradition, back to the Puritans, that, as Lawrence Buell points out, “every major Transcendentalist kept a diary and/or commonplace book” (274). In so doing they not only continued a local practice, however different their journals from those of their Puritan forebears, but they also brought their work in line with diaristic practices elsewhere in their own time. Trevor Field notes George Sand’s comments on the number of private journals being written there and then (31). If British and American writers turned the Puritan diary from a form that explores our guilt to one that explores our ideas of Ideas, the diary in France became, by the later eighteenth century, the journal intime, a form that grew so popular that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the writing of such texts had taken on the tone of a cult. On 22 October, 1837 Thoreau showed himself in perfect harmony with his time by getting a journal going. Unlike most other diarists, though, he produced a classic of the genre, what became his greatest work. What did the contemporaries of Emerson and George Sand, as well as many of the German romantics and their partners, see in the diary form that made it so attractive? Emerson — unlike some gurus, an astute observer of his time — used his journal to keep comments on his own and other journals and their current plethora. At some point in January or February 1827, ten years before he urged Henry Thoreau to join the crowd, he wrote out a set of “Peculiarities of the present Age,” noting that “it is said to be the age of the first person singular” (in Porte 61). As such, he continues, it has produced Transcendentalism, a metaphysics and ethics that look inward and involve figures like Mme de Staël (who had written a Journal de mon cœur in 1785), Wordsworth, and Swedenborg (in the person of his influence). Given Emerson’s mixed feelings

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about Mme. de Staël, this list is sufficiently catholic to cover a range of modes of the time. All shared in that current peculiarity, the emphatic, commanding, defining first person singular. In Emerson’s view and that of others as well (“it is said” suggests that the depiction was widespread and familiar), this was the age of the speaking of “I.” This definition of the age in terms of grammatical positioning tells a great deal about the age’s emphases and how he read this stage of Western civilization. Emerson knew much of the history it took, many of the texts it took, to bring human events to that stage. Though no comprehensive history of the diary exists, scholars like Gustav Rene Hocke have drawn enough of the lineaments, supplied enough of the details, to make the developments clear, however in need of qualification (see Hocke, passim and esp. 3775; see also Boerner). One goes back at least to Marcus Aurelius, who used his selfhood as a model, the most convenient available, of the human character as such. Later Roman daily reports, drawn frequently through the eyes of a single compiler, came to fuse with Hellenistic self-observation. The result was a radical step that placed the self in ongoing history, quotidian existence. That placement of the self in unremitting dailiness was surely a defining move for the texts that were to follow. Whatever that move lacked of the sort of intimacy Emerson and his contemporaries expected from diaries, Petrarch, Montaigne, and Pepys would set the tone of those expectations, Pepys in particular. As Hocke puts it he stands between “the vital individualism of the Renaissance and the moralistic bourgeois ideal of the Enlightenment, as fervent as it is skeptical,” and is the most significant bridge between “the objective-private diaries of the Renaissance and the subjective-private journals of the present” (66).1 In Germany that mode was followed by the diaries of the Pietists, the Sturm und Drang, and other related groups. After that one gets to Emerson’s age of the first person, the age of the saying of “I” and the formation of romantic modes of self-absorbed self-consciousness. But there were differences among their diaries, local as well as personal, differences in the meaning of the pronunciation of “I.” The type of journal one wrote had very much to do with the context in which one learned what a journal ought to be. Every journal, Emerson knew, is a product of a time and culture, and it speaks its particular being in its particular discourse, in a kind of dialect. Local specificities define local expectations, combining with who one is to create the tenor of one’s diary. But even that was variable: English diarists, for example, did not all sound alike. Henry Crabb Robinson played Boswell to some great German figures of his time, but he wrote nothing comparable to, say, Byron’s journals. (Byron had more in common with a figure like Benjamin Constant.) Neither Robinson nor Byron wrote journals like Dorothy Wordsworth’s, whose text derives its mode in great part from its context, social and personal, as well as the context of gender expectations in which she lived and moved and had a special role to play. Much the same can be said of Mary Shelley’s diary, though it took a far different reading of precisely the same issues. Despite the crowds of journal writers there were differences in that age of the incessant pronouncing of “I.” Who then is the “I” that speaks? More basically, what does the speaking? What is its role, its function? What does it do with its speaking? What does it do aside from speaking? Most commentators on the diary take the question of “who” as self-evident. Indeed they have to do so in order to make the diary work, to fulfill an implicit contract. We expect to hear comments on the daily doings of “I,” open and covert, what “I” thinks and feels about what it sees and

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feels, frank, intimate, personal, revelatory. We listen to the voice of Novalis’s diary as “I” reacts to the recent death of Sophie, watch its attempts to recover from what it will never want to forget. We listen to Constant working his studies of ancient religions over and over while he wonders what to do next about his aging, difficult mistress from whom he cannot undo himself, and somehow these two endeavors blend, comment on, talk to each other. The question of what the “I” is begins with what we think it is, what — given the business of reading a journal — what we must understand “I” to be. In Lawrence Rosenwald’s useful reading: “to call a text of the proper form a diary we must posit a number of identities: between the author and the narrator; between the narrator and the principal character …” (5). His “we must posit” means that we need to establish certain conditions to make the reading of a diary possible; more basically, to read it as a diary. Of course we do much the same when we read diary fiction, Kierkegaard’s Diary Of a Seducer, Poe’s Journal of Julius Rodman, Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge; but as Lorna Martens puts it, “[i]n the diary novel the author is distinct from the character, while in the diary he is not” (33). The consequences of that condition for a work of diary fiction involve, to begin with, a fracture in the wholeness the “real” diary claims to afford, a break in the consistency of the identity of “I” and therefore a break in the consistency of our assumptions. Or we can put it another way, speak of a dualizing of authors, one actual, one fictive, which does not patch up the split but locates its point more precisely. In any case, the “I” that records the interlocutor’s comment at the beginning of Thoreau’s journal is, here and throughout the text, really Henry David Thoreau who really met the real Emerson and really heard him speak those words. To make the diary work there ought to be no need for a quasi-Coleridgean willing suspension of disbelief. Given these attitudes and conditions, we see that we cannot separate the who and the what and the speaking. Further, we learn quickly that the positing of “I” has no single result. That is, it is never the positing of a single separate pronoun but of several at once. Thoreau may well be suggesting something like that when, pondering on what he does when he makes his daily inscription, he says: “Say’s I to my-self should be the motto of my Journal” (Thoreau 4: 177); that is, he talks to him-self about his talking to him-self. Given the function of a motto as the compendium of a text, speaking its essence succinctly, this puts the question of pronouns at the center of Thoreau’s journal. It also phrases his journal-making in a precise, particular way: in the journal’s major activity, one pronoun speaks to another; more specifically “I” speaks to that which is, at once, “I” and “Not-I.” Of course this makes the journal a soliloquy (not the first time Thoreau plays Hamlet); yet putting the self and its activities in terms of grammatical functions is more than an old stance repeated half-mockingly but is a revelatory move, perfectly consistent with reading the age in grammatical terms. By 11 November 1851 Thoreau had been writing a journal for nearly a decade and a half. By that date he was coming to see the changes in his journal, how it had become something more than a repository for thoughts and for observations of nature. Deeply meditating the meaning of this daily activity, he saw that what he was doing as a preparatory task was becoming his primary task. Yet what he says makes sense not only for his case but for the cases of his compeers who were working at similar business. Thoreau’s “Say’s I” is one of the fundamental comments in that age when the grammar of self was being so finely parsed in every sort of text, not only diaries. That saying was as true for Novalis and Delacroix, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley, all diarists and

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more, as for this craggy American naturalist who spent much of his life exploring the conditions of such a grammar. It was as true, in another way, for those of Rimbaud’s activities that led to “car je est un autre,” the function of that claim as, at once, continuation, parody, and rewriting. “Says I to my-self” (not “myself” but “my-self,” that hyphen an efficient separator) means that he speaks not only to him-self, makes soliloquy, but also toward him-self, in the direction that leads to him-self. We have, it seems, established a geography as well as a community inhabiting that geography. The “I” that does the speaking and the “my-self” that does the hearing make up much of that community. They are sufficiently separate, there is enough daylight between them, for us to see that there are two elements involved. We can, we have discovered, separate elements in what we like to think of as one and unified. The writing of a diary is an especially useful way of making that separation happen. Or perhaps we want to argue that saying “I” in a diary reveals a multiplicity that had, in fact, always been there, that “I” has components that the making of a diary is good at making evident. In sum, the saying of “I” in this age of the first person singular is either the fashioning of multiple elements or else a revelation that they are indeed multiple. For those who turned the making of romantic diaries into an elaborate and sustained activity, something more than occasional (figures like Constant and Delacroix, Emerson and Thoreau) that splitting or revelation seems to have been so fascinating that they could not resist the daily turn, each day’s multiplying of the elements of self. Putting this yet another way: to say “I” is, at that moment, within that scene and act, to utter “you” as well. One cannot have an “I” without, at the same time, having a “you,” just as to posit darkness means also to posit, at the same time, light (see Benveniste 224 and Garber, Repositionings 217). This means that the age of the first person singular is also, simultaneously, the age of the second person singular, whether the second person is shown to have always been in existence or whether, as some strongly argue, it is created in that moment. Of course if the self is created in and for that moment, the first and second persons must come into being at once; but if certain aspects of self hold on and continue from one enactment of self to another, then the second person would be continuous as well. The second is as continuous as the first that speaks to it. However we take these possibilities, the making of a diary is turning out to be a fundamental act, a most provocative one in the age of romantic grammar. The provocation increases as we look more closely at the issues and participants. It helps if we think of the utterance of “I” as an invocation, a bringing into being, making an aspect of self happen. Whether and to what degree that aspect can be said to exist before the moment of invocation, it can be said to exist now, in just as much fullness and presence as we are willing to grant it. Yet it is not as though the “you” that is invoked when “I” is invoked were simply standing there waiting to be used. To whom, after all, is the diary addressed? The simple, classical answer is oneself, which assumes that the diary is a kind of soliloquy. What does such an addressing tell of the nature of the journal, its fundamental activities? Those activities seem to fall into two separate but related categories: what does one tell in a journal? one tells about oneself; to whom does one tell that matter? one tells it to oneself. But each of these instances of “oneself” is in a different grammatical case, a point we do not notice in English as readily as we do in, say, German. We tell ourselves ourselves, that is, we tell of ourselves (direct object; accusative) to ourselves (indirect object; dative). The dative defines the direction of telling, the accusative defines what is told. Putting it in German puts it more openly, as Matthias Thibaut

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makes plain in his study of the “Ich-Erzählung”: “In this formulation the ‘itself’ [sich] intends [meint] both the accusative and the dative, the object and the addressee of such an account” (31).2 It looks as though every self-telling involves several personal modes, all of which involve elements of the first person singular. Our community grows as we watch it going about its business, as we encounter more of that business. It grows in breadth still more if one adds to this developing picture what modern English is missing, the familiar in “thee” and “thou.” It grows in depth and inner complexity when we see pronouns turn into each other: as “I” speaks to “myself’ the latter also becomes, or is shown to be simultaneously, a “you,” an addressee. Any lengthy journal displays, eventually, the full range of these pronouns, the total panoply. Most diarists seem to know that it is hard to speak to oneself in the way the diarist does without an occasional address to “you”; that sometimes such a “you” has all the tones of a “thee” or a “thou” and may, from another angle, sometimes be “myself.” Much of the drama in a journal comes from the interplay of “you” and “oneself” with the triggering utterance of “I.” So when Henry David Thoreau says “Say’s I to my-self” that “my-self” is clearly dative and therefore the direction of telling; but since his text is about himself what he tells is also “myself” as it works accusatively. “Say’s I to my-self” means “I tell my-self to my-self.” Emerson’s age of the first person singular pronoun speaks, involves, invokes, every mode of the singular, every role it can play, utterer, subject, audience. One can well understand why figures like Delacroix wrote such lengthy diaries, fascinated as they were, as Delacroix openly is, by the status and activity of pronouns. Delacroix comes as close to the usages of verbal romanticism as any visual artist of the time. In his diary imagination is a central, controlling thematic, always a present issue even when not spoken. That slashing exoticism identified with his work appears within his journal as a function of the imagination, one of the ways it makes an Other through which we define Ourselves. A potent play with pronouns often appears at those points where imagination is an issue, directly or implicitly, especially those that involve the making of an Other. This takes in more than the usual comments on romantic self-consciousness or the (finally more fascinating) struggles of anti-self-consciousness. Self-consciousness works itself out through modes of positioning that have a linguistic basis. For a visual artist like Delacroix, fascinated by language, diary-making is a way of maneuvering pronouns and syntax, of threading the labyrinthine complexities in first person utterance. On Thursday 22 April 1824 Delacroix tells of an evening coffee with Henry Scheffer: He told me today that Didot was at his brother’s and spoke to him of my project of taking on students. Didot said that I would be the first of my students. I don’t know if that affected my disposition for the rest of the evening, but I was extremely melancholy. (1: 83)3

Consider the complexities of what seems a simple insult. To take on himself as a rapin, a student of painting (the term can also be used to suggest “a bad painter”), Delacroix as teacher must know more and better than, be more skillful than, Delacroix as pupil. That suggests a radical split between aspects of himself, a division in what one likes to think of as whole and unified. Didot is saying of Delacroix that he owns a fractured self; that would be enough to make anyone melancholy. Phrasing it differently: Delacroix ought to know better than to do what he does, and that in itself bespeaks a crippling division of self.

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This activity of self-instruction has all manner of parallels to what happens in diaries, as Delacroix surely knew. Delacroix (subject, nominative) teaches Delacroix (object, accusative). He objectifies an aspect of himself, turns it into Other, in order to make that aspect teachable, that is, make it tellable-to. The object that is taught takes the same grammatical position as Henry Thoreau’s “my-self,” the aspect of self that is told what Thoreau’s “I” wants to say. That in its turn means that Delacroix does in this passage what he does in his journal as a whole: he utters an “I” that, in its utterance, necessarily creates a “you”; he also creates a “myself” to which he can tell all, just as, in his tutelage, he will need to create a “myself” that can be taught to paint more proficiently. The act of diary-making makes Delacroix very happy through its elaborate play of pronouns. The other activity, the tutelage of himself, makes him far less happy, precisely because it suggests a deficiency in the complex of self, a system Delacroix shows to be vital, effective, whenever he makes a diary entry. The first suggests total command in absolute fluency, the other suggests a position with a critical point of weakness. Ten years before Emerson’s comment on the age of the first person singular, Delacroix went deeply into its pronominal structure. He did so in a literary form that utilizes the structure at its most elaborate, most playful and efficient. Some three weeks later, on Friday 14 May, Delacroix continues the dejection (Delacroix 1: 102). He also continues the fascination with language, establishing and examining an elaborated version of the romantic enchantment with pronouns. After noting the previous evening’s despondency he speaks of reading, on the morning of the 14th, a review of Byron. He congratulates Byron on having a language that submits to his imaginings (“fantaisies”); but French, he also argues, however recalcitrant, is sublime in its own way. Delacroix will have to struggle with its shiftings (“ce Protée rebelle”) before taming it, making it work for him. After this lead-in he shows himself, in this very diary entry, involved in such a struggle, the shifting of the protean grammar and its subject positionings. Solitude torments his soul, probably because it is an imperfect solitude. The more his soul expands among friends and daily pleasures the more it flees from him (“elle m’échappe”) and retires into its fortress. Rapidly, efficiently, the passage reveals a split in that wholeness he cherishes and requires. Delacroix turns Coleridgean, as Thoreau was later to do. He has a soul (“âme”) and a self (the “me” in “m’échappe”). We can call the latter the self, as Yeats, echoing a long tradition, did in his “Dialogue of Self and Soul.” Those elements appear to be jealous of each other, the soul especially huffy, each demanding attention in this internecine struggle of desires. If a poet (“poète,” not “peintre”) lives in solitude and is productive, he can enjoy subjective treasures; but those goods flee (“se dérobent”) us when, as we have just seen, we give our attention to others. At that point the soul shows itself Other to self; it is not as beholden to self as self is beholden to it. Delacroix suggests a narrative describing not only our sources of happiness but precisely what happens when we disturb the narrative’s conditions. Who takes part in this narrative? That is, which pronouns act? There are a few uses of “je” in that day’s remarkable entry (though even if there were none it would exist as the first person singular and origin of “me”); there is, however, a significant, encompassing “nous,” acceptable because self-splitting is a problem all artists face. But, then, rapidly, “nous” slips into “on” and “on” slips into “vous” in a dazzling display of pronouns and the bliss promised to us when we give soul what it requires: “Quand on se livre tout entier à son âme, elle s’ouvre tout à vous, et

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c’est alors que la capricieuse vous permet le plus grand des bonheurs” (1: 102). We are a “nous,” and an “on” and a “vous,” the latter the “you” that always emerges when we utter some form of the first person. What then of Thoreau’s tellable “my-self?” In one of its aspects it stands in the diary as that unseen audience to which the telling is told (one tells not only the matter but the process of telling the told, as Delacroix does openly here). In another of its aspects it appears within the matter as the “myself” that emerges whenever soul flees from self, “âme” from the “me” in “m’échappe.” As for the “je,” conspicuous in its near absence in that day’s diary entry, it functions not only in the making of that entry but as the begetter of “vous” as well as “me.” Clearly we cannot separate the activities in the making of the entry from the activities the entry describes. We are what is told as well as what does the telling; but the telling, it turns out, is more coherent than what is told, even though Delacroix had spent a melancholy evening. But he is not nearly through with pronominal matters. His text packs one more surprise, of all things empathy. When self (“on”) yields fully to soul (“âme”) that powerful, capricious aspect of our being makes possible several conditions: “Showing [the soul] in a thousand forms, taking part in others, studying itself, painting itself continually in its works” (1: 102).4 Taking part in others (he would not know the phrasing is Keatsian) appears early in his list of good things. One joins with another being in its innermost recesses, takes part in an Other’s activities and what those activities feel like when that Other performs them. We become Self to that which is also always Other, never stops being Other although we manage to go in and take part. The reader hesitates, properly, to dissect these conditions since something like “myself” must become, for this scene, “itself.” It must be both “myself” and “itself” simultaneously, and that is only one frame, one possible interconnection, in this dense and complex geography. Delacroix goes on to speak of meeting others within his paintings (“votre peinture”; “poète” has finally become “peintre”). Now we own a possessive pronoun (“votre”). Though we need not pursue other pronouns in this extraordinary passage Delacroix goes on with his elaborate explorations leading to, for example, an especially rich “tu” — for the rest of the day’s entry. Are we supposed to think of this empathy as what happens not only within one’s paintings but also within one’s diary entries? Whether or not those entries are intended to, some day, be read by others, as so many diaries were, the passage suggests that we can meet in diary entries just as we meet in our paintings. We can take on a new community within, e.g. this diary entry that describes all sorts of problems having to do with community. Delacroix’s maneuvers, his play with questions of community, opens fundamental issues in the making of diaries, especially the question of diaries and community, one of the most complex of the time. As Delacroix makes clear, contemporaries like Lord Byron (he also mentions Rousseau) have made extraordinary use of these questions of self and community within their verbal art. What Delacroix accomplishes is a transfer of those activities to the visual world he makes. It seems odd for Delacroix to speak so intensely of solitude at the same time as he speaks of an ideal community whose home turf is his painting. Who inhabits this community? At the least every pronoun his “je” could generate. His desire to sketch this community leads him to run the gamut of what seems all possible pronouns. All those manifestations of “je” as well as its various productions make up the basic roster, and they do so whether or not he is joined by his viewers in that empathic narrative describing the meeting of souls in texts. Yet if those other

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souls do join him in his paintings they bring their own sets of pronouns, themselves becoming objects of his (now empathic) “je.” Again we catch a glimpse of an extensive field of pronouns, too complex to pursue at this point, our task now merely to acknowledge that they are firmly, effectively there. All this, of course, can happen — he shows it happening — not only within his paintings but in the text of the diary passage that describes those activities. Whether or not Delacroix envisioned readers for his journal, he makes clear that what he says applies not only to other paintings (he is specific on that point) but to other kinds of texts, especially those made from the fascinating stuff of language, what Byron does so well. The text is thus a meeting place, a textual agora, the meeting engendered by some originary speaking of “je,” uttered through a paint brush or a pen. The meeting results from solitude, in this case that of one of the greatest romantic painters, stellar within that period whose frequent public pronouncements tend to cherish solitude. Diaries, they found, were an especially suitable place where one can be solitary in all the fullness of one’s self, its components put to work, meticulously drawn and observed. For Delacroix and others the text was also a place where one could meet viewers or readers who brought into the context their own communities. Practicing romantics learned that in such situations terms like “sole” and “solitary” might appear in the same context as terms like “community.” None can be invoked without the potential emergence of paradox. Romantic diarists echoed what Whitman would say in ponderous paradox: “I am multitudes.” Each speaking of “I” is, or evokes, such a chorus. Thoreau and Delacroix turned those ambiguities into the stuff of their diaries. So too did Novalis in his scattered journal entries; so too did Dorothy Wordsworth within her north country context. The great romantic journals reveal an absorbed awareness, fascinated, unnerved, of what happens when romantic assertions about conditions like solitude meet the conditions of the journal and what it does with the acts of “I.” Whatever else their content, the great romantic journals always speak of what happens when the first person singular pronoun that so defines the age becomes both maker and subject of this ancient mode of self-scrutiny. If Emerson is correct then what we have said of the romantic diary will show fundamental analogies to other activities of the time. Take for example the function of poetry which, for John Stuart Mill, could not be separated from the conditions of writing poetry. In 1833, still feeling the effects of the crisis in which he rejected Benthamite reason, Mill published an essay in the Monthly Repository entitled “What is Poetry.” The essay is surely designed to respond to Bentham on poetry. Where Bentham had argued that poetry, given equal amounts of pleasure, was no better than a game of push-pin, where he had claimed that the purpose of poetry was to stimulate passion and prejudice, Mill rewrote the definitions, showing that what Bentham called poetry was no more than eloquence. Poetry and eloquence, Mill suggests, are easy to confuse, given that they are “thoughts coloured by feelings … alike the expression or utterance of feeling” (Mill, Norton 1256). Yet if eloquence echoes poetry in its “representation of feeling” it differs from poetry in its direction of utterance, its intentionality; that is, its mode of address, its approach to its audience. That, at least, is the way Mill’s comments have been read; but those comments are, in fact, less reductive than they may seem. Indeed, they lead to some of the age’s more complicated pronouncements on the making and meaning of poetry as well as the making and meaning of those who take part in poetry. Mill’s comments suggest ultimately how poetry relates to the world and therefore how we relate to the world, how we

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position ourselves within it. Consider the gist of Mill’s definition, the relations he establishes: “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude…. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds” (1256). Mill thinks in terms of position, defines in terms of stance, where one is speaking from, the direction toward which one speaks. He describes a splitting of self in which one aspect of self confesses and another comes into being through the activity of confessing, becoming the requisite ear. All manner of vague Gothicisms float about this analogy but they can be dismissed in favor of two essential points: the poem becomes a site of confessing, an edifice, a confessional; the utterance of “I,” essential to confessing, instantly creates that which listens to the confession. An unspoken sense of confessional as theater leads to the next image, one we have seen suggested in Thoreau and Delacroix: “All poetry,” Mill says, “is in the nature of soliloquy.” Taking suggestions from romantic bardolatry he has his brooding poet speaking only to himself, performing as, at once, actor and audience, creating an enclosed circle in which he supplies every aspect, occupies every position, becomes every pronoun. All this occurs, of course, in moments of solitude. In eloquence, however, actor and audience are separate and distinct, the performer addressing the other in the directest utterance. The speaker of eloquence addresses in order to persuade, that is, to establish a relation where he can convince the audience of the validity of his claims, get them to share his ideas, join with him in community. Poetry, Mill seems to argue, seeks to do the opposite, takes no interest in persuading an audience, rejects community. Mill’s theory has been read, by Yeats for example, as offering neatly binary packaging. But that reading cannot hold: his distinctions are by no means as neat as they might appear. For one thing there is the question of the number of audiences. Poetry has a direct, an immediate audience straightforwardly addressed: “poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude.” Aspects of self stand like priests, ready to receive the intimate news. Poetry represents a way of dealing with feeling, shows the telling of that feeling by one part of self to another. What we overhear is the performance of that act, the addressing of self to self. If poetry, in Mill’s view, reveals an “utter unconsciousness of a listener” that can only mean a listener outside the poet’s self, a silent eavesdropper. The poet, Mill’s words suggest, addresses only the internalized confessor, together with whom he creates a situation for feeling. Yet what of that eavesdropper (us) listening in on a private act? Mill so defines poetry as to assume an overhearer, generically part of the scene. His theory takes for granted the presence of an outside audience at this intimate performance, an audience positioned differently from that of eloquence but an audience all the same. If it is in the nature of poetry to be silently overheard, then the scene is once more a theater, the eavesdropping audience present in its silence, developing its own set of pronouns. It is clear that we can and must argue for two audiences, one internal, one external, each audience functioning much as the other (its Other) does, much of their difference coming from their relative positioning. (Alternatively we can think of the poem’s audience as twofold, each part with a role to play in this scene that houses a performance.) The poet confesses the (accusative) substance of his feeling to the (dative) confessor, his self as designated hearer. He also, unconsciously, utters that confession (accusative) to the overhearing audience (dative); or, to put it another way, that audience overhears his

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act of confessing. Those structures echo each other and suggest a system of utterance with several addressees, to one of which the poet is utterly unconscious though the description of the procedure acknowledges its presence. Whatever Mill argues about confessing self to self, whatever his claim for the poet’s “utter unconsciousness of a listener,” the making of poems creates an intricate community, its members posed at several levels and positions, participating differently but participating all the same. All of this sounds familiar because we saw these practices in the making of diaries. “Feeling confesses itself to feeling” acts out the same radical structure as “say’s I to my-self.” The system of pronouns and positions we saw in the making of diaries works in the making of poems as well. In Emerson’s first person age those practices echo each other, performing identical functions, making identical points. They do so because that age’s reading of singularity puts poems and diaries into profound and vibrant alliance. This means that we ought to be able to shift the topic of our inquiry to other elements in the making of poems and diaries, illuminating each genre both separately and together. Three particular terms invite further examination, especially because they turn up at a number of crucial points. Those terms are address, relation and community, and we shall look at them in that order because it suggests a narrative. Their positioning also suggests that address, in the narrative, has an originary function, setting the place to start. But what does it mean “to address,” “to have an address,” “to have address?” In the latter sense, address signifies (so says the OED) “general preparedness; skill, dexterity, adroitness”; that is, the capacity to make things go right, pointed in the direction in which one wants them to go. In “to have an address” the term means a place where one gets one’s mail, to which it is delivered; again, a sense of making things go to a place, according to one’s intention. “To address” would seem to mean, then, to direct in a straight line, to send out in such a line. Taken in the broadest view that scheme enfolds two points, the place from which one addresses, the address to which one addresses. The act of addressing is designed to link these points (call them originary and terminal) in a most straightforward manner. That can involve the addressing of a letter, the addressing of an audience, the addressing of an issue. Each of these cases describes a geography with a place for an addressor and an addressee. The act of addressing links them, joins them in a direct(ed) line. In one sense address involves a clear positioning. “Say’s I to my-self” is clearly an act of address. Putting “I” at one place in the scene of writing (call it, alternatively, the scene of utterance) puts “my-self” at another place within the same scene. In that context “to address” means to talk to; more specifically, to talk toward, in the direction of, one-self. That suggests an enclosed world with a geography in which position is the same as role, in effect defines one’s role. One of those roles is called “I,” the other “You” or “Thou” or “Other,” each with different emphases. The making of an address is the making of a “You” (or its variants), that same necessity we saw when we noted that the speaking of “I” is also, necessarily, a speaking of “You” (or its variants). The self creates the company it seeks and seems to crave, and it does so within the act through which it utters itself as “I.” In Emerson’s age such utterance means that, just by saying “I,” we create a society, that the utterance of the self is the utterance of a group, that the constitution of “I” is, surprisingly, a social act. The performance of “I” is therefore the performance of a social role: Thoreau’s “say’s I” creates a society. Call this, then, a version of the social construction of address; or, reversed, call it

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address as socially constructing. But what about Mill on poetry? Like Thoreau he has an “I” that not only utters itself but at the same time utters “You”; yet the society Mill makes is more populous than Thoreau’s, busier, more varied in the modalities of its action. That scene is at least tripartite, involving the one who confesses his feeling, the one who receives (hears) the confession, the one who overhears it. There are, it seems, two hearers, one direct, one indirect, both in the line of address since both take in the confession. Yet what about “address” as that skill to send straight forward, direct straightforwardly? Are both hearers addressed with equal straightforwardness? And what about the poet’s utter unconsciousness of his overhearer? In that unconsciousness he speaks straightforwardly, consciously, to the one in the confessional; indirectly, unconsciously, to the one who overhears. “Address,” after all, may not always be straightforward: sometimes it is quietly skewed. Yet perhaps it is so skewed only from the point of view of “I.” From the point of view of Mill’s definition of poetry the overhearer is as much a functioning part of the scene as anyone else within it, as involved as any. All that is uttered or is created by utterance goes to him in his role, the role that is created when the poem is created. The act that includes both utterance and reception, both the one who confesses and the one who hears the confession, goes, as a unified act, to the one who overhears. In a very important sense the poem is not complete until it is overheard. So when Shelley addresses the skylark he (1) addresses the bird, (2) confesses his feelings about the bird to other feelings within himself, (3) speaks (albeit unconsciously) to us as overhearers of his addressings of the bird. Quite a large, complex community with subtle and intricate gestures, no two truly the same. Two issues stand out in what we have so far uncovered: (1) in terms of genre the romantic poem and the romantic diary seem to have a great deal in common. They place considerable emphasis on the act of addressing, and they establish particular positions for those who are addressed, but it would seem that a major difference between the journal and the poem is the number of addressees involved. In Delacroix and Thoreau the journal houses an addressor and an addressee, each an aspect of the Subject (code-named “I”). That reading thinks of the journal as a tightly enclosed world containing facets of the Subject and, they argue, nothing else. That is, the motto of Thoreau’s journal would be the motto of every journal, the population the same. The poem, in Mill’s reading, behaves in similar ways: the feeling that confesses itself to feeling is a different range of feeling, a different location and kind of feeling, within the same subject. Yet in Mill’s poem there is another (an Other) involved, the notorious overhearer, curious, entranced. outside from the point of view of the poet’s reading of the scene, inside (part of the whole) in the theory’s reading of the scene. The difference, then (in terms of the scene’s population), is in great part in the question of the overhearer. So put, poem and diary have very much in common with one major unlikeness; but so put that is too pat, if essentially correct. We need to complicate that putting, in effect redefine it, to get at the special intricacies of many romantic journals. The second of the two issues can help with that complication: (2) when we began by stating that three terms — address, relation, community — need to be inspected because they turn up so often, so crucially, it soon became apparent that posing the question of address brings us straightforwardly to the question of relation. Further, it seemed that whenever we returned to address we also returned to relation. “I” is patently related not only to “my-self” but to the

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“You” that is created by the utterance of “I.” Of course all these pronouns are related to each other as part of the grammar of person, of personal positioning; but they are also related because the utterance of “I” not only creates the pronouns but fosters connections among them on which the genre depends. If that happens in the journal, it also happens in Mill’s poem, and Mill adds the overhearer who has an especially complex relation to all he overhears. Both diary and poem are deeply involved with relation, share in the same obsession, treat relation in ways that seem, at least in these contexts, alike. To address means to (at the same time) relate. Perhaps we can say at this point that address creates relation as well as that which is in relation. But at this point we must do with relation what we did before with address. What, then, does it mean “to relate”? For one thing, it means to tell a story: the relator is a narrator who utters an account, recites a tale. He may do so to himself or he may do so to a group made up of attendant Others. In any case he utters a text that harbors a tale, in its most basic sense a tale made out of words but that sense is extendable to texts that are painted or sculpted, played or hummed, composed of or by the body as instrument of enacting. Fundamentally one utters a text to an audience, “utter” as metaphor for all manner of communications, all modes of performing them. Thus, “say’s I to my-self” puts “I” as narrator, uttering a tale, relating a text, telling itself stories. We are edging once again toward the idea of performance, this time in terms of relation: to relate in the sense of narrate is to perform in the sense of act; more precisely enact, bring into present being, make happen in this place. The relator as narrator is a bringer-into-being. Mill’s poet’s feeling confesses itself to itself, synecdochically relating the tale of its experience, narrating the activities that generated the feeling, giving that feeling immediacy. That is what it means to perform as a narrator. Relation in this sense is a very active business. It is a noun that seems vigorously to push toward the status of a verb, to find it difficult to keep from forever enacting. That is one of the primary versions of what it means “to relate.” The other primary version seems, at first, oddly coupled, yet together they uncover a striking, fertile logic that fascinated the poets and diarists of Emerson’s age. This, for example, is Coleridge in a notebook entry of 1810: From what reasons do I believe a continuous <& ever continuable> Consciousness? From Conscience! Not for myself but for my conscience — i.e. my affections & duties toward others, I should have no Self — for Self is Definition; but all Boundary implies Neighbourhood — & is knowable only by Neighbourhood, or Relations. (2.1: 3231)

He was in a Kantian mood and into a brief discussion of morals, especially their involvement in the making of the self. He had touched upon that earlier in a passage Kathleen Coburn calls “a piece of self-analysis perhaps unmatched for acuity in the period” (2.2: 3026). As Coleridge worked his way through that passage he spoke of Love as “a sense of Substance/Being seeking to be self-conscious, 1. of itself in a Symbol. 2. of the Symbol as not being itself. 3. of the Symbol as being nothing but in relation to itself” (2.1: 3026). Here, truly, is Emersonian territory, and here another meaning of relation comes into play. What, in such a context, does it mean “to relate,” “to be in relation?” Clearly that has to do with connecting or being in connection, in Coleridge’s latter passage the symbol as connected to itself, in the former the sort of connection one has in one’s neighborhood. In both cases one speaks of linking through

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proximity, the sharing of a turf (as, say, members of a family, all each other’s relations, share genes and a blood line). Relation is, then, connection, in our Emersonian context the sort that supports the self as it seeks its constitution. What the self is depends to a considerable extent on the nature of its neighbors. Further, relation is always relation to something; more precisely, of something to something. (That can be said of address as well.) Indeed, relation is so structured that Coleridge wants to equate relation and neighborhood, that term requiring several elements in relation. Once again we sense an increase in population: “I,” we saw, makes “You” and “my-self”; address, we saw, always addresses something. If, following Coleridge, to be in relation means to be in a neighborhood, community inevitably enters the general picture: a neighborhood is a place where a community resides. That carries us one step farther, for Coleridge’s hint about one meaning of relation makes it possible to link the question of self-constitution (“Definition”) with the question of community, the third of our three major terms. Indeed, in Coleridge’s reading, self comes into definition only when seen in a neighborhood. That suggests that we need neighborhood (relation) to define what is next to us, what tells us, by its geography, where we end and it begins (a Rilkean concept with a long romantic lineage). The next point in our pursuit is patent and necessary: what happens when we put together the two meanings of relation, “to tell” and “to connect”? The answer comes forth to us in page after page of romantic diaries, through acts in romantic poems, through descriptions in romantic theories. Putting the two together reveals that to tell is to connect. The terms take different axes but any walls between them are porous and often transparent. To narrate (sense one of relate) means not only to tell a story but to join with, link with, establish a connection with (all these sense two of relate). The act of relation/narration puts forth material (Thoreau telling himself of his day’s activities, Delacroix telling himself of his feelings about an insult, Mill’s poet confessing his feelings on feeling to feeling, Coleridge telling his selfhood how it needs community to engender moral acts). That gesture also establishes the links of the uttering “I” to that which is being told of what the “I” needs to tell. Relating of that sort is what the self has to do to find a place in the world. That is what makes Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider” a crucial romantic text: it defines a poetics of romantic poems and diaries, a poetics of relation: A noiseless patient spider, I mark’ d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. (3:585)

Relation means, clearly, being-in-connection. Relationality is connectivity. What the soul-spider seeks to perform is what happens, or should happen, in any diary or poem, at least as Emerson’s

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age reads diaries and poems. Relation is an act that, in Coleridge’s interpretation, gives the self “Definition”; that, in Whitman’s terms, gives the self-as-spider the bridge it so eagerly seeks, surely in order to establish the self’s Definition. From Thoreau through Delacroix through Coleridge through Whitman — these among many more — it seems that the making of texts may also be an act of self-making, that constituting the one may also constitute the other. We have seen the pronomial version of this act in the Emersonian dwelling on the utterance of “I,” how it spawns related pronouns. To utter is to make a text, and that, for Emerson’s age, is a crucial corollary to the making of a self. Maybe, in fact, it is more than a corollary; maybe it is the same act seen from differing perspectives. Maybe the self is also a mode of romantic text. To turn “maybe” into “yes” we need to look at address as the radical starting point for several activities. It is the impetus for a narrative that has as its components address, relation and community, and it has as a major function the making of a self. Given what we have developed we can outline the narrative’s actions: addressing creates relation; relation, once achieved, creates community. That is the narrative as story. To make it a plot we need to say that we address because we seek, because relation is what we desire and we address to fulfill that desire. When we have achieved relation we have the germ of community. Community is thus the product of desire, the result of the act of address, which means that address is socially constructive. Whitman’s lyric on the spider makes a beast fable of this plot; Delacroix’s play with pronouns makes a social farce of it. And yet, whatever the generic form the narrative takes — a poem like Whitman’s, a journal passage like Delacroix’s, a theory of the romantic text, a philosophical speculation on the self and neighborhood — the form is always an allegory of address, its attendant desires and goals. In every one of these models addressing is the act, relation is the goal, community is the product, allegory the mode. Suppose we were to turn this narrative Aristotelian. Address would be the point before which we need nothing, after which comes the remainder of the plot; relation is the middle that needs something before and after; community is the point where we need only something before. If the narrative is comedic the turning point would come when what seems like a hopeless struggle reverses its direction and leads to relation and its product, community. If the narrative is tragic the turning point undoes the efficacy of desire. Relation is not achieved or, if achieved, finally fails, the result no communal product. All of this is quite neat but that neatness belies what happens in the greatest romantic poems and the most fascinating journals, the latter not only in passages but entire diaries. The neatness belies what happens because what emerges in, say, Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” or Hölderlin’s “Brot und Wein,” what happens in, say, the scattered journal fragments Novalis wrote after Sophie’s death, is a kind of ambiguous triumph that emerges from what turns out to be a failure of relation and a loss of community. These poems, that diary, enact the entire plot on the seeking of relation, show it in all its chiaroscuro. They can therefore be described as allegories of address. If we return to the suggestion that the act of addressing is the starting point for self-making (Coleridge and Whitman were patent on that point) then our narrative is also a tale of the making of the self. As Whitman’s soul-spider spins out filament after filament it seeks for the connection that would mean its own fulfillment, its fundamental making. For Emerson’s greater community (in his reading it takes in the entire age) the allegory of address is also, simultaneously, the allegory of self-making, the self that narrative makes in the act of seeking relation.

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That is as true for Coleridge and Hölderlin as it is for Constant, whose journaux intimes offer a fascinating version of the play of these allegories. By 18 December 1804 Constant had been keeping a journal for nearly a year. On that date he was hurrying to Paris but, tired of his journey, tempted by a warm room and clean bed, he stayed at Nevers for the night. Looking for something to do he reread his journal jottings. No one knew of the journal’s existence; it had been “[un] espèce de secret,” a sort of secret (Constant 428). When he began to write the journal he committed himself to putting down everything he felt but, given his old habit of speaking with the gallery in mind (“l’habitude de parler pour la galerie”), he had not always conformed to his self-generated commandment. The metaphor of the stage we have noticed at several points emerges openly, frankly, in this crucial document. But why, in a document so designedly personal, of which no one knew the existence, must he play the theatrical part, Hamlet with one eye cocked for the groundlings’ response? He has the habit, it seems. Even the most private speaking cannot neutralize the compulsion to perform. As he says elsewhere in the entry, continuing the theatrical: “On met un caractère, comme un met un habit, pour recevoir” (428): we are always dressed for visitors, sporting the requisite self (Constant surely aware of the pun on habit/habitude). His analysis is strikingly Millesque, confirming our supposition that Mill’s theory represents more genres than that of the poem. In Constant’s poetics of the journal, the diarist speaks directly to an element in the complex: “This journal, this species of secret unknown to all the world, this auditor so discreet that I am certain of finding every evening” (428).5 Each entry in Constant’s journal faces a gallery of overhearers whom he cannot blot out of awareness, the entries facing that audience at the same time as the text performs that talking to oneself that a diarist is supposed to do. These prefigurations of Mill show us dealing with a scene fundamentally romantic, grounded in Emerson’s age’s reading of the world, that reading more like a performance than we had previously supposed. Yet what is it that performs? Constant’s analysis of his own practice shows that we do not give fully of ourselves, whatever our self-made commandments to hold nothing back. But what is it within us that knows we are holding back, recognizes our reticence? On the previous 11 April, in a moment of sharp self analysis, he remarks on his mobility of self as well as certain excellent qualities he possesses, pride, generosity, devotion. Yet, he adds, he is not entirely real: “There are two persons within me, one of which observes the other and knows well that these convulsive movements must pass” (290–1).6 One aspect of self watches another aspect of self to see if the latter follows the law. One aspect of self observes a diaristic performance by another aspect of self, checks its accuracy, its sincerity, its completeness; and of course the performance falls short. “Bizarre espèce humain,” he exclaims on 18 December. We are especially bizarre because, whatever we claim we want, we cannot be totally independent. There is no independence from the gallery, of course; the habits we don are too ingrained. But it seems we cannot be independent even of ourselves — and that phrasing of the question suggests more facets of self than journal-making in the abstract (the kind for which we fecklessly make laws of sincerity) knows or even suspects. This densely populated scene includes not only a textual auditeur and a gallery of overhearers but a spectatorial consciousness that sees the various audiences as well as our selves. It is worth speculating whether that spectatorial consciousness comes into being with the utterance of “I” or whether it precedes that performance, is always already there at the moment

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of performance and watches it taking shape. There is yet another sense in which we are bizarre. Though our predilections for pose compel us always to perform, though we cannot seem to free ourselves from playing to the gallery, we are in one sense independent whether we want to be or not: “Others are others, we can never make them self” (428).7 Do others do as he does? — but that is not quite how he puts it: “Les autres sont-ils ce que je suis? Je l’ignore” (my emphasis). Constant’s question is not do they do what he does, but are they what he is? He confesses ignorance. Now though, as recompense, we know more about being and doing, which seem like the same act viewed from differing perspectives. Constant’s remarkable document, a major text of the age, positions self so intricately that its condition and its acts cannot be separated. Indeed, condition and act make and determine each other. At one point in the entry he speaks of the function of journal entries. Whatever his initial self-promise he does not put everything down but he does put down enough to retrieve his impressions from the text and retrace them when he has nothing better to do. as in that evening at Nevers (“pour y retrouver mes impressions et pour me les retracer quand je n’ai rien de mieux à faire”). In moments of boredom he performs one of the prime romantic acts, fundamental to his culture as well as to those before and after: he retraces and revives old impressions through the recollected suggestions of dailiness. This diarist of 1804 once again prefigures Mill with an emphasis on feeling that both Constant and Mill would find in eighteenth century predecessors as well as their own contemporaries. This is the diarist as man of feeling, l’homme sensible, dwelling on daily fluctuations within patterns of feeling the way Thoreau’s journal would dwell on daily fluctuations within patterns of nature. This is also Constant as the observer of feelings, a spectatorial consciousness watching the self take on the habit of the man of feeling, still another “caractère” to don for an occasion. Indeed the self in this passage so closely echoes that of the person of sensibility that his feeling impregnates the text in which he records his impressions. He calls his journal an “auditeur,” a secret hearer unknown to the world. It not only contains impressions but is itself a “sensation.” It is not simply a repository of those he has already felt: “Ce journal … est devenu pour moi une sensation.” The text of the journal is what it contains; it is the same as what it will produce. Constant’s entry of 18 December contains an extraordinary extension of the poetics of the journal, a concept of the genre that owes much to the age of feeling and its still-prevalent discourse. This entry offers both a commentary on culture and a reading of a kind of text, the kind it is in itself. It graphically depicts the way a genre derives its modes from the company it keeps. Taken by this business of sensation he returns to it three days later. Reflecting on his “mobilité” he remarks how objects disappear from his consciousness as he leaves their presence, how they re-enter consciousness to the degree he approaches them. Diaries counter such contrary movements by recording history: “This journal can serve not only to give me back my past sensations, but to recall that I have felt those sensations and that it is only up to me to find them again when I change place. Thus, this journal is a kind of history (429).8 Here is the diarist as partner of the voice of “Tintern Abbey”:

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I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood and felt along the heart. (Lyrical Ballads 117)

It is also the voice of Proust’s Marcel, recorder of the sensation of the recovery of sensation (recall that Constant spoke of his journal, the place of record, as itself sensation). That is why Constant says that his journal is a species of history (“histoire”). In so naming the kind of the text he demonstrates one way of phrasing the question of dailiness that every diary speaks of, through example if not through comment. His phrasing of the radical theme links dailiness and the history of the force of a mobile selfhood. It is so mobile that it changes not only in what it attends to, but also in its relation to aspects of itself: to “You,” to “my-self,” to all that conglomeration of “auditeurs” and mirrorings that inhabit the romantic journal, indeed any romantic text. Constant’s mobile self, immersed in its mobile history, studies the narrative of its being from jotting to jotting, its reinventing of itself, its retextualizing of itself. Deeply immersed in the flow of its personal dailiness, it compulsively records the rapidly shifting responses of its mobility to the mobility in the world, the context in which, of which, its selfllood is metonym. Here Constant should be compared to Dorothy Wordsworth and to Thoreau, who often record shifts in the shape of the external world from one part of the day to the next, sometimes from hour to hour, even minute to minute; those acts in perfect consonance with Constable’s sketches of clouds in which he carefully notes the time, suggesting the facts of the scene’s immediacy, the truth of (only) that moment. Constant is not so minute in his recording of shiftingness but he shares with these figures a fascination with change and the way it occurs within a continuity of change, what may well be the only continuity there is. Obsessed by these issues he turns them into the shape and tenor of his recording, not only what he gets down but the way he gets it down. The range of his jotting is striking, perhaps unique in its time for the breadth of its effects. “Amelie et Germaine,” among the earliest of his journaux intimes, owns a novelistic tone, speaking with much of the sound of Les liaisons dangereuses and Constant’s own Adolphe. But most of his journal writing is put in more routine modes, half or so of the entry recording, say, his struggles with his studies of religion, the rest on his social affairs, his sardonic commentaries on figures like Goethe and August Wilhelm Schlegel, his problems with various women, especially his incessant worrying over what his feelings permit him to do with Madame de Staël. At the other end of the spectrum stands his journal abrégé, brief recordings of fact, some annotated with “chiffres,” code marks. In an entry of 8 May 1805 (520–1), he explains how the death of Madame Talma led him to this mode: the descriptions of her malady became too painful to support but breaking continuity seemed to be out of the question. The answer was to write quickly, “en abrégé et en grande partie en chiffres.” Abbreviated texts partly in code (later in the entry he explicates the code to the journal as “auditeur”) kept what seemed of radical importance, the journal’s ongoingness, its uninterruptedness as a record of daily affairs. The “chiffres,” of course, would ensure privacy as well as the requisite brevity. Secret and condensed but still continuous: that is the quality he wanted from the journale abrégée.

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Some sense of what this continuity meant to Constant emerges in an entry of 14 July 1804. Reflecting on the uncertainty of his situation, a condition he cannot control, he concludes in a phrasing that might have come out of Ecclesiastes, must have come out of the Gospel of John, and, given different dates, could have come out of Sartor Resartus: “One must live from day to day and only work as much as possible, for only that remains” (337).9 What Carlyle does with the text from John (which probably echoes Ecclesiastes) echoes and continues the intention of Constant and others, diarists and more. Here is Ecclesiastes: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). John has the following: “I must work in the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work” (John 9: 4). And here is Carlyle: “Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work” (Carlyle 197). Carlyle takes John’s urging to work while there is light and turns “day” into “Today.” Now, “day” will turn into Night but “Today” will turn into Tomorrow. Thus, the change from “day” to “Today” discloses an extraordinary shift in intention, in the focus of awareness. Carlyle turns a question of light into a question of time, changing to a sense of one’s standpoint in the immediate flow of things, the continuities of change in which Today has a part, just as Tomorrow will (whether we shall have a part remains moot in every case). Deeply influenced by German romanticism, Carlyle turns the text from John into a comment upon us, our engagement in a temporality obsessed with immediacy. Drawing on the biblical echoes that had so moved Constant, he continues and elaborates the contemporary gestures Constant and others defined in terms of dailiness (“au jour la journée”). By midyear 1805, several years into his journal, Constant had come to see that dailiness is salvific because within it one can produce not only a body of work but the specific text, extended or “abrégé,” that records the dailiness; records, in its continuity, not only what one has done but the fact that one has done it, there and then, again. Through all their variety these journals of Constant show dailiness and address to be intimately entwined, in part because the journals are not only immersed in history but, themselves, about that immersion and the speaking emergent from it. Whoever or whatever the romantic diary addresses it addresses dailiness, addresses the Subject in dailiness, addresses dailiness as subject. If the motto of every journal is “say’s I to my-self,” the theme of every journal is the saying of dailiness. Which is not to say that all saying sounds alike or that the communities addressed all share the same formal structure. The intent of saying has a certain audience, varying in specifics according to the speaker’s role in several communities in which he speaks a part: that within the text; those which include the text. To put it another way: diarists usually find some way of describing the move from communal spaces to the self’s most private space, that which emerges in the moment and place of writing. Romantic diarists make a fetish of this movement. That is one reason why their texts often sound like the epistolary novels the romantics could not relinquish to the century just past: those novels have much to do with the secluded “closets” to which middle class women retired for their private writing and reading (see Watt). (Studies of diary fiction have done much with the relation of diaries to eighteenth-century epistolary fiction; see Martens, for example. More needs to be done on the links of the diary to letter-writing as such, a major bourgeois mode of expression in the period preceding Emerson’s.) That is one reason why the romantic diary relates so closely to, echoes the modalities of, the romantic

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familiar essay, a mode of discontinuous prose that seems always to be seeking the place from which one speaks, initiates a conversation. And that matter of conversation adds one more reason for the prevalence of similar sounds. Many diaries of the time share the tone of conversation that sounds from epistolary texts, Richardson’s kind as well as bundles of real material like the letters and journals of Novalis. That similarity of tone also does much to explain why romantic journals often sound like familiar essays, why Sainte-Beuve wrote his Causeries, conversational chats, at the time when journaux intimes were becoming popular in France. Yet this is not to say that the participants in these conversations always number the same, that all the communities share the same shape. Whatever the likenesses among the kinds of private space identified with the scene of writing diaries, they do not always intend the same sort of audience. That is true even though the genre is the same, even though they share the narrative of address, share fundamental elements Mill would have recognized. Consider Constant’s “chiffres.” Whatever their function in jogging Constant’s recollections (recall his rereading of his diary during that boring night in Nevers; recall the relations to Wordsworth and Proust) the code marks also serve to keep out prying ears, to limit the audience for the utterance of “I.” The “chiffres,” as well as the occasional Greek letters, short circuit those paths where the overhearer attends, limit the audience even if the journal should fall into other hands. That is, they profoundly affect the context of conversation by effecting kinds of community. There is no question that Constant wanted to keep his journal private, for his own eyes and use. Whatever he shared with other romantic diarists, he had no sense that his entries were to be thought of as quasi-epistles or sketches for a familiar essay. Address’s narrative has a different shape of telling in Constant’s journaux intimes than in, say, the journals of Thoreau or, to take in the texts of an earlier naturalist, those of Dorothy Wordsworth. Much has been made of her journals in terms of their time and context, much also of her role as their maker within that time and context. For some literary historians they offer the day to day business out of which grew a number of poems by her brother and Coleridge: the Alfoxden joumals of 1798 record the dailiness from which Lyrical Ballads emerged, while the Grasmere journals of 1800 to 1803 record spin-offs and developments that were to define the course of the Anglo-American Iyric. That reading puts her journal as a useful appendage, the emphasis on the scenes out of which such poems appeared. Here, for example, is 27 March 1802: “Saturday [27th]. A divine morning. At Breakfast Wm wrote part of an ode. Mr Olliff sent the dung and Wm went to work in the garden. We sate all day in the orchard” (Wordsworth 106). So read, such scenes offer a kind of local color, William working over the dung after working out some stanzas of the Immortality ode. One is easily touched by the homeliness of this entry, its heimisch qualities, the way it moves from the writing of one of the grander displays of rhetoric in Western literature to the everydayness of working dung into the earth; but this passage holds more than corresponds with an awed, sentimental reading. It reaches deep into various discourses of the time, in effect conducting a dialogue with them. It reaches into the bases of orthodox romantic poetics and into subsequent poems like Wallace Stevens’ “The Man on the Dump” that extend the entry’s implications. Fundamental analogies play around the passage, legible to most readers of what would be the ode: one works at poems as one works at the soil, performing the textual equivalent of the acts of hoeing, fertilizing. The working of text and soil involves correspondent acts, metaphorically equivalent gestures, laying the groundwork

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for an organic poetics of the sort exemplified by Dorothy’s brother and his friend. Alternatively one may see these actions as metonyms drawn from a context replete with other metonyms, sexuality for instance, itself potentially active in any organic poetics, implicit at many points in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals. Thoreau wrote similar passages, some perhaps tongue-in-cheek; in fact he consistently likened the inscribing of the earth with the inscribing of a text (Garber, Fable). On the other hand, one can well imagine what Constant or Delacroix or either of the Schlegels would have thought of such an entry, especially the dung. One needs to read these journals with a broad sense of context, in terms of various communities created by relation, in terms of tonalities frequently denser than they seem. Few romantic journals approach those of Dorothy Wordsworth in the intricacy of their design, their density of implication, the breadth of their intertext. That makes all the more fascinating the question of community — of a sum of communities that inhabits these daily inscribings. Dorothy’s role, her pivotal status as a kind of collector/conductor, makes her handling of address and its attendant narrative as complex and effectual as in any diary of her time. Equally complex is the question of private spaces, especially their relation to that communal space from which one withdraws to perform the highly personal act of making a diary entry, getting addressing going. Where does privacy end? Where does surrogacy start? The first entry in the Grasmere journal, like the first entry in Thoreau’s journal, talks of some reasons for the making of journals. It was Wednesday 14 May 1800, and William and his brother John were setting out on a journey, “cold pork in their pockets” (a euphonious phrasing of what she thought important to note, her certainty they would be fed. One’s sense of one’s role determines what one notices). She tells how she gave William a farewell kiss, then “sate a long time upon a stone at the margin of the lake, and after a flood of tears my heart was easier” (15). What follows in the passage is masterly lyricism, descriptions of details and textures of the landscape she walks through to return to Dove Cottage. Interspersed among them is an occasional touch that puts this person in this place at this moment: “The valley very green, many sweet views up to Rydale head when I could juggle away the fine houses, but they disturbed me even more than when I have been happier…. Sate down very often, though it was cold” (15; later, at home, she will note that her face became “flame-coloured” [ 16]). Self as fountain, then, full to overflowing in contrary temperatures. To counter that overflow she turns to another act of self, its utterance of “I”: “I resolved to write a journal of the time till W. and J. return, and I set about keeping my resolve because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it when he comes home again” (15–16). Toward the end of the entry she speaks of a young woman who came to the door begging. She had “buried her husband and three children within a year and a half — all in one grave — burying very dear” (16). The temporarily fractured community of Dorothy and her brothers finds an unsettling counterpart in the forever fractured community of this impoverished young woman, all the obvious differences erased in the rush of grief. The first entry ends with a wish for another text, another kind of addressing, this time epistolary: “O!! that I had a letter from William !” Epistolary addressing is more open and direct. It offers a potent impetus in her struggle to enact her narrative of address, where “I” would speak to “my-self” to forestall internecine quarrels. The initial entry in the Grasmere journal reads like

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a commentary on texts and communities, reads clearly the relations of textual communities to those in which texts abide — here including among others the community of Dove Cottage (Dorothy and her brothers), the community of two young women, at the moment alone in their kind, the community of human grief that takes in all the others. The initiating entry, an allegory of address, offers the reader a dense and intricate set of instructions for reading. That would include, it seems, her reading of the bit of cold pork, her concern with her brothers’ sustenance, her pleasure in their possessions. Her pleasure takes in, in part, the joy of a role well fulfilled, a pleasure in giving pleasure, not only in food for their bodies but in food for their souls as well. Pleasure, she says, is one reason for writing this journal: not only will such writing keep her from quarreling with herself but she “shall give Wm pleasure by it when he comes home again.” Dorothy is a provider of pleasure, in the case of her journal the multiple pleasures of the text. But there is much more at play here than varieties of pleasure. When William returns he will read what she has seen and what she has felt, read in this Grasmere journal about her relations with natural things, what William would likely have noticed had he been there too. Further, he will read of her pleasure in giving him pleasure, her joy in writing this journal, part of that joy coming from her awareness that their seeing is so much alike. That is, the journal is a record of what they are to each other as well as what she is in herself. Indeed in its very form, in its play with private and communal spaces, it records an intimacy that the diary of, say, Constant would not know how to describe; but of course that question is moot because such intimacy with another would never have come to Constant in that very private space where his diary gets written, that space blocked off by “chiffres” and an occasional snippet of Greek. Dorothy retreats to her version of that space, as every diarist does; but in writing this journal not only for her pleasure but that of William as well she gives him the key to her private closet, makes that scene of intimacies available to him, a kind of offering of self in its utmost recesses, the record of where she has wept and why, as well as what she has seen. Dorothy’s journal textualizes their relation, embodies its contours and geography, gives it verbal form. Whatever her differences from Constant, hers too is a journal intime. What, then, of William’s role, his function in the community she creates anew with each entry? “Say’s I to my-self” becomes, in addition, “say’s I to William,” her utterance of “I” creating a multiple addressing. William and her selfhood are partners within the journal’s inmost community. They are partners in an intimacy “my-self” knows in every utterance but few other addressees ever come to know. Coleridge read her journal and it gave him ideas for texts but no one, not even Coleridge, knew the intimacy known to William, a version of the sort ordinarily aimed (address is a kind of aiming) toward the aspect of oneself that is designated hearer. Dorothy’s journal reserves for William a degree of intimacy approaching identification, the gap between “my-self” and “William” nearly nonexistent. From Mill’s point of view (the reading Constant would approve) William would be an overhearer of feeling confessing itself to itself, the act that shapes the tight, inviolable circle designed for ultimate intimacies. Dorothy rejects that scheme for William’s reading of her journal; William hears directly, from within. But she rejects overhearing only for that solitary reader, sole and single just as she is, as though they were characters in his poems. But of course they are neither single nor solitary when together in the most private space: though he is not herself he can stand where, otherwise, only her version of “my-self” can stand. Put in another way, closer to some we have seen: “my-self,”

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when addressed, becomes also a form of “You,” the requisite addressee in every utterance. “William” is closer to that “You” which is also “my-self” than anyone else can be. All manner of ironies abound in this variation of a fundamental scheme. For one, Mill confessed that, when pressures on his fragile intellect led him to near disaster, he was rescued by Wordsworth’s poems, and it is certainly those poems that make the major models for his claims for romantic poetics (Mill 43). That bit of history helps us to read Dorothy’s journal from still another angle: we, the overhearers, can treat it as a performance, phrased as if it were Millesque. The diary acts like a lyric where feeling utters itself to itself, though here is a special case where “itself” is, for once, not alone. The semblance, in other words, makes a kind of reading possible, creates a particular contract between this writer and most readers (every other reader but William). We read Dorothy’s journal as though we were reading Mill’s kind of lyric, itself drawn from a reading of William’s poetry. That could also mean that we should read William’s poems as though they too were as if, their utterance enclosed within the most private space but also pronounced, pace Mill, so as to reach an overhearer. Through the patterns in Dorothy’s journal we are approaching another aspect of the question of lyric and diary and romantic textuality, finding a deep, probing reading of how that textuality works. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal is reading more and more like a defining text of the time. Other pleasures emerge from the text of Dorothy’s journal, other variations on the pleasure of the text. Part of her overall pleasure comes from her role as provider: she arranged cold pork for trips and would, in her journal, arrange for scenes of Wordsworthian seeing: I never saw such a union of earth, sky, and sea. The clouds beneath our feet spread themselves to the water, and the clouds of the sky almost joined them. Gathered sticks in the wood; a perfect stillness. The redbreasts sang upon the leafless boughs. Of a great number of sheep in the field, only one standing. (5)

That is from Alfoxden in February 1798, and it sounds modes of seeing that inform William’s work from at least “Tintern Abbey” to “The Solitary Reaper” and beyond. That seeing sounds again in a passage from the Grasmere notebooks of November 1801. It shows most tellingly how the matter of relation, in fact the entire narrative engendered by address, appears not only in the poetics of her journal but in the context of what she sees: As we were going along we were stopped at once, at the distance perhaps of 50 yards from our favorite Birch tree. It was yielding to the gusty wind with all its tender twigs, the sun shone upon it and it glanced in the wind like a flying sunshiny shower. It was a tree in shape with stems and branches but it was like a Spirit of water. The sun went in and it resumed its purplish appearance the twigs still yielding to the wind but not so visibly to us. The other Birch trees that were near it looked bright and cheerful, but it was a creature by its own self among them. (61)

An epiphanic moment burns through a single object that stands alone in its kind, the object and its context grounded in history because the emergence cannot be seen, the text cannot render the scene, apart from the facts and textures of the moment in which it occurs. Dorothy’s observation turns the sundry of dailiness into the activating substance of a scene of transformation. Consider the several narratives at play within the scene. First there is the narrative of this day’s observation, dailiness at work in its diachronic phase. Then there are at least two other narratives, the

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addressing of the birch that leads to extraordinary relation, the addressing of “my-self” in the recording of the scene. The likeness of these acts is especially remarkable. If the poetics of the journal is a poetics of address, the acts described in this scene are performances of address: the poetics and the acts share the same configuration, the same results of utterance. That poetics, phrased magnificently in the initial Grasmere entry, shows its material counterpart in the events within this scene. Dorothy knew intuitively that the way of seeing depicted in this and similar scenes, her addressing of persons and objects — the homeless young widow of the initial Grasmere entry, the single tree that is “a creature by its own self” — was fundamentally kindred to the writing of a journal. That likening resonates through other aspects of the journal designed for William’s pleasure. Part of that pleasure feeds into his writing of his own poems. If the last two entries we looked at offer generic Wordsworth, perceptible in many poems, other entries are more specific, offering jottings that William turned into the substance of particular poems. Some two and a half weeks after the morning with the ode and the dung, Dorothy entered a long passage on a colony of daffodils, a golden community whose details went, some verbatim, into “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” written two years later (109). The likenesses are striking but what the final stanza offers does not appear in the journal: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. (Poems in Two Volumes 208)

The matter of time and memory — here and in “Tintern Abbey” and the “Immortality” ode, among many other lyrics and the massiveness of The Prelude — marks a central contribution to the history of the lyric. Absence and presence and mind and memory — none ever purely itself but always partaking of the others — define much of the lyric’s conditions from Wordsworth’s writing on, playing out major strains based in the workings of address. William takes Dorothy’s text and turns it into a parable of the narrative of address, showing in particular what the scene with the transformed birch rendered with literal bedazzlement: addressing nature can lead to a reciprocal relation in which we too are addressed — a kind of return of the gaze that is more a return of address, not necessarily at the moment of initial address but later, in retrospect. A return of this sort refigures the act of relation and restates community. Again we see that the poetics of the journal possess the elements of a performance in and of nature. This time one can add how the poetics of the romantic journal shares much that is essential with the poetics of the romantic lyric. Dorothy’s activities, cooking and walking and seeing and journal-making, lead to a pristine instance, all elements purely laid out, of the place of the romantic journal among the genres of its time. Other examples suggest what this one clearly unfolds, the fundamental likeness among basic romantic acts.

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Notes 1. “dem vitalen Individualismus der Renaissance und dem moralistichen Bürger-Ideal der ebenso pathetischen wie skeptischen Aufklärung…. von objektiv-privaten Diarien der Renaissance zu den subjektiv-privaten Tagebüchern der Gegenwart” (Hocke 66). 2. “das ‘sich’ in dieser Formulierung meint zugleich den Akkusativ und den Dativ, den Gegenstand und den Addressaten solchen Erzählens” (Thibaut 31). 3. “II m’a dit aujourd’hui, Didot étant chez son frère, et lui parlant du projet où j’étais de prendre des rapins. Didot disait que je serai le premier de mes rapins. Je ne sais si cela a influé sur ma disposition tout le reste du soir, mais je suis d’une mélancolie extrême” (Delacroix 1: 83). 4. “de la [the soul] montrer sous mille formes, d’en faire part aux autres, de s’étudier soi-même, de se peindre continuellement dans ses ouvrages” (Delacroix 1: 102). 5. “Ce journal, cette espèce de secret ignoré de tout le monde, cet auditeur si discret que je suis sûr de retrouver tous les soirs” (Constant 428). 6. “mais je ne suis pas tout à fait un être réel. Il y a en moi deux personnes, dont une, observatrice de l’autre, et sachant bien que ses mouvements convulsifs doivent passer” (Constant 290–1). 7. “Les autres sont les autres, on ne fera jamais qu’ils soient soi” (Constant 428). 8. “Ce journal peut me servir non pas à me redonner des sensations passées, mais à me rappeler que j’ai éprouvé ces sensations et qu’il ne dépend [que] de moi de les retrouver en changeant de lieu. Ainsi ce journal est une espèce d’histoire” (Constant 429). 9. “Il faut donc vivre au jour la journée, et seulement travailler le plus possible, car il n’y a que cela qui reste” (Constant 337).

References Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: U Miami P. Boerner, Peter. 1969. Tagebuch. Stuttgart: Metzler. Buell, Lawrence. 1973. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Carlyle, Thomas. 1937. Sartor Resartus. New York: The Odyssey P. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1961. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Constant, Benjamin. 1957. Œuvres. Ed. Alfred Roulin. Paris: Gallimard. Delacroix, Eugène. 1950. Journal de Eugène Delacroix. Nouvelle Édition. Ed. André Joubin. 5 vols. Paris: Librairie Plon. Field, Trevor. 1989. Form and Function in the Diary Novel. London: Macmillan. Garber, Frederick. 1995. Repositionings: Readings of Contemporary Poetry, Photography, and Performance Art. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP. ———. 1991. Thoreau’s Fable of Inscribing. Princeton: Princeton UP. Hocke, Gustav René. 1978. Europäische Tagebücher aus vier Jahrhunderten. Wiesbaden: Limes. Martens, Lorna. 1985. The Diary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Mill, John Stuart. 1944. Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. New York: Columbia UP. ———. 1968. “What is Poetry.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Rev. Ed. Meyer Abrams et. al. New York: W. W. Norton. 1250–60. Porte, Joel, ed. 1982. Emerson in His Journals. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP. Rosenwald, Lawrence. 1988. Emerson and the Art of the Diary. New York: Oxford UP. Thibaut, Matthias. 1990. Sich-Selbst-Erzählen: Schreiben als Poetische Lebenspraxis. Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz.



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Thoreau, Henry David. 1981–92. Journal. Eds. John C. Broderick and Robert Sattelmeyer. 4 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP. Volume 1. Eds. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, William L. Howarth, Robert Sattelmeyer and Thomas Blanding. Volume 4. Eds. Leonard N. Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons. ———. 1975. “Of Keeping a Private Journal.” Early Essays and Miscellanies. Eds. Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edward Moser. Princeton: Princeton U. Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: U California P. Whitman, Walt. 1980. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. Eds. Scalley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. 3 vols. New York: New York UP. Wordsworth, Dorothy. 1971. The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. Mary Moorman. Oxford: Oxford UP. Wordsworth, William. 1992. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems 1797–1800. Eds. James Butler and Karen Green. The Cornell Wordsworth. Ithaca: Cornell UP. ———. 1983. Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems 1800–1807. Ed. Jared Curtis. The Cornell Wordsworth. Ithaca: Cornell UP.



The Romantic Subject in Autobiography EUGENE STELZIG SUNY Geneseo

We love only the individual; thus our great joy in portraits, confessions, memoirs, letters, and anecdotes of departed and even insignificant persons.1 Goethe

The term autobiography implies a degree of generic instability because critics and theorists have been unable to agree on a consistent definition of it or indeed even whether it is an identifiable genre. In its broadest usage as an umbrella term, it merges into fiction — the autobiographical novel — at one end of the spectrum and into various forms of personal writing, including letters, essays, and journals at the other. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I will use the term primarily in the more limited and traditional sense formulated by Lejeune: autobiography is “a retrospective narrative in prose that someone makes of his own existence when he places the principal accent on his individual life, particularly the history of his personality” (14).2 Lejeune’s definition comes near the beginning of that remarkable surge of contemporary interest in life writing by scholars, critics, and theorists that reaches a high point by the end of the twentieth century. The pioneering psychological explorations by James Olney (Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography; 1972) and Jean Starobinski in his writings on Rousseau, chiefly La Transparence et l’obstacle (Transparency and the Obstacle; 1971) helped launch and provided a critical foundation for autobiography criticism as did the subsequent writings of Lejeune, especially Le Pacte autobriographique (The Autobiographical Pact; 1975) with its complex contractual concept of the identity of author (named on the title page) and protagonist as a formal condition of autobiography. By the time Olney published his influential collection, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical in 1980, the study of autobiography had not only come into focus, but had also effectively established itself as an academic specialty with rapidly developing sub-specialties including a powerful revisionary feminist reading of the genre. Although Saint Augustine is the founding figure of the Western autobiographical tradition with his account (in the late fourth century) of his spiritual struggles and conversion to Christianity and although autobiographical writing takes on a powerful secular and individualizing momentum in the early modern period with Montaigne and Cellini, the scholarly consensus is that as a historical and developmental narrative of the self by the self, modern autobiography is a literary form that emerged by the middle of the eighteenth century and achieved a prominent presence by the beginning of the nineteenth. In the philosophical and psychological sphere, it is the function of a post-Cartesian, post-Lockian sense of the subject and of personal identity; in the economic sphere, it is correlated with the rise of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism. The sense

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of the individual self as a private possession is associated with the emergence in the later eighteenth century of a more subjective awareness of human experience. For Lejeune, who dates the beginning of modern autobiography to the 1760s, the explosion of the genre in Europe by the end of the century is related to “the transformation of the concept of the person” (43) that is a function of the discovery of the historicity of the self and a genetic conception of personality. Like other critics and historians, Lejeune sees the figure of Rousseau as instrumental: Rousseau did not “invent” the genre (64), “but he realized at one fell swoop nearly all its virtualities” (65).3 His influential Confessions (1782–89) established this kind of writing in the popular imagination, and he is the founding figure of the modern autobiography against which subsequent practitioners, particularly throughout the nineteenth century, have had to measure themselves and against whom they frequently had to react to define and formulate their own approach to life writing. The fact that the rise of autobiography and the rise of romanticism in the later eighteenth century are closely correlated has not escaped notice. A recent commentator resumes the common ground between them in pointing to “Romantic subjectivity and its expressive poetics” and to “the Romantic search for origins and its child cult [that] led writers to narrate their own lives from the beginning, and to find more significance in their early years” (Folkenflik 8). The romantic discovery of childhood and the proto-psychoanalytic insight that the child is father of the man is explored in depth by major romantic writers and autobiographers beginning with Rousseau and Wordsworth. Autobiography is indeed a distinctive romantic genre as well as a mode of self-knowledge. If not all romantic writing is autobiography, much of it is certainly confessional and autobiographical. It is no mere coincidence that the term itself was coined during the period of romanticism’s emergence, in the later eighteenth century. Until recently, its coinage was attributed to Robert Southey (in 1809), but now its appearance has been pushed back by more than a generation: “the term autobiography, and its synonym self-biography, having never been used in earlier periods, appeared in the late eighteenth century in several forms … in both England and Germany with no sign that one use influenced another” (Folkenflik 5). What is perhaps most telling is that the neologism emerged spontaneously, repeatedly, and independently during this time. Romantic autobiography as a major literary form by way of a retrospective narrative of the self that projects a developed subjective self-awareness is most pronounced in French, German, and English literature of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The dramatic opening of Les Confessions, in which Rousseau insists on the originality both of his autobiography and his moi seul, marks the polemical beginning of romantic autobiography. Beginning with Rousseau, who provided the foundation for modern autobiography as a secular scripture of the self and sustained signifier of personal identity, the French, German, and English contributions to the genre are the most impressive, while Italy produced some important works as well. The French tradition capitalizes on Rousseau’s analytic and narrative exposure of the self, the exploration of the sources of identity in childhood, and the formation of the personality through a novelistic presentation that merges fact and fiction. In Chateaubriand and Sand, this project is pushed to truly monumental proportions as they transcend Rousseau’s obsessive concern with the solitary and persecuted self in order to present their individual careers in the larger contexts of family, society, and history. Nearly two thousand pages long, Chateau-

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briand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Memoirs from beyond the Grave; 1850) was originally intended for publication half a century after the author’s death. At times grandiloquent and fabulous — for instance, the author ranks himself with the most celebrated writers of the age, Goethe and Byron, and chronicles (on his visit to North America) an interview with George Washington, who was too ill to receive him — the Mémoires, begun in 1809, were written over three decades as a vast and profitable publishing project in which Chateaubriand set out “to tell the whole truth” (1: x) as well as to write “the epic of my times” (1: xiii).4 One of the striking stylistic features is a consistent and ironic double consciousness of the remembered past and the present shifting moment of writing (specified in time and place). Chateaubriand’s portrait (1780–1840) of his world, from the pre-revolutionary to the post-Napoleonic era, is also an artful concatenation of the private individual and the public persona through the ups and downs of a high-profile literary and political career that has a wide range of geographic and temporal references. While the public man (writer and diplomat) concludes his literary “monument” with a synoptic overview of his life and of the changes that have happened on the globe during its course (2: 938), the private man also acknowledges in his preface, “If any part of this work has attracted me more than another, it is that concerning my youth, the most ignored corner of my life” (1: 2).5 Perhaps Chateaubriand’s characteristic contribution to romantic autobiography is the lyricism and the nostalgia of the account of his childhood and youth in the first three books of his Mémoires. His father’s estate at Combourg is the emotional anchor of his being: his room in a solitary tower, the ghostly family dispersed throughout the spacious chateau by the sea, the adolescent phantom of romantic love (“the ideal object of my desires”) that preys on him, and the image of his beloved sister Lucile (1: 95). All these blend into an interior landscape that haunts his imagination: “It is in the woods of Combourg that I have become who I am, that I began to feel the first attack of that ennui that has burdened all my life, that sadness that makes all my torment and felicity” (1: 105).6 This quotation shows the same mal de siècle that also afflicts his famous confessional alter ego, the Werther-like hero of René. George Sand too unfolds the narrative of her life (some sixteen hundred pages) with epic breadth and lyric depth. Like Chateaubriand’s Mémoires, her Histoire de ma vie (History of My Life; 1854) is a writing project protracted over several decades. One of the most lively and readable autobiographies ever written, her life may still be read long after her sensational novels are forgotten. Her narrative is also very much in the mode that feminist critics have identified as a distinctive marker of women’s autobiographies, a view of the self as defined in and through its relations with others. Instead of beginning with her own birth, Sand first devotes several hundred pages to a history of her family, especially that of her beloved father: probably the most poignant and painful moment in her autobiography is his death caused by a fall from his horse. Sand’s concern with family carries through into her later life, as the loving daughter devastated by the loss of her father rounds out her autobiography with her maternal concern for her own daughter. Even as it is influenced by Sand’s Histoire is written very much against the grain of Rousseau’s Confessions; in her opening chapter she programmatically rejects the obsessive selfconcern of Rousseau’s confessional model: “I have always found that it was in bad taste not only to speak too much of oneself, but also to reflect at length on oneself” (1: 7). Instead of

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Rousseau’s professed singularity, she stresses a familial and historical notion (“to speak the language of my times”) of “solidarity” (1: 9).7 While Sand admits to being moved by the struggles of genius of the “inspired soul” of the author of The Confessions with a refractory world (1: 11), her own view of autobiography is that her “intimate history” is correlated with the history of humanity (1: 308) and that her “individuality is inscribed in the universal book” (1: 307). Her temporal framing of her life — “it is thus necessary that I embrace a period of roughly one hundred years to recount forty years of my life” (1: 308)8 — is close to Goethe’s historicizing view of the genre. Stendhal described himself in everything he wrote from his novels to his discursive and personal writings, but the only coherent narrative retrospect of his life that he produced is his Vie de Henry Brulard (Life of Henry Brulard) written in 1835–36 and left in manuscript at his death. (His Souvenirs d’égotisme [Memoirs of Egotism], also left in manuscript, are powerful if fragmentary recollections of his life during the early 1820s). Stendhal’s pseudonymous autobiography covers the first eighteen years of his life and is one of the most penetrating and powerful portraits of childhood and youth on record. Written with the characteristic sprezzatura of his style, an improvisational combination of skeptical wit, effusive lyricism, and brutal honesty, it opens with a teasing foregrounding of the identity question — not the what do I know? of Montaigne but the more modern who am I? — that haunts romantic autobiography: “I am going to be fifty; it is about time that I knew myself. What have I been, who am I; in truth, I am hard put to say so” (Stendhal 38). In the wake of Rousseau, whose Confessions and Julie exerted a decisive influence on his imagination, Stendhal’s tracing of the defining moments of his childhood as the psychic stresses of family romance may be the most explicit formulation of the Oedipus complex before Freud: “I wanted to cover my mother with kisses and wished that there was no clothing…. I abhorred my father when he came to interrupt our kisses” (60).9 His intense grief at his mother’s death and his suffering under the tyranny of his dour and overbearing father, neurotic aunt, and Jesuit tutor — the abbé Raillane — are vividly evoked, as is his hatred of this stifling bourgeois world of money, religion, and reactionary politics. The young Stendhal’s romantic imagination and his “Spanish” temperament are polarized against the provincial straightjacket of his father’s city, Grenoble, from which he finally manages to escape on the wings of a lycée mathematics prize. Life in Paris with his influential relatives, the Darus, is a series of missteps (like Julien Sorel, the young Stendhal misspells cela as cella), and Paris itself, as it was for Rousseau on his first visit, a major disappointment. Stendhal in Paris experiences the characteristic romantic mismatch between reality and imagination. In his case, the result is serious depression and illness. Only on his absurd military adventures on the trail of Napoleon as a clueless lieutenant of dragoons who does not know how to ride a horse (shades of Fabrice del Dongo) does he begin to taste the first real happiness of his life. Like the young Wordsworth at the Simplon Pass, he finds the crossing of the Alps an anticlimax — “What! the crossing of the Saint-Bernard is only that?” (419) — but the pleasures of Italy, culminating in Milan, ravish his soul: love, music, countryside. For Stendhal, the experience of true pleasure eludes memory and is beyond language; the final chapter (on Milan) of his unfinished life narrative thematizes the romantic disjunction between language and the plenitude of being: “How can one paint a mad happiness?” (428).10 German literature did not produce an autobiography of European significance until the

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publication of Goethe’s magisterial Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth; 1811–32), which compensates for this lack by its status as the summa of eighteenth-century and the preeminent nineteenth-century autobiography. The eighteenth-century autobiographies most frequently mentioned as important contributions before Goethe’s are by two of his acquaintances, Johann Heinrich Jung and Karl Philipp Moritz. Jung, a devoutly religious young man from humble origins was a medical student at Strasbourg with literary aspirations who later became a famous eye surgeon. He was part of Goethe’s circle at the university, and Goethe several years later helped him find a publisher for the first and most successful of his autobiographical narratives, Heinrich Stillings Jugend (Henry Stilling’s Youth; 1777). This highly poeticized third-person narrative of a rural childhood in humble circumstances is informed, like its sequels gathered in Heinrich Stillings Leben (Henry Stilling’s Life; 1806), by a simple faith in the agency of divine providence in his daily life and in the natural dignity of common people. Jung’s autobiography is usually credited as the most impressive literary expression of the impact of that powerful eighteenth-century German religious movement, Pietism (to which Goethe himself paid tribute in the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” in book 6 of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship; 1795–96]). Moritz, who had been enchanted with Goethe’s Werther and who later became friends with Goethe in Rome, produced a powerful hybrid of autobiography and psychological novel in his Anton Reiser: Ein Psycholog (1785–90), which in its depiction of an impoverished youth afflicted by depression and self-contempt takes to a near-pathological extreme the introspective tendencies of the German Sturm-und-Drang movement. In Jung and Moritz, we hear (as we do later in England in John Clare) the voice of a hitherto excluded lower class struggling to assert its place in the literary sphere. In this connection, mention should also be made of Ulrich Bräker, the Swiss farmer’s son whose popular Lebensgeschichte und natürliche Ebentheuer des armen Mannes in Tockenburg (Life, History, and Natural Adventures of the Poor Man in Tockenburg; 1789) claims an exemplary status for the struggles of a poor man in pursuit of knowledge, and of Johann Gottfried Seume, the orphan boy who grew up to be a professional soldier and traveler whose autobiographical writings include his unfinished Mein Leben (My Life; 1813). German romanticism, which became a highly self-conscious movement in the influential writings of the early romantics at the end of the eighteenth century, did not produce, as Müller has pointed out, any autobiographies properly speaking, because “romanticism started with the assumption that life is the true novel, but demanded its romantic elevation into poetry, so that here it is no longer a question of autobiography even in the most extended sense” (343–4).11 Of course the tradition of the Bildungs- and Künstlerroman — from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, 1795–1821, to Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1802, Hölderlin’s Hyperion, 1797–99, and by the mid-nineteenth century, Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (Green Henry; 1854–55) — draws on elements of autobiography in its creation of a fictional or poeticized life narrative that reflects the central impulse(s) of the romantic movement in Germany. German women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century also explored autobiographical forms even though they did not write traditional autobiographies. A number of them who came from well-to-do families and moved in literary circles and salons were known for their letters, including Rahel Varnhagen, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, and Dorothea VeitSchlegel. Current academic efforts of canon revision and recovery (like Blackwell and Zantop’s

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Bitter Healing) have even made samples of their work available in English; a notable example is the memoirs of Henriette Herz (begun in 1818), which describe with considerable charm the marriage of the barely fifteen-year-old Jewish bride to a doctor fifteen years her senior. Probably the most original and substantive autobiographical work in the first half of the nineteenth century by a woman was that of Bettina von Arnim, who created an emotionally charged auto/biographical hybrid of letters and journals in Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Goethe’s Exchange of Letters With a Child; 1835) and Die Günderode [sic] 1840. The seventeen-year-old Bettina’s worshipful letters to the most famous author of the age and his distanced replies create the terms of a relationship that exists mostly in her imagination (although there is a factual foundation for the relationship in their several meetings) and suggest that her famous Goethe book should be read primarily as her autobiography as has recently been convincingly argued (Bäumer and Schulz 66). The same is true of Bettina’s poetic recreation of the powerful spiritual friendship between herself and Karoline von Günderrode, the young poet who committed suicide in 1806 and whose portrait is Bettina’s tribute to a soul sister as well as a complexly-articulated selfportrait resting on the ideal of a female self-knowledge won through passionate subjectivity. Two notable Italian contributions to romantic autobiography are Vittorio Alfieri’s Vita (1806) and Silvio Pellico’s Le mie prigioni (My Prisons; 1832). Alfieri’s preface avows the motive most autobiographers prefer to keep hidden — “I frankly confess that what induced me to lay out my own life — though mixed perhaps with some other reasons though always stronger than the others — was the love of me myself” (43) — but like Rousseau (in the draft preface to his Confessions), he also signals his proto-anthropological conception of the genre because he will relate only those circumstances which “contribute to the study of man in general, a plant whose secrets we are best able to enumerate by observing ourselves” (45).12 The picaresque life narrative of the Italian aristocrat and leading dramatist is the story of an unprofitable education and an idle youth of travel across Europe and romantic intrigue until his discovery of his literary vocation in early manhood. Alfieri makes a colorful contribution to the romantic legend of genius with his self-portrait as an unstable compound of acute sensibility, generosity of spirit, timidity to the point of morbid lassitude, and reckless impulsiveness. The three passions of his life (in chronological order) were horses, women, and literature. The romantic intrigues of Alfieri are in the aristocratic tradition of grand adultery, especially his protracted affair in England with Penelope Ligonier, which reads like an episode from Byron’s Don Juan, including the duel with Lord Ligonier in Green Park and the ensuing public scandal and divorce. Most impressive is the mature Alfieri’s sustained dedication to belles lettres, which involves a belated study of Latin and Italian literature and the composition of a series of tragedies. He also took up the systematic study of Greek at the age of forty-six. Probably the most dramatic and characteristic moment of this spirited autobiography is Alfieri’s account of his departure from France during the Reign of Terror: with his mistress, servants, and two baggage-laden carriages, the Italian aristocrat faces down an intoxicated and furious French mob: “Look, listen! Alfieri is my name! I am an Italian, not a Frenchman…. We want to pass [this barrier], and by God we shall pass!” (Alfieri 364).13 One of the most vivid and touching memoirs of the romantic age is Pellico’s account of his ten-year imprisonment by the Austrians. The young author of the well-known tragedy Francesca da Rimini and member of the Carbonari was arrested in 1820 at the age of twenty-one and spent

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the next decade in the dungeons of the Habsburgs. After his sentencing in Venice in 1822, he served the remainder of his term in the fortress-prison of Spielberg. In documenting the repressive institutional apparatus of an absolute monarchy three decades after the French Revolution, Pellico’s account of political imprisonment foreshadows the more systematic and sinister persecutions of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. Pellico chronicles both the spiritual resources of the political prisoner — surreptitious creative writing, an intensification of religious faith — and the pleasures of friendship and communication with other political prisoners as well as some of his prison guards, whose essential decency and humanity is repeatedly stressed. Despite the terrible and disease-producing physical conditions of his imprisonment, Pellico refuses to give in to hatred of his guards or the Austrians; instead he shows both prisoner and guard as victims of the same inhuman system and rises above it through an affirmation of their common humanity. Thus the seventy-four year old soldier and war-veteran Schiller, who at their first meeting seemed so sullen and severe that Pellico “viewed [him] as impudent by virtue of [his] long habit of cruelty” turns out to be a gentle and compassionate soul and father figure to his prisoners who affects a rough exterior only to conceal his true feelings (180–1).14 The early nineteenth century in England produced an unprecedented range and variety of autobiographical expression, including letters (those of Keats and Byron are classed among the best in the language), journals — Dorothy Wordsworth’s have long been recognized as the exemplary romantic instance for their minute attentiveness to the myriad appearances of nature — and the personal and familiar essay practiced by leading men of letters like Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey. Of those works that fit the traditional definition of autobiography as narrative retrospect, the foremost instances are De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (first published in 1821 in The London Magazine) and Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805). Other writers wrote autobiographies as well, but none of them is a major literary achievement, although they are at times colorful and revealing as biographical and historical documents. This category includes the autobiographies of John Clare, Benjamin Robert Haydon, and Mary (Darby) Robinson, the “English Sappho” who was a popular poet at the end of the eighteenth century. Mention should also be made of that brilliantly eccentric work of philosophical criticism, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), which as its subtitle (“Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions”) indicates, draws on an autobiographical context in presenting Coleridge’s ideas on literature, the imagination, and Wordsworth’s poetry. Ironically, what would surely have turned out to be the most popular and sensational of English romantic autobiographies — Byron’s — has been lost to us. Written during his years of exile in Italy, the manuscript was destroyed after his death. The autobiographies of Haydon and Clare present contrasting studies in the romantic legend of the struggle of genius with an indifferent or hostile world. Haydon, the friend of two generations of English romantics and the ambitious painter of large canvases on heroic subjects, was obsessed with achieving fame. His Autobiography is based on the voluminous journal that he started in his early twenties; as one commentator has recently noted, the “Autobiography and the Diary are filled with assertions of his own greatness and immortality, the devotion to a high calling almost as if it were a divine mission” (Porter 171). In his heroic self-assertion as the solitary and struggling artist, Haydon identifies himself with larger-than-life figures of contemporary history such as Napoleon and Nelson as well as with the most famous modern instance of

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the persecuted genius available to him, Rousseau. Next to the booming romantic sublime of the painter who moved in the high culture circles of British romanticism, Clare’s voice is truly one crying plaintively in the wilderness. His fragmentary stream-of-consciousness account of his struggle to become a poet within the limits of “the humble situation I have filled in life” is an odd mixture of the prosaic and the lyrical (Clare 11). There is some overlap with Wordsworth’s childhood, including a “solitary disposition from a boy” and even the “robbing of the poor birds nests” (13, 16), but none of the imaginative power of the early “spots of time” of The Prelude. Instead there is that quiet love of nature that found its most compelling voice in his poetry: “I had plenty of leisure but it was the leisure of solitude for my Sundays were demanded to be spent in the fields at horse or cow tending my whole summer was one days employment as it were in the fields I grew so much into the quiet love of nature’s preserves” (Clare 12). The poignant account of this timid Northamptonshire agricultural worker’s struggle to find his voice as a poet and the fleeting fame and prosperity he enjoyed after the publication of his first volume, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), is a revealing document in the social and literary history of the early nineteenth century. Indeed, in Clare’s autobiography, the romantic and Faustian sublime is translated into the mental struggles of the talented poor: “I always had a thirst after knowledge in everything & by that restless desire have only acquired a very superficial knowledge of many things that serves no other purpose than to make me feel my real ignorance” (54). The Memoirs of Mary Robinson (1801), completed after her death and published by her daughter, are also a telling piece of social history as well as a rather disingenuous attempt at damage control on the author’s part for her scandalous life. Her striking physical beauty as a young woman made the young actress the unremitting object of male attention. Pressured into marriage at the age of fifteen by a mother who had herself been abandoned by her husband for his mistress, she in turn discovered that her husband was a wastrel who “indulged in the lowest and most common intrigues” (81). Despite his infidelities, she followed him into debtor’s prison but later entered into a series of high-profile affairs including one (after negotiations about how much she would be paid) with the Prince of Wales, who had become enamored of her during her performance of the role of Shakespeare’s Perdita. In pleading her resistance to the various attempts on her virtue, she protests too much her “chastity inviolate” (84). The attention she devotes to her pursuit by prominent men makes her narrative the type of the celebrity memoir: “Among the list I was addressed with proposals of a libertine nature by a royal Duke, a lofty Marquis, and a City Merchant of considerable fortune” (99). One of the defensive strategies of this sensational vita is to frame it from the outset with the sentimental morality of a “naturally … pensive and melancholy character” and “a too acute sensibility” (31, 21). However, it becomes clear that the “sensible” young woman knew how to use male desire for her own purposes; this fact may explain her negative perception of her own gender, which also makes Mary Robinson a problematic case for feminist reclamation: “Indeed I have almost uniformly found my own sex my most inveterate enemies; I have experienced little kindness from them; though my bosom has often ached with the pang inflicted by their envy, slander, and malevolence” (82). De Quincey’s uneven autobiographical œuvre is the most extensive and multifaceted in nineteenth-century England and in some of the experimental passages in the last part of his

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Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821–56) and the Suspiria de Profundis (1845) where language approaches the condition of music, probably also the most brilliant. The closest he came to writing a full-scale retrospective autobiography was in the opium memoir that brought him instant notoriety, but if this is put in its proper place with the various autobiographical sketches he published in magazines in the decades following the first appearance of his Confessions, the larger chronological shape of his life is apparent. Because of his mannered, allusive, and maddeningly digressive style, De Quincey is something of an acquired taste. In his awareness of the mysterious depths of the individual mind in which all of our past experience is potentially and instantly available as in a theater and of the importance of dreams and of traumatic childhood experiences, he is clearly a forerunner of psychoanalysis. Although his poetic sense of the enigmas of consciousness is closer to German romanticism than it is to Freud, his concept of the human brain as a palimpsest (Suspiria) anticipates Freud’s view of the subconscious, and the allegorical tropes of the Ladies of Sorrow and the Dark Interpreter (Suspiria) look ahead to Jung’s archetypal mapping of the psyche. In other ways too De Quincey the autobiographer is ahead of his time: his disconcerting sense of the radical contingency and opacity of human experience has a postmodern touch (“every intricate and untried path in life, where it was from the first a matter of arbitrary choice to enter upon it or avoid it, is effectually a path through a vast Hercynian forest, unexplored and unmapped, where each several turn in your advance leaves you open to new anticipations of what is next to be expected, and consequently open to altered valuations of all that has been traversed”); his oppressive awareness of “the burden of the Incommunicable” (Confessions 314, 315) brings us to the threshold of Kafka; and the phantasmagoria of his opium nightmares anticipates the surrealism of the early twentieth century. Both versions of De Quincey’s most famous work (the first book publication in 1822, and the considerably extended redaction that appeared over three decades later) revolve about what he characterized as the “great central sun of opium” (Confessions 418) that dominated his life for over half a century. The title harks back to both Augustine and Rousseau, for De Quincey is praising opium (confessio as laudatio) as much as he is confessing the character flaw that is his addiction. Indeed, in the second section in his role as “the Pope” of “the true church on the subject of opium” (Confessions 384), he writes a hymn to the pleasures of this philosopher’s drug that holds “the keys of Paradise” (Confessions 396). It is only in the visionary prose of the final and shortest section, “The Pains of Opium,” that the author presents the poetically elaborated dreams that have become identified with the work as a whole. In the larger developmental scheme that underlies De Quincey’s conception of his autobiography, “those … dreamsceneries … were in reality the true objects — first and last — contemplated in these Confessions,” but the sufferings of his early years chronicled in the long first part are identified as “the entire substratum” of his opium nightmares (Confessions 233). De Quincey is referring to the period after he ran away from Manchester Grammar School at the age of seventeen, particularly to the nadir of his “suffering in the streets of London” (Confessions 232) as a penniless vagabond, when he was befriended by the teenage prostitute, Ann of Oxford Street, whose loss haunts his imagination. But as is evident in the autobiographical sketches that appeared after the first publication of his Confessions, the suffering is inherent in a childhood haunted by loss — the deaths of his father and two sisters and the separation

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from his mother when he was sent away to boarding school. The “causal connexion” between early suffering and drug addiction is stressed again at the beginning of Part 3, where opium is identified as “the one sole agent equal to the task of tranquillising the miseries left behind by … youthful privations” (Confessions, 412–3). For De Quincey, finally, opium is not only a way of soothing that suffering, but a mode of self-understanding and an imaginative transposition of that suffering into a higher key, of spiritualizing and infinitizing it by way of the dizzying expansions of space and time in the culminating opium nightmares. In these psychedelic pages, we touch the experimental limit of romantic autobiography. If some of the writers discussed in the preceding survey produced major autobiographies — Chateaubriand, Sand, Stendhal, Alfieri, De Quincey — clearly the leading and normative instances of romantic autobiography are those written by the three major and most influential authors of their respective ages and literatures: Rousseau’s Confessions, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit. These writers accomplished the definitive self-inscription of a highly developed individuality in a genre revitalized to capitalize on the full display of that individuality, particularly during the period of childhood and youth. In their autobiographies, they exemplify Friedrich Schlegel’s dictum that the modern poet must create his works from within himself (1: 174). In different and distinctive ways, they produce confessional narratives that offer a developmental account and interpretation of how their individual characters and identities were formed, and they do so by transforming life into literature in an artful dialectic of reality and imagination, or, to invoke Goethe’s title, of “poetry” and “truth.” The developmental focus and imaginative dimension of their life narratives also aligns these with the genre of the Bildungsroman, whose literary prototype is part one of Rousseau’s Confessions. Rousseau turned to autobiography in the fifth decade of his life after his success as the leading political and educational thinker of the French Enlightenment had brought him unprecedented fame but also embroiled him in bitter controversies. To counter what had begun to loom in his (increasingly paranoid) imagination as the slanderous legend of “Jean-Jacques” circulated by his enemies, he turned in the final phase of his life to autobiography to give an account of himself and his motives. His defensive strategy is evident from the opening paragraph of his Confessions (written 1766–70), where he raises the rhetorical ante by challenging not only the reader but God to judge him only after having read his book, through the protracted forensic debates of his Dialogues (written 1772–76), where he seeks to restore his reputation in the face of the perceived failure of his Confessions to do so to — finally — the plaintive lyricism of the Reveries on which he worked during the last two years of his life and in which he claims to write only for himself even as he inscribes his unnamed and ubiquitous enemies in the defensive system of his resentment. While the self-justifying motive of Rousseau’s Confessions is prominent from its strident opening to its close with the episode of a failed public reading of them, his autobiography served other needs as well. One of these was clearly to relive the happy times of his early years before he became the unhappy celebrity. Through a poetic cultivation of powerfully affecting memories, he sought to dwell in a romanticized past, as in the idyllic setting of his stay in the country with Mme de Warens at Charmettes (book 6). But Rousseau also brought to his autobiography the full burden of the thinker, and thus perhaps even more important than his defensive and escapist motives are the philosophical: Rousseau aimed at an unprecedented disclosure of what it means

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to be a human being. He wanted to lay bare his own humanity in a way that no writer before him — not even Montaigne — had ever done. The aim of his literary and psychological selfexposure, including all the intimate and even sordid details (especially of early sexual experiences), is a new epistemology of the inner self. Indeed, Rousseau’s attentiveness in the opening books to the formative function of childhood experiences and their causal connection to our adult identities makes him as it were the first psychoanalyst. If Augustine’s religious confession, addressed to God, embodies a typological pattern of sin and conversion that can serve as model for all Christians, Rousseau’s secular confession, addressed to his fellow humans, is a psychological laying bare of the complexities of human personality and the individual self for their own sake. Despite Rousseau’s rhetorical insistence on his singularity, his confessional model thus has a representative human purpose and value. While his philosophical motive is not as prominent as the defensive one, Rousseau’s draft Neuchâtel preface (1764) contrasting Montaigne’s profile with his full-face self-portrait is a clear statement of it, and it surfaces in book 10 of The Confessions, where he states that his aim was to write a work where “at least for once the world might see a man as he was within” (608).15 Among the most powerful and vivid episodes in his Confessions are the depiction of his childhood and early years including the two spankings of book 1 — the first at the hand of Miss Lambercier introduces him to the world of sexuality, the other exposes him to the experience of injustice that is a central concern of the adult philosopher — the account of his disastrous apprenticeship as an engraver, the description of running away from Geneva at sixteen, and the narration of his subsequent career of vagabondage (from his stay at the hospice for catechumens in Turin, where he converted to Catholicism, to his settling in for the better part of a decade with Mme de Warens). The young Rousseau’s complex romantic relationship with her — soul sister, adoptive mother, and finally and most problematically, mistress — is the emotional center of Part 1, which ends with his departure for Paris to make his fortune with the pipe dream of a new system of musical notation. The second part of his autobiography has its vivid and dramatic sequences as well, especially the account of his disastrous stay in Venice (including his falling out with the ignorant French ambassador and his charming intrigue with the young courtesan Giulietta) and later the protracted if unconsummated throes of love with the young countess Sophie d’Houdetot, but these bright spots are lost more and more in the dark and labyrinthine passages of his mounting persecution mania. The formative importance of childhood experiences and the love of nature that are significant elements in Rousseau’s Confessions become intensely powerful concerns in Wordsworth’s portrayal in The Prelude of the life of his imagination as a boy and young man. Unlike Rousseau and Goethe, who wrote their autobiographies in their later years when their reputations were established, Wordsworth began writing his in his late twenties when, except to a few early admirers like Coleridge and De Quincey, his name was unknown. Like De Quincey, he wrote more than one version of his autobiography; indeed The Prelude is a process of protracted revision from the origins of the poem in the two-part version of 1798–99 to its expansion to five books in 1804, to the thirteen-book version of 1805, to a further series of revision resulting in the fourteen-book version that was published after his death. However, as a narrative autobiography, the 1805 text is preferable as being the fullest, freshest, and most authentic rendering of the poet’s life and world-view at the height of his poetic powers. The

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1799 version, which corresponds roughly to the first two books of the longer version(s), is the autobiography of his childhood (without any account of his student years at Cambridge, his foot journey to the Alps, or his experiences in France during the Revolution), and the post-1805 revisions frequently show attenuations of his religious and political sentiments in the direction of growing orthodoxy and conservatism. When Wordsworth was finishing the 1805 Prelude, he wrote with a real sense of embarrassment — and an odd case of amnesia with respect to Rousseau — that “it will not be much less than 9,000 lines … an alarming length! and a thing unprecedented in Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself” (534). Wordsworth never published what turned out to be his most important work in his lifetime, and his decision to defer the appearance of The Prelude until after his death is the result of a Catch-22: to use his favorite trope, The Prelude was meant to be the portico or antechamber to the gothic cathedral of his long-planned but never-completed philosophical poem, The Recluse. In Wordsworth’s view, only the completion of that master work would justify the publication of the poem on the growth of his mind (as he liked to call The Prelude), but since The Recluse was never completed, the introductory poem to it could not be put forward either. That Wordsworth’s best work was kept from the public is surely the greatest irony of the great romantic poet’s anticlimactic career. The romantic sublime of Wordsworth’s script for his life derives from the fact that it is typological of the history of “higher minds” and “the glorious faculty / [they] bear with them as their own” (13.88–9). These words describe the imagination whose course The Prelude has traced as “the moving soul” (13.171) of the poem like that of a river. In the teleological overview of the final book that comes in the wake of the visionary Mount Snowdon spot of time, the stream of the poet’s life has been traced from the “blind cavern” of its birth to the “feeling of life endless … infinity and God” (13.174–84) which the autobiographical overview of its progress inspires. In Wordsworth’s epic song of his own self, autobiography merges into theodicy by way of a celebration of the divine energies latent in human consciousness, particularly during the most intense moments of childhood experience. Perhaps no autobiographer before or after Wordsworth could write with such unabashed enthusiasm and naive dignity about his own assurance of spiritual election: “Of genius, power, / Creation, and divinity itself, / I have been speaking, for my theme has been/ What passed within me” (3.171–4). In the episodes of The Prelude dealing with his childhood, his sense of his election comes through the mysterious action of a tutelary nature whose nodal points are the famous “spots of time.” For the boy whose mother died shortly before his eighth birthday and who lost his father a few years later, nature becomes a parent figure who occasionally rewards (the skating “spot”) but mostly punishes him through the “discipline” of “both pain and fear” (1.439–40). Many of the most vivid and numinous early experiences — the stolen boat, the drowned man of Esthwaite Lake, the gibbet-mast of Penrith beacon, the wait for the horses to take him and his brothers home from school for the Christmas break — are traumatic episodes of “visionary dreariness” (11.310) that have an edge of gothic terror as well as the burden of the psychoanalytic family romance. Paradoxically, in such solitary moments of preternatural childhood anxiety, Wordsworth locates the sources of his psychic strength as an adult and that he identifies as “the base / On which [his] greatness stands” (11.330–1). As M. H. Abrams has emphasized, The Prelude is also a romantic version of the Augustini-

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an pattern of a spiritual crisis and its resolution (Abrams 71–140); in Wordsworth’s case, the imaginative power located “in simple childhood” (432) is put to sleep during the distracting round of his undergraduate career at Cambridge and finds its deepest challenge and threat in the promise and failure of the French Revolution, both of which Wordsworth observed first-hand in France. To the former, the challenge, Wordsworth responded with every fiber of his being, as the promise of a renovation of human nature itself through the ideals informing the early stages of the Revolution. To the latter, the failure of the Revolution in the bloodbath of the terror, he responded with a prolonged crisis of conscience and a nervous prostration from which only the healing mercies of his sister Dorothy and a renewed love of nature could cure him. The upshot of Wordsworth’s spiritual crisis at the failure of the Revolution is not that the love of nature leads to the love of man (the tendentious argument of book 8), but to the emotional tautology that the love of nature leads to the love of nature. For the mature author of the 1805 Prelude, fortified by the visionary promise of the crossing of the Alps and the Mount Snowdon spots of time (books 6 and 13), the apocalypse of the imagination and not the radical politics of revolution is the legitimate basis for any hopes for a higher or reborn humanity. This insight is the high romantic credo of the transcendentalizing conclusion of Wordsworth’s autobiography, where the poet in 1805 maintains his faith that “the mind of man becomes / A thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On which he dwells,” even as his age relapses into “old idolatry” (13.446–8), and “to ignominy and shame … nations sink together” (13.434–5) under the imperial scepter of Napoleon. Wordsworth’s vatic stress on the instrumental role of imagination is very different from Rousseau’s defensive circumscribing role of that faculty in his Confessions. Despite the obvious play of romantic revery and the indulgence in (autoerotic) fantasy in Rousseau’s life and his autobiographical writings, he assigns the imagination only a subsidiary role as a filler for the gaps of memory in his Confessions: “If I happen to have used some immaterial embellishment, this was never done save to fill a void caused by my defective memory” (4).16 However, what was for Rousseau the moralist a giving in to temptation — the pleasures of the imagination — was for Goethe, as the element of “poetry” or Dichtung signalled in the title of his autobiography, central to the presentation of his life. Goethe poetically elevates his experiences to a symbolic and representative level according to which, to invoke a remark of his (17 February 1830), he incorporated no trait that was not experienced, but none in the manner in which it was experienced (Eckermann 1:368). For both the visionary Wordsworth and the cosmopolitan Goethe, then, the imagination serves a normative function in their autobiographies, albeit in very different ways. If the older Goethe’s urbanity differs from Wordsworth’s egotistically sublime selfconcentration, it also differs radically from Rousseau’s defensive polarization of his self against his world. Goethe’s historicizing, objectivizing, and world-embracing autobiography unfolds his development as a progressive imbrication in life’s richness and circumstantiality. Indeed, although Goethe never openly criticizes the author of the Confessions, whom he venerated in his youth, in many ways his Poetry and Truth can be seen as a conscious reaction in the early nineteenth century (cf. George Sand) against the influential confessional mode of Rousseau. If Rousseau polemically puts himself at odds with a culture increasingly perceived as corrupt, the older Goethe sees a relationship of mutuality and complementarity between the self and its world

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in his imaginative reconstruction of the development of his (richly informed) personality. For Wordsworth too such a dynamic relationship was an imaginative ideal — “A balance, an ennobling interchange/ Of action from within and from without” (12.376–7) — but in Poetry and Truth it is a reality represented with an extraordinary wealth of biographical and historical specificity. Like Rousseau and Wordsworth, and despite the historical contextualization of his experience, Goethe is the type of the modern subjective writer whose works come out of the matrix of his own experience. Thus in a famous phrase from book 7 of Poetry and Truth, he describes all of his writings as “fragments of a great confession,” which his autobiography is “a bold attempt to render complete” (9: 283).17 Goethe approached this task like a research project, studying the history of Frankfurt and the Holy Roman Empire and making the autobiography a collaborative project by drawing on the recollections of friends and colleagues, including Bettina von Arnim’s conversations with Goethe’s mother about his childhood. By the time he set to work at the age of sixty, Goethe was well positioned to write his own life: he had already translated Cellini’s autobiography and written biographical sketches of the art historian Winckelmann and the painter Hackert. The composition of the first three parts proceeded rapidly (they were in print by 1814); the fourth and final part which concludes with his decision to accept the offer of the Duke of Weimar to go to his court was edited and published by his literary executors after his death in 1832. Even though contrary to his original scheme the narrative of Poetry and Truth only takes Goethe to his mid-twenties, he never abandoned the hope of completing his autobiography so as to encompass his entire life. Though he fell short of his goal, his massive Italienische Reise (1816–17; Italian journey) — a composite of letters, journals, and travelogue — and his memoirs of the abortive allied invasion of France in 1792 (Campagne in Frankreich) and the French siege of Mainz in 1793 (Die Belagerung von Mainz), both published in 1822, were written as parts of his larger autobiographical project, “From My Life.” Goethe’s decision to write his own biography is also a function of his growing awareness of the radical historicity of his life and his age. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had made it clear to him that the world in which he had come of age had gone the way of the Holy Roman empire whose antiquated coronation ceremonies he had witnessed as an adolescent in Frankfurt and which he recreated at length in book 5 of Poetry and Truth. Goethe’s historicizing perception of the genre is formulated in his preface where he asserts that the chief task of biography is to show the humans in their temporal relations, and that “each one of us, born only ten years sooner or later, would have become a very different person as far as his cultural development and his impact on others are concerned” (9: 9).18 Like no autobiographer before or since, Goethe develops the temporal and historical context of his life and his times with an epic breadth and wealth of detail including the life of the Goethe family in the eighteenth-century Frankfurt of his childhood (with the emotional stresses that line son, mother, and sister up against a touchy and autocratic father and reach a crisis point during the French occupation of the city during the Seven Years War and the quartering of the king’s lieutenant in the Goethe house); the network of his relations with a host of mentors and friends like Jung, Herder, Behrisch, and Lavater; the passionate romantic relationships of his adolescence and twenties (Gretchen, Friederike, Lili); the student experiences at Leipzig and Strasbourg; his professional

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beginnings as a desultory lawyer in Frankfurt; and his first and spectacular successes as the young author of Götz von Berlichingen and Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther). Such a catalogue can only suggest the range but not the poetic richness and intellectual depth, the broad humor, naive joie de vivre, and the profound and subtle ironies as well as the clarified wisdom of this supreme achievement of modern European autobiography. Like Rousseau and Wordsworth, Goethe is very much concerned with tracing the mysterious patterns of individual development or Bildung from childhood to youth. Like Wordsworth who wrote in The Prelude of childhood as a “fair seed-time” (1.305), Goethe was attracted to a biological model of development. Indeed, his original plan, as he wrote in a draft preface to Part III (Aus meinem Leben 2: 881–2), was to model his own development on the explicit analogy of the metamorphosis of plants. While this rigid scheme was never carried out, an organic conception of individual development informs his life narrative. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of Poetry and Truth is how the “organistic, naturalistic notions … of his own formation” (Weintraub 365) run up against the revolutionary upheavals of his age, which vitiate such notions of organic growth. That is, the process of a slow and regular development that defines Goethe’s view of his youth is disrupted or aborted by the forces of modern history. As Goethe pointed out in book 11, there are few biographers who can show a calm and steady progress of the individual; our lives are “an incomprehensible compound of freedom and necessity” (Goethe 9: 478).19 Perhaps the concept of “the demonic” that he introduces in the last part of his autobiography is an attempt to provide some explanation for this world of chaos and disruption by way of a mysterious force in nature that manifests itself in the human sphere in extraordinary individuals like Napoleon, who are capable of wielding an uncanny influence over others. This mysterious force which calls into question and problematizes the developmental paradigm of Poetry and Truth may be Goethe’s poetic way of trying to account for the chaos of contemporary history. The narrative of his youth from the perspective of his later years contains as it were the patterns of both evolutionary development and revolutionary change and as such registers a greater conflict or dialectic, not only of romantic autobiography, but also of the new century.

Notes 1. “Wir lieben nur das Individuelle; daher die große Freude an Porträten, Bekenntnissen, Memoiren, Briefen, und Anekdoten abgeschiedener selbst unbedeutender Menschen” (Goethe 10: 536). 2. “Nous appelons autobiographie le récit rétrospectif en prose que quelqu’un fait de sa propre existence, quand il met l’accent principal sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” (Lejeune 14). 3. “la transformation de la notion de personne” (Lejeune 64); “Rousseau n’a donc pas ‘inventé’ le genre: mais il en a réalisé d’un seul coup presque toutes les virtualités” (Lejeune 65). 4. “à dire toute la vérité” (Chateaubriand 1: x); “l’épopée de mon temps” (Chateaubriand 1: xiii). 5. “Si telle partie de ce travail m’a plus attaché que telle autre, c’est ce qui regarde ma jeunesse, le coin le plus ignoré de ma vie” (Chateaubriand 1: 2). 6. “l’idéal objet de mes désirs” (Chateaubriand 1: 95); “C’est dans les bois de Combourg que je suis devenu ce que je suis, que j’ai commencé à sentir la première atteinte de cet ennui que j’ai traîné toute ma vie, de cette tristesse qui a fait mon tourment et ma félicité” (Chateaubriand 1: 105).

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7. “J’ai toujours trouvé qu’il était de mauvais goût non seulement de parler beaucoup de soi, mais encore de s’en entretenir longtemps avec soi-même” (Sand 7); “pour parler la langue de mon temps” (Sand 9). 8. “âme inspirée” (Sand 11); “histoire intime” (Sand 308); “individualité est inscrite dans le livre universel” (Sand 307); “Il faut donc que j’embrasse une période d’environ cent ans pour raconter quarante ans de ma vie” (Sand 308). 9. “Je vais avoir cinquante ans, il serait bien temps de me connaître. Qu’ai-je été, que suis-je, en vérité je serais bien embarrassé de le dire” (Stendhal 38); “Je voulais couvrir ma mère de baisers et qu’il n’y eût pas de vêtements … J’abhorrais mon père quand il venait interrompre nos baisers” (Stendhal 60). 10. “Quoi! le passage du Saint-Bernard n’est-ce que ça?” (Stendhal 419); “Comment peindre le bonheur fou?” (Stendhal 428). 11. “Die Romantik ging davon aus, daß das Leben der eigentliche Roman sei, forderte allerdings seine romantische Aufhebung zur Poesie, so daß hier auch in einem noch so weiten Sinne von Autobiographie keine Rede mehr sein kann” (Müller 343–4). 12. “Io perciò ingenuamente confesso, che allo stendere la mia propria vita inducevami, misto forse ad alcune altre ragioni, ma vie più gagliardo d’ogni altra, l’amore di me medesimo” (Alfieri 43); “contribuir potranno allo studi dell’uomo in genere; della qual pianta non possiamo mai individuare meglio i segreti che osservando ciascuno sé stesso” (Alfieri 45). 13. “Vedete, sentite; Alfieri è il mio nome; Italiano e non Francese … e vogliamo passare, e passeremo per Dio” (Alfieri 364). 14. “colui ch’io riputava impudente per la lunga consuetudine d’incrudelire” (Pellico 180–1). 15. “Afin qu’au moins une fois on pût voir un homme tel qu’il était dedans” (Rousseau 608). 16. “Et s’il m’est arrivé d’employer quelque ornement indifférent, ce n’a jamais été que pour remplir un vide occasionné par mon défaut de mémoire” (Rousseau 4). 17. “Bruchstücke einer großen Konfession, welche vollständig zu machen dieses Büchlein ein gewagter Versuch ist” (Goethe 9: 283). 18. “Ein jeder, nur zehn Jahre früher oder später geboren, dürfte, was seine eigene Bildung und die Wirkung nach außen betrifft, ein ganz anderer geworden sein” (Goethe 9: 9). 19. “auf eine unbegreifliche Weise aus Freiheit und Notwendigkeit zusammengesetzt” (Goethe 9: 478).

References Alfieri, Vittorio. 1962. Opere. Ed. Luigi Fasso. Vol. 1: Vita Rime e Satire. Torino: Unione Tipographico-Editrice Torinese. Abrams, M. H. 1971. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton. Arnim, Bettina von. 1986. Werke. Ed. Heinz Härtl. Vol. 1 Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. Vol. 2 Die Günderode. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. Bäumer, Konstanze, and Hartwig Schulz. 1995. Bettina von Arnim. Stuttgart: Metzler. Blackwell, Jeannine, and Susanne Zantop. 1990. Bitter Healing: German Women Writers from 1700 to 1830: An Anthology. Lincoln: U Nebraska P. Bräker, Ulrich. 1965. Lebensgeschichte und natürliche Ebentheuer des armen Mannes in Tockenburg von ihm selbst erzählt. Ed. Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli. München: Winkler. Chateaubriand, François René de. 1951. Mémoires d’outre tombe. Eds. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Clare, John. 1951. The Autobiography 1793–1824. The Prose Works of John Clare. Eds. J. W. and Anne Tibble. London: Routledge. De Quincey, Thomas. 1897. Collected Writings. Ed. David Masson. Vol. 3 Confessions of an English OpiumEater. (1856 edition). Vol. 13 Suspiria de Profundis. London: Black. Eckermann, Johann Peter. 1945. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1823–32. 2 vols. Basel: Birkhäuser.



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Folkenflik, Robert. 1993. “The Institution of Autobiography.” The Culture of Autobiography:Constructions of SelfRepresentation. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. Stanford: Stanford UP. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1981. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe. Vol. 9 Autobiographische Schriften I. Ed. Lieselotte Blumenthal; Vol. 10 Autobiographische Schriften II. Ed. Lieselotte Blumenthal und Waltarud Loos. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. ———. 1970. Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. 2 vols. Ed. Siegfried Scheibe. Berlin: Akademie Verlag,. Haydon, Robert Benjamin. 1950. The Autobiography and Journals. Ed. Malcolm Elwin. London: Macdonald. Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich. 1968. Heinrich Stillings Jugend, Junglingsjahre, Wanderschaft und Häusliches Leben. Stuttgart: Reclam. ———. Lebensgeschichte. Ed. Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli. München: Winkler-Verlag. Lejeune, Philippe. 1971. L’Autobiographie en France. Paris: Colin. Moritz, Karl Philipp. 1971. Anton Reiser: Ein psycholog. Ed. Klaus Detlef Müller. München: Winkler. Müller, Klaus-Detlef. 1976. Autobiographie und Roman: Studien zur literarischen Autobiographie der Goethezeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Olney, James. 1972. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP. ———. 1980. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton UP. Pellico, Silvio. 1962. Le Mie Prigioni. Ed. Giuseppe Morpurgo. 8th ed. Verona: Mondadori. Porter, Roger H. “‘ in me the solitary sublimity’: Posturing and the Collapse of the Romantic Will in Benjamin Robert Haydon.” The Culture of Autobiography. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. Stanford: Stanford UP. 168–87. Robinson, Mary. 1994. Perdita, The Memoirs of Mary Robinson. Ed. J. M. Levy. London: Owen. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1980. Les Confessions. Ed. Jacques Voisine. Paris: Garnier. Sand, George [Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin Dudevant]. 1970–71. Œuvres autobiographiques. 2 vols. Ed. Georges Lubin. Paris: Gallimard. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1969. “Gespräch über die Poesie.” Athenaeum: Eine Zeitschrift. 3 vols. Ed. Curt Grützmacher. München: Rohwolts. 3.1: 58–128; 3.2: 169–87. Seume, Johann Gottfried. 1977. Seumes Werke. Eds. Anneliese and Karl-Heinz Klingenberg. Vol. 1 Mein Leben. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. Starobinski, Jean. 1971. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence et l’obstacle, suivi de sept essais sur Rousseau. Paris: Gallimard. Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle]. 1955. Œuvres intimes [de] Stendhal [pseud.]. Ed. Henri Martineau. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1955. Vie de Henry Brulard. Ed. Henri Martineau. Paris: Gallimard. Weintraub, Karl J. 1978. The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. Chicago: U Chicago P. Wordsworth, William. 1979. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton.



Educating for Women’s Future Thinking New Forms CAROL STRAUSS SOTIROPOULOS

MARGARET R. HIGONNET

Northern Michigan University

University of Connecticut

“I feel, that I am neither a philosopher, nor a heroine — but a woman to whom education has given a sexual character.” Mary Hays, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney

For the historian of feminism, the student of romantic individualism, and the explorer in the hybrid realm of non-fiction genres, tracts on women’s education in the late eighteenth century offer a rich if rocky terrain for comparative analysis. Grounded in a debate over the nature of woman and the gendered meaning of individualism, arguments about women’s upbringing convey their often contradictory views through their choice of prose form and their rhetorical strategies such as paradox or dialogue. Curiously enough, the feminine metaphors mobilized to lend force to particular arguments can be found marshaled in the camp of opponents as well. Nonfiction and fiction (especially the female Bildungsroman) were closely linked as vehicles for this discussion, where narratives often take the place of argument. Thus some readers have wondered whether Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) is a plotless novel containing many stories about miseducation and conversations about proper education, or rather an educational treatise enlivened by exemplary narratives, like Rousseau’s Emile, published the same year. The energetic development of eighteenth-century thought on this topic explains how Emma Courtney, the emancipated heroine of Mary Hays’s 1796 novel, might define education in terms that are prophetic of twentieth-century theories about the social production of gender (Hays 117). These two early novels of education differ significantly, however, from the non-fiction written in the critical romantic period, which was more focused on marriage and maternity as a woman’s goals and obstacles in her search for education. The narratives implied by educational treatises do not as a rule stop at marriage. Those who advocated improvements in women’s education found voice not only through novels but through narratives of Bildung incorporated into a wide array of nonfictional forms: essays, editorials, proposals, reports, treatises, manifestos, lecture notes, letters, and colloquies. Our project is unified, therefore, by its thematic and narrative stress on Bildung, rather than by a single non-fiction genre. The controversial nature of the subject, however, does generate a number of shared rhetorical forms and strategies. This panoply of rhetorical weapons was adapted to the specific relationships between writers and their audiences, as well as to the tensions and contradictions of the political struggle for educational “emancipation,” in a period when the pursuit of liberty helped to define romanticism.

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The French Revolution was a critical turning point in the development of this debate about women’s education. One side built upon the pedagogic contributions of John Locke to express the emancipatory expectations of the Revolution. Enlightened notions of universal reason fostered women’s hopes, as did theories touting the economic as well as social benefits of an educated citizenry. These theories encouraged men and women alike to intervene in the political and social upheavals of the romantic period to advocate better education for girls. Yet many otherwise radical thinkers were reluctant to share the public sphere with women. This reluctance found support in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s insistence on gender differences in his educational treatise Emile as well as in growing claims about women’s incapacities. As a result, the frame within which the romantic discussion of women’s education took place can be understood broadly not only as a response to Locke and Rousseau, but as a debate between their views of women’s abilities and social roles. Locke’s widely translated Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Some Thoughts on Education (1693) had such a long-lasting impact that manuals written a century later — Maria and Richard Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798), for example — continued to popularize his thoughts on associationism, play, and child development. Ivan Betskoi, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Catherine Macaulay, and Mary Wollstonecraft all drew on Locke’s belief in the power of education to form the individual: “Of all the Men we meet with, Nine Parts of Ten are what they are, Good or Evil, useful or not, by their Education” (Locke, Education 20). Remembered today for his concept of the tabula rasa, Locke was cited by progressive romantic pedagogues, because he perceived no gender differences among minds, recommending the same education for both sexes: “I acknowledge no difference of sex in your mind relating to truth, virtue and obedience” (Locke, Correspondence 102). Romantic educationists capitalized on an enlightenment heritage that postulated a thirst for encyclopedic knowledge, a belief in reason as the instrument of scientific discovery, and the rise of new print vehicles that could develop middle-class literacy and political dialogue. Like late eighteenth-century political reformers, educational reformers grounded their proposals in Locke’s and Rousseau’s theories of a civil society built on a social contract with the consent of an educated citizenry. Equality of education, it was thought, would open careers to those who demonstrated their individual merits. This line of thought fostered educational advances for women, until conservative thinkers attacked the desirability of any female individualism. In the period leading up to the French Revolution, the impetus for reform was fostered by a revival of charity schooling in Germany (La Vopa 9), as well as by state interests there and elsewhere in developing more skilled workers. As James Melton has argued, absolutist reformers in Prussia and Austria shared a conviction that “the state, if it was to master social, economic, and cultural change,” must transfer coercion “from outside to inside the individual” (Melton xix). Such a shift in social discipline, it was held, could be accomplished through schooling. Educational reform, including fresh opportunities for girls, was thus understood as a desirable alternative to revolutionary rupture. The issue possessed national importance: a broadly based educational system, many hoped, would guarantee the stability of a political system. When Frederick II of Prussia in 1763 decreed schools for children up to the age of thirteen, he aimed to mitigate Lutheran control over schooling, to encourage cottage industry and small businesses, and to develop a better educated

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class of noncommissioned officers for his army. Similarly, Maria Theresa, who proclaimed compulsory schooling in her General School Ordinance (Allgemeine Schulordnung) of 1774, affirmed in her imperial preamble, “We have thus taken note that the education of the youth of both sexes, as the most important foundation of the true happiness of nations, demands a closer examination” (3: 491).1 Likewise the revolutionary focus on education in France was prepared over several decades. Starting in the 1750s and 1760s, French philosophes attacked clerical instruction, especially in Jesuit schools, and campaigned instead for a patriotic education that would redefine the relationship between state and society (see Barnard 29). Turgot, Contrôleur Général des Finances, advocated universal popular education. Enlightened thinkers believed the deprivation of education constituted mental bondage, a rhetorical legacy that revolutionary thinkers like Mirabeau would draw on. Yet the progressive vision of the new citizen led neither to a substantial advance in rights for women nor to significant improvement in their education. One of the stinging ironies of the French Revolution and its reverberations across Europe lies in the setback of the movement for equal rights and education. Instead, in states that undertook reform in this period, the duties and obligations of citizens were articulated along strictly divided gender lines. The tolerance of noblewomen’s learnedness that had characterized Renaissance and seventeenth-century court culture lost currency among Enlightened thinkers, who turned instead to an increasingly gendered view of women’s functions and character that stressed her domesticity. The long history of advocacy for women’s education by Poullain de la Barre (1671, 1673), Bathsua Makin (1673), Mary Astell (1694), Dorothea Leporin (1742), and others disappeared from view. It is this ironic split in romantic thought, when it comes to gender, that is the focus of our essay. In tension with the Lockean assumption that the mind had no sex, as Londa Schiebinger and Thomas Laqueur have noted, was a growing interest among eighteenth-century scientists in defining differences between the sexes. From the 1750s through the 1790s anatomists called for “a finer delineation” of physiological characteristics, drawing, for example, on skeletons deformed by corsets, in the hope that “sexual differences — even in the mind — could be weighed and measured” (Schiebinger 189, 215). This scientific movement lent authority to the notion of gendered minds and fueled a “wide range of apparently unrelated political agendas” (Laqueur 207). Much of the “scientific” writing on the duality of the sexes devolved into a catalogue of familiar polarities between mind and heart, reason and emotion, active generation and passive receptivity. It was thought that women saw the aesthetic, while men saw the moral; that women obeyed feeling rather than conscience, while men understood justice, a prerequisite for their role in the public sphere; or (in a characteristic inconsistency) that women saw the moral, while men were concerned with the political. These presumed gender differences were reinforced by a late eighteenth-century shift from a stratified to a functionally differentiated society and the emergence of belief in the separation of private morality from public politics (see Rasch 24–5). From mid-century, apparent scientific support for the essentialist notion that the female mind tends to observation but not to abstract reasoning gave ammunition to social and political thinkers for limiting women’s education. Romantic theories of education emphasized individual accomplishment, growth, and self-

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fulfillment. Yet some writers saw women not as individuals who could participate directly in the public sphere, but as subordinate to the family, in a traditionalist, corporate structure of relationships that did not require their education. In the view of the philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, who believed women forgot whatever they were taught at school, “the wellbeing of the state depends on the home life…. The female sex has a special calling in the state” (97; see 629).2 While romantic concepts of individual growth and self-fulfillment would inspire female revolutionaries and girls’ schools, paradoxically, many male romantic thinkers feared the socially destabilizing impact of female individualism. The educational theorist who came to represent this emphasis on sexual difference for later romantic thinkers and revolutionary politicians was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Locke, Rousseau exerted an influence that crossed all national boundaries to shape views on women’s education (see Stock 106–9; Graham 127–39). At first, his Émile (1762) seems to view women as equal in mental abilities to men: “In everything not connected with sex, woman is man. She has the same organs, the same needs, the same faculties” (Rousseau, Bloom 357).3 In behavior and mental composition, however, he believes that they are not comparable: “A perfect woman and a perfect man ought not to resemble each other in mind any more than in looks” (358).4 A woman’s “proper purpose” (362)5 is to produce children; she is naturally subordinate: “woman is made specially to please man … and to be subjugated” (358).6 While Rousseau denies that woman “ought to be raised in ignorance of everything and limited to the housekeeping functions alone” (364),7 he holds that her primary concern should be her moral reputation. He attacks the “civil promiscuity” described by Plato that “confounds the two sexes in the same employments” (363).8 His conclusion reverberated throughout the rest of the century: “Once it is demonstrated that man and woman are not and ought not to be constituted in the same way in either character or temperament, it follows that they ought not to have the same education” (363).9 Through his distinction between the educations appropriate for Émile and for Sophie in Émile — his entire argument cast in the form of a powerful narrative — Rousseau became the most influential predecessor against whom romantic advocates of women’s education were forced to construct their arguments. Accordingly, Condorcet ironically comments on the inconsistency of women who praise Rousseau’s theory of education, which reduced them to men’s servants (9: 20). Wollstonecraft rejects his arguments in extensive footnotes. Theodor von Hippel mocks him as a hypocrite. Later eighteenth-century writers on education were nonetheless forced to respond to the assumption that a woman was predestined by her immutable nature and character to carry out a particular role — that of mother and wife. In their exploration of female selfhood, these theorists, whatever their sympathies, all had to address the question: Education for what? The more conservative writers aimed to make women better moral teachers of their children and companions to their husbands, limiting the subjects of education to topics useful within a domestic context. Selfhood, so important to romantic thought, effectively disappears from view. This circumscribed view typifies the genre of middle-class conduct books, which provided a point of reference for theories of female education. Motherhood became compulsory, just as the Prussian Territorial Law of 1794 made the breast-feeding of one’s own children obligatory. As so many students of women’s history have noted, the narratives of a woman’s life and education became spatially as well as intellectually constricted. Only a few radical voices, male and

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female, called for the thorough education requisite for active participation in public affairs and entry into all the professions. If conservative voices wished to limit women’s education by emphasizing their maternal calling, more progressive voices drew on the same explanation and the same figure for womanhood, in order to advocate higher and better education for women. As “motherhood was being ‘professionalized,’” in Dorothea von Mücke’s phrase, a flood of pedagogical advice for women about how to teach their children encouraged the spread of literacy (Mücke 9). While the terms ostensibly remain the same, writers on this topic displayed widely varying views about motherhood and the responsibility of mothers for the moral or intellectual education of their children. Immanuel Kant went so far as to doubt that mothers were appropriate educators of their young sons at home. Others, such as Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, and Theodor von Hippel, promoted women’s full participation in every walk of life. These value-laden rhetorical strategies make the debate interesting generically. The agreed social value of motherhood dictated the terms within which even reformers often cast their arguments. One strategy was to make “Motherhood” an ideal term, requiring the development not only of traditionally feminine virtues and graces but of knowledge and intellectual skills that had traditionally been understood to be masculine. Proponents of women’s education learned to accommodate themselves to the Zeitgeist by appropriating the patriarchal views of their opponents, often as a narrative mask through which to reach their audience. As Joan Landes has argued, feminist arguments for women’s rights during the French Revolution were articulated at the juncture of the ideological contradictions of the period, between the claims of natural law and individual rights, and they drew on definitions of republican motherhood to depict the home as “the nursery of the state” (Landes 138). Romantic idealism gave a particular coloration to the debate, as it reinforced the doctrine of separate spheres but also transvalued the sphere to which women were thought to belong. The feminine realm of feeling and imagination was elevated and androgynous complementarity made into an ideal, especially for male development, as exemplified in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde. Among German romantics, for example, Schleiermacher, the novelist Sophie Mereau, and the poets Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis glorified the “beautiful soul” of woman, whose moral leadership was acknowledged as socially important, although her sphere of action was limited to the home and family. As Peter Petschauer documents, the professionalizing of woman’s domestic role as well as the idealizing of womanliness is seen in late eighteenth-century changes in German word usage, from Hausmutter (“housemother,” a term with economic significance) to Hausfrau (“housewife”) or Gattin (“wife”) (Petschauer 239–40). The refinement of feminine virtues and graces was sharply contrasted to female learnedness, which held indescribable terrors for thinkers like Kant, Herder, and Moritz. Kant notoriously thought “a woman who has a head full of Greek, like Mme Dacier … might as well even have a beard” (Observations 78).10 Similarly, Thomas Matthias and Richard Polwhele in England thought the French Revolution had “unsexed” female writers. One consequence of this lively disagreement about women’s capacities was that many romantic texts on women’s education took on the generic shape of a debate or dialogue with opponents of reform. It is no accident that embedded colloquies, conversations, and exchanges of letters figure among the narrative devices that carry buried arguments about the ways to

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improve women’s condition. The most important element that the romantic period contributed to this debate was a shift in the potential grounds of citizenship. In 1791 the French revolutionaries created a Committee on Public Instruction to reform the structure of schooling in order to create a new kind of citizen. As a result of these political conditions announcing the possibility of social change, texts advocating educational reforms emerged in France, triggering in turn responses by writers in other countries, such as Wollstonecraft and Hippel. Until the Revolutionary decade, however, the vision of educational reform for women was largely limited to individual projects inspired by a spirit of Enlightened reform. A unique combination of political factors meant that one of the earliest reform plans to take women’s education seriously was written in Russia. There, Peter the Great had taken an active role in education, a precedent upon which Catherine the Great could expand by inaugurating opportunities for women. Only in Russia did Catherine’s leadership create an occasion for the reform of women’s education comparable to the occasion of the French Revolution. In 1762 Catherine appointed Ivan Betskoi (1704–1795), a former lieutenant colonel and gentleman of the chamber to Peter II, director of the Academy of Fine Arts and of the Cadet Corps, a school for young nobles. Asked to prepare a new system of education based on the principles of the French Enlightenment, he traveled throughout Europe studying educational institutions before he presented in 1764 plans for a foundling home, for a revamped Cadet Corps, and for a “community of young women,” a boarding school for 200 girls which became known as the Smolny Institute. Addressed to Catherine, to the nobility, and to parents of all estates, the Système complet d’éducation publique, pour l’un et l’autre sexe & pour les diverses conditions (Complete system of public education for each sex and for diverse conditions) covers details of administration and curriculum, aimed at molding a new model citizen — through the complete separation of children from their homes between the ages of six and eighteen. Betskoi addressed his proposal to Catherine as the mother of the nation. His introduction requests her permission and implores her sacred protection as the sole benefactor who can provide for the “nurture” (nourriture) (1: 66) of orphaned children. He promises her not only praise but the prayers of those whom she will thus raise up; their posterity will, in a sense be hers, granting her immortality. Betskoi, in turn, saw himself as the father of a new class of Russian citizens, a “third estate” or tiers état (1: 249; see also 1: 169) neither noble nor serf. This new class, to be freed by Catherine, would be composed of foundlings, whom his school would train in skilled trades (arts et métiers) to become master artisans, accountants, merchants, supervisors in factories, capable in turn of teaching students at the foundling school. He envisioned a working community that would form around the school, joined by those skilled artisans who would teach the orphans while practising their crafts. The administration of the school, “like a good and tender mother … who sees with sorrow her children depart,” would “attach” most of its graduates and their new businesses to the orphanage home (1: 103).11 Teaching and statecraft were thus both described as a kind of maternity. The first part of Betskoi’s plan, devoted to the imperial home and school for foundlings, responds positively to the question, “If it is necessary to give girls the same instruction given to boys” (1: 200).12 His innovative plan called for all subjects including human anatomy to be

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taught to girls. Betskoi foresaw that the girl graduates would “become models of virtue and knowledge (1: 247).13 Naturally when girls graduated they would become mothers, capable of teaching their own children, free from superstition and the “gangrene” of criminality and superstition that infects an uneducated underclass. They would also be able “to run shops, sell and debit merchandise, calculate profit and loss, regulate commerce beneficially, and understand in depth the details of household management” (1: 207).14 The goal of this training was to produce women able to support themselves and to set aside sufficient capital to purchase “an honest establishment” (1: 103).15 Some students, he suggests, would show superior talents or even genius, deserving selection for further study at Moscow university or the academy of fine arts. Even more revolutionary, in the chapter on the necessity of an equal education, he urges parents to teach their children that “in spite of titles and birth, all men are always born equal” (1: 205).16 Note that Betskoi was translated into French in 1777 by Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc, who used the occasion to argue on behalf of educating girls with the same care that is shown to boys (2: 247). Clerc agrees that a good education is not only necessary for the common people but also for “demoiselles” who must serve as examples and ornaments to society. He is ready to concede that certain professions such as the military or priesthood are inappropriate for women, but not that women lack “domestic” courage or prudence, which most men in public fail to display (2: 248–9). In a fictive conversation, Clerc imagines a woman responding to the usual reproaches made about female ignorance or laziness: taught to value appearances and manners rather than reason, “we” learn dissimulation and falsehood. But true education will be the hand of the sculptor who gives value to his materials — women’s innately pure hearts and healthy reason (2: 258–59). Through his translation, Clerc introduced Catherine’s educational reforms into France at a critical moment in French history; they were also cited by Hippel in his landmark work of 1792, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber (On Improving the Status of Women 42). Betskoi’s tract, with its ideological contradictions and transformative impact, points to the exceptional role of political circumstances in shaping the voice and genre of writings on education. Caught between the interests of the female monarch who had commissioned his plan and the assumptions of his culture, Betskoi at once stresses women’s capacity to lead in the public sphere and their maternal task of shaping the next generation. As a commissioned treatise by a trusted expert, the Complete System claims our attention for its assumption of authority. Addressing a female autocrat, the author is inevitably conscious of the capacity of powerful women to occupy the public stage and their concomitant need for education. At the same time, his unstable argument, with its attitudinal strains, typifies the difficulties faced in this period even by those who were highly motivated to advocate reform in the education of women. Catherine introduced an extensive system of primary schools in 1782; in 1786 she opened a system of secondary schools in larger towns that were free, open to both sexes, and geared to a demanding curriculum. Parental opposition continued, however. At her death in 1796, thirteen times as many boys as girls had received secondary education (Stock 120). The period of the French Revolution marks the crux of the public debate over the education of female citizens, in newly emergent prose genres. The very public nature of the issue of education fostered the rise of specifically political vehicles of expression. Both the promise and

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the failures of romantic individualism are exposed in discussions of women’s individual capacities and their relationship to the state. With surprising rapidity, the demonization of symbolic female figures (whether Marie Antoinette or the tricoteuses), coupled to a reaction against the horrific costs of the Terror, led to a widespread backlash against the egalitarian claims made by proponents of women’s education at the turn of the century. French plans for reform that emerged in the course of the revolution significantly differ from that of Betskoi. Specific political circumstances affected the formal structure of argumentation as well as the tropes, such as “Spartan” or republican motherhood, that lend persuasive power to their proposals. When the revolutionary legislators considered how the new citizen was to be molded, they commissioned proposals for a national system of education whose class premises were more egalitarian than those of Betskoi. A romantic cult of a return to nature, however, inflected the debate over the basic human rights that might apply to women. The resulting plans recapitulated the grounds of the debate that had been elaborated over preceding decades. These proposals addressed the development of elementary schools to ensure mass literacy and the mechanisms whereby children of intellectual merit could acquire advanced schooling that would serve the utilitarian needs of the new society. While commissioned projects might lay claim to inherent authority, it was by no means certain that any one plan would be adopted. Occupying a site of debate, the plans rely for persuasive power on rhetorical ploys. The trope of education as liberation is contrasted to ignorance as enslavement imposed by tyrants; education can cure the contagious “infections” of vice and corruption; and education is personified as the great equalizer in service of the god of reason. Talleyrand’s plan, Rapport sur l’instruction publique fait au nom du comité de constitution (Report on public instruction by the constitutional committee), delivered in September 1791 to the Constituent Assembly, asserts that education is essential for maintaining the new constitution, for liberty and equality. Because the text acknowledges that “some women have gloriously wielded a scepter … a small number of brilliant exceptions” (Talleyrand 177),17 it has been argued that Germaine de Staël helped to write this text (Isbell 62). The plan opens by admitting, “we cannot here separate questions relative to women’s education from the examination of their political rights” (Talleyrand 175).18 It continues with an assessment that anticipates Staël’s remark in 1796 on the disinheritance of “half the human species”: “Half the human race excluded by the other half from all participation in government; natives in fact but foreign by law to the soil that bore them; owners of property without direct influence or representation: these are political phenomena which in abstract principle seem impossible to explain” (175–6).19 In principle, women’s right to educational equality might seem assured in the new republic. Yet the section “On the Education of Girls” in Talleyrand’s plan proposes vocational schooling primarily for poor women, who require “the means to subsist independently, by the fruit of their labor” (180).20 The nation should be a “tender and vigilant mother,” whose pedagogic foresight will prepare “resources for exceptions” and “remedies for sorrow” (179).21 The main thrust of the plan is to prepare women for domestic felicity and the duties of private life (175). In short, Talleyrand’s plan incorporates contradictions not unlike those of Betskoi’s plan, and its main proposals are disappointing. If indeed Staël helped draft the plan, it reflects the exceptionalism that so powerfully shaped her own self-image and that complicated her views of women’s civil rights.

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Similarly, a project for educational reform discovered among Mirabeau’s papers after his death in 1791, Travail sur l’éducation publique (Work on public instruction), relegates girls to the home after a basic training in reading, writing, and arithmetic. He envisions men only in his opening argument that “in slavery, man can have neither the illumination of reason nor virtue” (Mirabeau 5).22 The virtue and happiness of the people can be regenerated only by “a good public education” (6).23 That the denial of education to women might constitute a form of “slavery” he does not consider. By contrast, Condorcet’s proposal a year later to the Legislative Assembly, when read together with his other works on education, offers one of the landmarks of feminist advocacy. He was already known for his progressive stance on women’s right to full citizenship and to the vote, formulated in his Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven (Letters from a citizen of New Haven; 1788) and his essay “Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité” (On the admission of women to citizenship, 1790). “As women have the same qualities as men, they of necessity have the same rights” (10: 122).24 The “preliminary” Rapport sur l’instruction publique (Report on public instruction) that Condorcet submitted on behalf of the Committee on Public Instruction in April 1792 discusses women’s education at the elementary level but promises a special attachment on the topic (7: 515). According to the historian Célestin Hippeau, who collected revolutionary treatises on education, the Report was accompanied by a version of Condorcet’s five Mémoires sur l’instruction publique (Memoranda on public instruction; 1790); the printed Report of 1792, however, has no appendix (279). In its discussion of girls’ schooling, the Report allowed for coeducation. This theme had been amplified in the Memoranda. There Condorcet defended the same instruction for women, exclaiming, “it would be absurd to exclude them from that [instruction] in professions in which they must engage alongside men” (7: 216).25 He argued that coeducation would guard against corruption and foster equality in marriage. His rationale is egalitarian: “In the institutions of a free nation, everything should aim at equality … because the maintenance of order and peace dictates it” (7: 223).26 The family is a microcosm of the state in its relationships of power. One cannot establish [instruction] for men alone, without introducing a marked irregularity not only between husband and wife, but between brother and sister, and even between son and mother. Equality is everywhere, but especially in families, the first component of felicity, of peace, and of virtue. What authority can maternal tenderness have, if ignorance condemned mothers to become objects of ridicule and contempt to their children? (7: 218–9)27

By insisting on the familial need for mutual respect and maternal authority, Condorcet reverses the standard argument against the education of women. Precisely because he sees the family as a microcosm of the state, the rule of equality must prevail there as well. In spite of his emphasis on equality, Condorcet sets up his arguments within a horizon set by gender difference. Thus women may not be capable of scientific discovery, but rather of “observations demanding an almost minute precision, great patience, and a sedentary and regular life” (7: 217).28 For practical reasons women, especially among the poor, will become responsible for the instruction at home of their small children. The gap between the Memoranda and the Report two years later may reflect, as various

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modern historians have argued, a betrayal of Condorcet’s earlier convictions, a tacit adaptation of his argument to the biases of his audience in the Assembly, or the constraints of his role as spokesman for the Committee on Public Instruction (Lacour 78–9). The two texts use different voices — a radically personal voice in the Memoranda, as opposed to the authoritative “we” of the committee. Dissension within the committee or the outbreak of war may indeed have impeded discussion of the report and its further development. Another type of tract on education generated by the specific circumstances in France was the petition, a vehicle that gave the public at large, including women, direct access to the legislators in the National Assembly and the Convention. Already in 1789, one of the many petitions from women of the Third Estate to the king appealed for the right “to be enlightened, to have work” in order to escape the choice otherwise forced on poor women between the convent and prostitution: “We implore you, Sire, to set up free schools where we could learn our language…. We ask to come out of the state of ignorance, to be able to give our children a sound and reasonable education so as to make of them subjects worthy of serving you” (Anonymous, “Petition” 20).29 Often, therefore, the petitions are couched in very simple, misspelled, even grammatically flawed French, and accompanied by apologies: “You will forgive me for not writing in an elegant, flowery, and precise style, as does a man whom long study has taught the art of such composition; but I hope to present striking truths and to be logical in my reasoning” (Mouret 467).30 The palpable irony of this apology reflects the actual condition of women, who in 1786–90 in France had a literacy rate of about 30 to 40 percent, and in Paris perhaps as high as 50 percent. The tone of the petition, furthermore, marks the distance of the topic of education — significant but not so urgent as food — from the vocal demands made by female firebrands in the streets of Paris. These petitions assume common agreement that former social structures must be changed in order to eliminate “the shadows of ignorance and prejudices, and the dangers of luxury and frivolity” (Mouret 462).31 Past centuries of effeminate and frivolous customs must be replaced by the civic virtues of “citoyennes” (Lemaignan 473). To educate men but not women in history, theories of social justice, and republican virtue, would entail the risk of corruption from within the new state. In these open letters by women addressed to an all-male locus of power, we can hear a tone of entreaty underlying language designed to evoke sympathy by the invocation of feminized tropes such as maternal “regeneration” or patriotic “service” to the new nation. They adduce as historic models Lucretia, Portia, and Cornelia (Lemaignan 479). Some of these petitions, like one of 1793 by the well-established Citoyenne Valincourt, seeking authorization to set up a normal school for schoolmistresses, avoid the question of equality in their appeals, but most insist on the significance of women’s role in the shaping of the new citizens of a new state. The form thus tends to juxtapose the narrative of individual accomplishment with the narrative of national transformation. Citoyenne Lemaignan of Besançon, for example, the wife of a painter, makes the claim that women wish to produce beings who will be “useful to the fatherland” (474)32 and freed from the cruel limits of the Old Regime, which kept one “class” of individuals in the sterile state of servitude (474). With the support of her revolutionary club, “Les Amies de la Liberté et de l’égalité de la Ville de Besançon,” she demands that the education of “our daughters” must come

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“even before that of our sons” (478),33 since women will become the means to change the character of society. Her proposed curriculum included secondary education in geography, ancient history, mathematics, home economics, and the revolution. Differences in class should be eliminated, in order to preserve equality and to prevent the continuing influence of the Old Regime: poor girls should be educated by the state rather than raised in ignorance and superstition at schools run by religious orders (481–2). These petitioners appropriate the values of motherhood, nature, and patriotism, and fuse women’s rights with civic duty in service of the community. A Dutch woman who founded a revolutionary club for women, the Association des Amies de la Liberté, Etta Palm D’Aelders was one of those most outspoken concerning education. She proposed, for example, a national system of patriotic women’s circles that would supervise welfare efforts, such as the administration of wet-nursing, and the establishment of charity schools “to teach children the rights of men, respect and obedience for the law, the duty of citizens, the decrees of the National Assembly … instead of legends of the saints” (Palm D’Aelders, “Letter” 70).34 Attacking the 1791 police code for distinguishing between the rights of husbands and wives, she appealed in an “Address” to the Assemblée Nationale for reform “of the dull and enervated education of the cloisters, haunts of ignorance and fanaticism”: “You will complete your work by giving girls a moral education equal to that of their brothers; for education is for the soul what watering is for plants; it makes it fertile, causes it to bloom, … and carries the germ productive of virtue and talents to a perfect maturity” (“Address” 77).35 Speaking one year later to the Legislative Assembly, she sought that girls’ education be set up “on the same foundation” as that of men, by the decree of a “national” education for girls (“Plea” 123).36 Before the worst Jacobin violence against women broke out, D’Aelders returned to Holland. The most famous of feminist manifestos from this period, however, is Olympe de Gouges’s declaration of Les droits de la femme, written before the arrest of the royal family. A remarkable amalgam of forms and voices, this manifesto includes a letter of appeal to the queen to support improving the status of women; an angry indictment of men; a list of women’s rights in ironic response to the “Déclaration des droits de l’homme”; a “préambule” to the men of the Assembly, and a lengthy “postambule” exhorting women to awaken and unite. One reason this manifesto retains its interest is the multiplication of its voices, an inscription of the changing view in this period of the political arena, which comes to be understood as composed of many competing interests rather than as a single representative authority. Although de Gouges does not focus on education, her famous tract argues in article VI that all female and male citizens “should be equally admissible to all public honors, offices, and employments, according to their abilities and with no distinctions other than those of their virtue and talents” (de Gouges 207).37 She calls upon women, who possess “every intellectual faculty” (206),38 to invoke the force of reason on their own behalf, and to reject enslavement by men. In a postscript she expresses optimism that her views on national education will coincide with those about to be published by Talleyrand. Such hopes for equal opportunity were soon to be dashed; de Gouges ended on the scaffold in October 1793. The extremely public nature of the French debate over educational reform attracted attention in both England and Germany. The most famous response to the plan proposed by Talleyrand, for example, was written not in France but in England: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the

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Rights of Woman (1792); the text was translated immediately into French and into German by the following year. Like so many other writers on this topic, Wollstonecraft linked virtue to education, arguing that the moral fiber of British society was being undermined by deficient and misguided education for women. Her polemic commences as a letter ostensibly addressed to Talleyrand and returns in the twelfth chapter to his plan, which she proposes to amend by including women, to make the French national system co-educational on both elementary and secondary levels. Wollstonecraft challenges Talleyrand to reconsider the injustice of denying women’s rights, especially the right to an education, which he himself had found “impossible to explain.” By placing the French author between herself and her English audience, Wollstonecraft created a buffer that might disarm readers apprehensive about social changes for women at home. She also underscored the importance of the French Revolutionary debate for all those who in the romantic period would address the question of women’s education and self-development. Of course, Wollstonecraft’s real audience and agenda are British, and she focuses less on women’s equal political or civil rights than the title might seem to promise. Rather, this manifesto insists that educating women in the use of reason will create a better society by improving the character of women and indirectly that of men. Here she reaffirms Talleyrand’s thesis that “a good public education” is necessary to illuminate reason and virtue. A scant two pages address professionalism for women who when unmarried or widowed require education to achieve financial independence (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 148–9). Her main line of argument, presented in a chapter “On National Education,” advocates the social utility of women’s education: “To render man more virtuous, to render the social compact truly equitable, to spread those enlightening principles which alone can meliorate the fate of man, women must be allowed to found their virtue on knowledge, which is scarcely possible unless they be educated by the same pursuit as men” (173). Because knowledge is the key to virtue, women’s proper education in turn strengthens the family and the state. As Mitzi Myers has argued, “Wollstonecraft aggrandizes, heroizes the maternal mission, elevating woman’s status by making her familial roles the linchpin of a new society” (206). This rationale coexists with a tacit investment of power rather than weakness in the domestic sphere, and a fusion of reason with virtue, the two terms that Rousseau had split apart. Central to Wollstonecraft’s definition of a proper education is the role of reason, understood not to be a gendered faculty peculiar to men but a capacity that education can develop in men and women alike. Wittily Wollstonecraft rejects Rousseau’s “direct and exclusive appropriation of reason” as “confined to the male line” (87). Claiming the evidence of reason, she decries the notion that virtue has a “sex,” taking a rational form in men and an instinctive form in women. If women betray emptiness of mind, manipulative behavior, or dissipation, the causes are historical, not innate. In Chapter 6 of Vindication on “The Effect Which an Early Association of Ideas Has upon the Character,” Wollstonecraft shows that the blank mind posited by Locke becomes saturated with gendered qualities through the associations made in childhood. Conditioned to obtain power and pleasure by exciting emotions in men, girls acquire a feminine sensibility: “Everything that [the girls] see or hear serves to … call forth emotions and associate ideas that give a sexual character to the mind” (117). Once girls have been led to associate their own gender with passion and an incapacity to reason, they “have not sufficient strength of mind to efface the superinductions of art that have smothered nature” (117). Thus Wollstonecraft

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frames her argument about women within the parameters set by Locke and Rousseau. Nurture, not nature, is responsible for women’s foibles and deficiencies in virtue, as Wollstonecraft attempts to show by recounting several short narratives about miseducation and the misbehavior that results. The mistaken belief that skill in childrearing is innate in women has led, she implies, to the shortcomings of middle-class women. “The want of natural affection in many women, who are drawn from their duty by the admiration of men, and the ignorance of others, render the infancy of man a much more perilous state than that of brutes.” Some women do not have “sufficient understanding to know how even to nurse their babies” (176–7). Paradoxically then, the book accepts women’s gender assignment to maternity, while arguing that successful mothering does not come to women naturally or inevitably. Wollstonecraft includes these exemplary narratives depicting weak women’s dangerous behavior to blow an alarmist trumpet about miseducation, but she does not draw up a list of exceptional women who have been the intellectual equals of men, as had previous advocates of women’s education. The Vindication’s polemic relies primarily on reasoned argumentation that exemplifies the case for women’s potential abilities. Point for point, she chips away at the flawed reasoning of those she opposes, simultaneously providing evidence through her own authorial performance that an educated woman is capable of reasoning. The tacit claim of sober rationality constitutes part of her rhetoric, in a deliberate reaction against a tradition going back to Quintilian that identifies linguistic ornamentation with “feminine excess” (Brody 117). Throughout the Vindication, Wollstonecraft refers to a wide range of works — ancient, Renaissance, and contemporary — to make manifest her skill at managing the masculine domains of scholarship and polemic. Her insistence on rough simplicity links her to the revolutionary effects sought by romantic poets such as William Wordsworth: “I shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style. I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 10). Paradoxically, such a rhetorical insistence on sincerity and on natural language for natural feelings (which were preeminent romantic claims) ran the risk of reinforcing gender differences between women and men, and might suggest that women had no need of an education at all. As we see throughout this debate, the romantic paradigms for the masculine poet, for renovated language, and for a new kind of citizenship, have a troubled relationship to concepts of femininity and complicate the rhetorical task of proponents of women’s education. The French political debate over educational renewal opened up a window for Wollstonecraft’s polemic, but her commitment to the issues had already been established in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, subtitled With Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life (1787). The late eighteenth-century conduct book, an educational genre to which Wollstonecraft explicitly responded, provided the conservative backdrop against which she set up her arguments both in this book and in the Vindication five years later. Conduct books enjoyed popularity across Europe, and especially so in England, as a tool for managing social relations (Carré 270–1). Their embrace of a separate sphere for women and relative neglect of intellectual development made them a particular bone of contention for later feminist writers. In Thoughts Wollstonecraft invoked the narrow range of educational options allowed in

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conduct books in the titles of her chapters on “Exterior Accomplishments,” “Dress,” “On the Treatment of Servants,” and “Matrimony.” Conduct books addressed female behavior and manners in preparation for marriage, rather than formal education. They aimed to inculcate modesty and chastity, “to assure that a woman’s appetites were under control” (Poovey 28). Intellectual appetites were scarcely acknowledged, except as a potential threat to domestic management. Indeed, conduct books were a target for those who advocated better education for women, because they served as mediocre substitutes for girls’ educational texts. Conduct books, in Elizabeth Fay’s view, replicated “society’s substitution of women’s behavior for a masculinizing education” (Fay 29). When Wollstonecraft describes her own voice as preacherly — “I have almost run into a sermon, — and I shall not make an apology for it” (Wollstonecraft, Thoughts 4: 35), she ironically reminds the reader that conduct books had traditionally derived their authority from their authorship by ministers. However, as Londa Schiebinger notes, modernizing advances in the sciences brought in their wake a shift from conduct books by ministers to those by medical doctors like John Gregory or the Scottish anatomist Alexander Monro. By grounding their arguments in women’s delicate physiology, these authorities promoting women’s training for motherhood made the task of those who advocated women’s education more difficult (Schiebinger 217). Wollstonecraft consciously followed Catherine Macaulay in her rejection of the norms presented by conduct books. Renowned for her scholarly eight-volume History of England, 1763–83, Macaulay received favorable reviews for her Letters on Education (1790), including one by Wollstonecraft. On important matters, the two agree: they underscore the value of learning to foster piety and virtue and the importance of coeducation in guaranteeing equality. (See Ferguson and Todd 61–2.) If Macaulay’s earlier text has been less influential than that of Wollstonecraft, the reason may lie in its dispassionate presentation. Cast ostensibly in the epistolary form so popular in the age, both in fiction and non-fiction, Letters on Education addresses its advice to a “Hortensia” who has no persona; the letter’s audience is a mere trope designed to convey the sense that communication is taking place and to allow the reader a small measure of identification and feeling of participation. As a rule, we find a “generic contract” in eighteenth-century epistolary forms, according to Elizabeth Cook, that “constructs the reader as participant in a critical interpretive process that is also a political act,” an “exercise of critical reason in the public sphere of print culture” (67). In fact, each of Macaulay’s letters carries a title, as if a chapter in the book, and there is no trace of a debate or exchange between letter writers. Indeed, she turns in the close of her first letter to “Hortensia” to her true audience: “Oh magistrates! Oh legislators! admit of some variation in your views of interest” (Macaulay 13–4). Macaulay urged an androgynous and strenuous coeducation (Plutarch at twelve) that would inculcate graces in young men as well as learning in young women: “Confine not the education of your daughters to what is regarded as the ornamental parts of it, nor deny the graces to your sons…. Let your children be brought up together; let their sports and studies be the same” (50). Although she believed that coeducation could foster friendship rather than passion, she also believed that “domestic converse” between husband and wife depended upon “a mind irradiated by the clear light of wisdom” (49). Another literary form in which women’s voices on education might be sounded, if not

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always heard, was women’s journals. Most women’s journals were edited by men (Geiger and Weigel 7), and many resembled conduct books in serial form. Nonetheless, they offered a new space within the public sphere that women might inhabit, where female literacy was a herald of things to come. Letters to the editor afforded the safety of anonymity to scathing attacks on the current system. Mme L., for example, writing to Le Courrier de l’Hymen in April 1791, sarcastically lays claim to women’s mental superiority. She challenges the male editor of this journal, whose titular focus is women’s marriage, to demonstrate that there is any difference between men’s and women’s intelligence — or that if such a difference exists, it lies in favor of men. Men’s selfinterest, she slyly suggests, prevents them from acknowledging “our superiority” (458).39 Refreshingly, she argues that women “learn more readily than men” (459)40 and that men condemn women for pedantic learning, when what they really fear is that women will be rational. This wittily acerbic argument, after rehearsing what her opponents will say, mocks conventional views as foolish (sottises) and rewrites history, offering to exchange places with men. German journals for women in the period negotiated uneasily with the conservative trends of German romantic idealism. They reflected the shift in the eighteenth century from the woman defined by her social status to one defined by her “femaleness,” that is, “possessing psychological depth rather than a physically attractive surface” (Armstrong and Tennenhouse 10), a shift especially visible in German “anthropological” treatises. They advocated the formation of a “fine soul” (schöne Seele) rather than learnedness. The learned woman, exalted by the aristocratic tradition of letters, who had been promoted just sixty-five years earlier in Gottsched’s journal for women, Die vernünftigen Tadlerinnen (1725–26), had come to represent superficial accumulation of knowledge and selfishness rather than selfless concern for others. In the last two decades of the century, two renowned women novelists, Sophie von La Roche and Marianne Ehrmann, became pioneers of the first journals edited solely by women, an important step toward creating a new medium. By extending their writing talent to this public medium — to a public whose familiarity with their work made their commercial venture viable — they both gave voice to women’s concerns. Sophie von La Roche was one of the first German women to edit her own magazine for women, entitled Pomona, für Teutschlands Töchter (Pomona, for Germany’s Daughters; 1783–84), and it was designed to serve as a vehicle of female education. In her “Letters to Lina,” addressed to a fictitious fifteen-year-old preparing for marriage, she promotes the German romantic cult of feeling, sentimentality, and morality, along with practical instructions for running a household. “Learnedness,” she suggests, “gives a faltering step” to women’s graces (La Roche 1: 15).41 Each issue, however, also includes articles on history, customs, and political matters in other countries, as well as the lives and works of renowned learned women. She argues that women, without failing to perform their domestic duties, also should “understand everything that is involved in their husbands’ work” (1: 33).42 It is in her correspondence with her readers that La Roche’s originality becomes apparent. There the debate reveals her correspondents’ yearning for educational reforms. One reader writes, for example that Pomona has demonstrated through its descriptions of learned women throughout history, a corresponding history of women’s oppression by men; she suggests that women would do better to educate other women, just as

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Pomona attempts to do. La Roche’s response frankly indicts men who perpetuate injustice toward women: “Like you I believe that men have never yet reflected with special attention to our development … Strength and power are what men value most … for they always see themselves as lords of all creation” (1: 170–5).43 Signing herself as “Mutter” or mother, thus conflating the intellectual sustenance of her articles with maternal nurturing, La Roche attracted strong personal responses from young women, who begged her to continue her work after the newspaper folded at the end of 1784. The Swiss-born Marianne Ehrmann, known for her epistolary novel Amalie (1788), edited from 1790–92 the monthly Amaliens Erholungsstunden (Amalie’s hours of recreation). The ideological conflicts so apparent in La Roche’s journal appear in Ehrmann’s journal as well, for example, in the rhetorical contrast between the Denkerin (thinker) and the Gelehrte (learned woman). An actress as well as a writer, Ehrmann advertised her projected publication as a way for women to achieve the knowledge that would make them good wives, mothers, and Christians (ctd. Dawson 61). As a working woman herself, she recommends education as preparation for work in the case of need, and sees the necessity of training women teachers for girls’ schools. Despite her title, her first priority is the instruction and enlightenment of her young friends. Under the rubric “Overview of the most recent world history,” she addresses current political events. With an unusually militant tone, she asks why women are denied true education: “Why are we not brought up from our earliest youth as human beings?” (Ehrmann, “Anzeige”5: xxiii).44 She inverts the usual relationship between motherhood and citizenship: “How can this repressed sex bring forth good mothers, before it has good citizens?” (1.7: 77).45 Condemned by male despotism to become Sklavinnen (“slaves”) (2.6: 266), Ehrmann’s female audience requires rational education for its emancipation. Although in her correspondence with a misogynist male reader she powerfully indicts the current system that deprives women of the instruction they need, Ehrmann generally embraces a limited individualism for women, one that balances selfimprovement and self-sufficiency against the need to be educated in charity and self-abnegation. Two years later, almost at the same moment as Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, Theodor von Hippel’s Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber (On Improving the Status of Women; 1792) offered the most radical feminist argument in the romantic period for woman’s full participation in society, including entry into all professions and public affairs. Radical as the argument was, this posthumous tract has been accorded surprisingly little attention. In the later nineteenth century, even German feminists turned to Wollstonecraft for sustenance rather than to Hippel. Anonymous, originally read as ironic, the text was forgotten until modern times. Anonymity plays a special role in non-fictional prose, especially in polemic. Authority is at stake in any public debate like the one traced here over forms of education and the shaping of society. The seriousness of reception derives in part from the rhetorically shaped voice, in part from the rank, title, or renown of the author. As a high-ranking civil servant under Frederick II and at the age of thirty-nine mayor of Königsberg with a number of fictional and non-fictional books to his name, Hippel would certainly have aroused greater attention and controversy, perhaps serving as a feminist beacon, had he made his authorship known. Like Wollstonecraft, Etta Palm d’Aelders, and French petitioners, Hippel casts his argument on the “necessity” of educating women for the status of citizenship as a response to the French constitution and to writers such as Mirabeau. Indeed, he describes his work as “the petition

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which nature submits on behalf of the female sex” (Hippel, Improving 120).46 He compares it to a speech by Condorcet to the National Assembly. Unabashedly pursuing the political metaphor, he argues that Frenchwomen have fought for their liberty, and that all women deserve to be freed from the “bastilles of the fashionable world, the fortresses of the domestic, and the dungeons of the civil world wherein the fair sex finds itself” (60).47 State interests are at stake, he suggests, and like Talleyrand he notes the waste as well as the injustice of current educational disparities: “Is it not inexcusable to leave half the resources of mankind unknown, unassessed, and unused?” (62).48 Precisely that half of humankind, indeed, was entrusted by nature with the most important aspects of child rearing: “There can be no doubt that nature destined the opposite sex for the noble business of education and endowed it with all the talents and faculties necessary to fulfill this great calling” (126).49 Up until the age of twelve, schooling should be coeducational, and women’s evident talent for languages, for the arts, and even for mathematics and the sciences, including the healing arts, should be fostered. Where he admits differences between men and women, it is largely to women’s credit: they listen better, persuade better, learn languages better, moderate their anger, Hippel’s program is imbued with a spirit of republican individualism: “honor, privileges, and rewards would not then be a prerogative of sex, but the result of personal merit” (132).50 In a striking anticipation of some modern feminist theorists, Hippel argues that once women have been fully educated, gained legal rights, and entered politics, “then hysteria … will vanish” (160).51 Indeed, full political citizenship is the educational outcome he foresees: “Let the wall which divides us be broken apart — let us raise citizens for the state without regard to sex and leave that which women must know as housewives and mothers to separate instruction, and all will return to the order of nature” (125).52 This transformation of women will also bring about the apocalyptic transformation or “rebirth” of the state through the restoration of natural law and inauguration of a “new heaven and a new earth” (Verbesserung 217–8).53 For several decades to come, Hippel’s utopian vision marks the culmination of tracts advocating revolutionary transformation of women’s education. His work also provides a summation of the rhetorical forms with which other writers had experimented. A petition by nature, a “colloquy” with an imagined opponent over principles and preconceptions, a catalogue of historical precedents, On Improving the Status of Women self-consciously synthesizes arguments by Hippel’s predecessors as well as their most effective stylistic devices. An overview of the debate over women’s education permits us to see that writers had certain generic choices about how to present their arguments, some forms being thrust upon them by political circumstance, others becoming available as instruments of persuasion. Official plans tend to be systematic descriptions of institutions graded by age-level and sex, with the arguments gathered in prefatory remarks. Yet even though a reform project may seem rather abstractly descriptive, the political audience for such plans shapes the voice of the reformer and the character of the arguments. Not surprisingly, proposals related to women’s education and development draw on various forms of narrative. In order to interpret and align these different proposals for reform, we must ask who is the protagonist of the narrative of educational change for women: a singular, exceptional woman like Mme de Staël or Catherine the Great? the marginal women whose unmarried or widowed state excludes them from the normative married state? Spartan mothers?

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wives who are the intellectual partners of their husbands? or women in general, whose capacities for growth and accomplishment warrant their entry into the public sphere? Those theorists who were unable to imagine a narrative of female growth, we find, composed tracts whose subjects were conventional and whose guiding principle was nature — a nature believed to be anchored in the female body and relatively immutable, even hostile to narrative. Others, however, were ready to contest platitudes. One of the most obvious forms of evidence to which these writers could turn in constructing their arguments on behalf of women’s potential for profiting from improved education was historical example. It is not surprising, therefore, that the translator of Betskoi cites Queen Christina as a great leader as well as an artist. Condorcet points to Queen Elizabeth of Britain, Catherine the Great, and Maria Theresa to demonstrate women’s equal abilities and their equal natural rights; he suggests that Catherine Macaulay would be an able legislator, and like Hippel, he invokes the learning of Italian university women (Condorcet 10: 123). Madame L. cites Madame Dacier’s learning (459), as does Hippel, who ranks Catherine’s letters above those of her correspondent Voltaire. Intercalated features such as stock lists of famous women or exemplary narratives seem to be a hallmark of educational literature. In her journal Pomona, Sophie von La Roche cites the business skills of Dutch women and writes articles about the lives and works of learned women. These embedded role models may have helped writers to conceive the range of women’s educational potential. They also offered the materials to help readers imagine educations that would foster the serious and continuing pursuit of knowledge by women of power, learning, and moral stature. While many of the figures cited as exemplary are historical, other interpolated stories are undoubtedly invented in order to convey a moral or pedagogic point. Among imagined mini-stories, we may count Wollstonecraft’s monitory paragraphs about dissipated middle-class women, not unlike the little didactic tales in her Original Stories from Real Life (1787), which the subtitle tells us were “calculated to regulate the affections, and form the mind to truth and goodness.” The intensity of the debate led to the production not only of actual letters (to editors or to the National Assembly, for example) but to a wide number of lightly fictionalized letters and addresses. These display a hierarchy of intimacy from the most personalized and intimate letter addressed to a friend, to a dry treatise or letter addressed to a superior. Maria Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), cast as a male epistolary debate, exposes middle-class preconceptions against women’s education as pure prejudice. Even a letter couched as an intimate address to a member of one’s family can also be didactically parental, a format especially popular in civilities such as Dr. John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774). Others, written to one’s superior, resemble petitions, cast as letters from a member of the people to a leader or representative. If Wollstonecraft’s polemic is understood as a quasi-legal brief, then it too belongs to the epistolary form writ large. Whether an exchange of letters or a colloquy, many of these prose works reproduce the structure of the intellectual debate over women’s education in their choice of a form that permits the exchange of ideas. Hippel thus lays out questions that a fictive reader or interlocutor might ask, in order to defend his position. From the outset highly conscious of choosing his rhetorical devices, at the close of his work he satirically dramatizes “my honored opponents whom I have requested to dispute a few points with me” (Hippel, Improving 120).54

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The greatest of the romantic tropes used to convince opponents of reform in women’s education is that of emancipation. Indeed, in the case of the orphans whom Catherine II symbolically adopted, education literally freed them from the status of serfs. To the proponents of the French Revolution, freedom was a self-evident prerequisite of equality and fraternity. And the romantic heirs of the Enlightenment understood education to be the prerequisite to emancipation from “mental bondage.” In an age when twice as many men as women were literate, literacy itself was the key to entering the newly expanded public sphere created by print culture. There was scarcely any debate over women’s need for literacy. That true freedom involved access to a full range of knowledge and occupations was far more controversial. We find “constant equivocation” on the issue of equality of women and men by a number of “fierce critics of religious intolerance, absolutism, and slavery” (Bell and Offen 18). As historians have long recognized, however, the political alliance forged with abolitionists in the latter part of the eighteenth century gave women a moral platform that could justify their entry into the public sphere. In order to lend force to women’s claims, early feminists repeatedly drew on a partial analogy between slavery, the deprivation of all rights based on race, and the deprivation of civil rights based on sexual difference. Olympe de Gouges, Ehrmann, and Wollstonecraft all insist that depriving women of an education enslaves them. Hippel too condemns a system of justice that treats slaves as nonentities, and by analogy condemns “the enslavement of the female sex” which “remains a worm that dies not and a fire that is never quenched” (Improving 81; Isaiah 66: 24).55 Maternity was equally important as a trope. In effect, by identifying the power to give early childhood lessons in virtue at a mother’s knee with the power to create the future of the nation, radical advocates of women’s education were constructing an image of woman as the mother of the nation. Maria Theresa underscored her “maternal solicitude for her country” (3: 496).56 If Catherine was the mother of the Russian people, the school she established was also the mother of the students, in Betskoi’s phrase. Talleyrand’s republic was to become the tender mother of impoverished women citizens. Revolutionary writers found precedents for their arguments among Spartan mothers and Roman matrons, figured in sculpture as the many-breasted Republic. The voice of the editor as educator, as Sophie von La Roche’s Pomona so often shows us, was maternal. Marianne Ehrmann’s editorial introduction to Amaliens Erhohlungsstunden likewise explains that as a childless wife she can attend to writing as well as housework, in effect becoming a mother to her readers (1: 1). Maternity was the corset that contained most of these arguments for women’s advancement, since it appeared to constrict access to education for the professions. But in narrative terms, maternity opened a door to a new realm of activity: it was both the natural outcome of women’s training for marriage and a threshold, the beginning of an adult life understood as active and creative within the domestic sphere. The narrative renewal traced in so many of these tracts, therefore, distinguishes it from fiction, where marriage so often marks the end of the story. The late eighteenth century debated the best educational program and its function within the state; within that context, women’s education also was an issue addressed across the face of Europe. The major treatises of the period were part of an international conversation; thus Talleyrand’s Plan provoked responses not only in France but in England and Germany, and Sophie von La Roche’s subscribers included Catherine the Great. In spite of the transnational character of the debate over women’s education, it is nonethe-

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less true that the specificities of national political and historical conditions were very conscious determinants in many of these works. The question of shaping a citizenry’s identity had already been prominent in proclamations such as Maria Theresa’s Allgemeine Schulordnung, which hopes to shape the thinking (Denkensart) of the people, or Catherine’s approval of Betskoi’s plan to create a “third estate” through proper schooling. The concern for the formation of a national character took hold especially in the aftermath of the Revolution in France. Above all, those who aimed at revolutionary reforms cast their arguments within the framework of romantic nationalism. French petitioners appealed to revolutionary legislators’ consciousness that they were creating a new France with a new kind of citizen, who should be protected from the corruption resulting from Old Regime ignorance. Women’s maternal role made them prime instruments of this civic and spiritual revolution. If that rationale had seemed compelling to Catherine and Maria Theresa, it was even more compelling to revolutionary Frenchwomen and to Wollstonecraft in the 1790s. Nascent nationalism, glancing backward at a purer past, fused with and reinforced arguments for future reforms. Thus Hippel insists on women’s leadership in ancient Germania, an indigenous tradition corrupted by Roman law, but still vital enough to permit German women to display their talents if granted a proper education. For such progressive thinkers, the fulfillment of women’s individual capacities for development would enact a social regeneration, bringing about, in Hippel’s phrase, a “new heaven and a new earth.”

Notes 1. “So haben Wir wahrgenommen, daß die Erziehung der Jugend, beyderley Geschlechts, als die wichtigste Grundlage der wahren Glückseligkeit der Nationen ein genaueres Einsehen allerdings erfodere” (Maria Theresa 3: 491). 2. “Von dem häuslichen Leben hängt das Wohl des Staates ab…. Das Weibliche Geschlecht hat im Staat einen besonderen Beruf” (Schleiermacher 97). 3. “En tout ce qui ne tient pas au sexe, la femme est homme: elle a les mêmes organes, les mêmes besoins, les mêmes facultés” (Rousseau, Émile 445). 4. “Une femme parfaite et un homme parfait ne doivent pas plus se ressembler d’esprit que de visage” (Rousseau, Émile 446). 5. “Les femmes, dites-vous, ne font pas toujours des enfans. Non, mais leur destination propre est d’en faire” (Rousseau, Émile 451). 6. “La femme est faite spécialement pour plaire à l’homme … et pour être subjuguée” (Rousseau, Émile 446). 7. “S’ensuit-il qu’elle doive être élevée dans l’ignorance de toute chose, et bornée aux seules fonctions du ménage?” (Rousseau, Émile 454). 8. “Je parle de cette promiscuité civile qui confond partout les deux sexes dans les mêmes emplois” (Rousseau, Émile 452). 9. “Dès qu’une fois il est démonstré que l’homme et la femme ne sont ni ne doivent être constitués de même, de caractère ni de tempérament, il s’ensuit qu’ils ne doivent pas avoir la même éducation” (Rousseau, Émile 453). 10. “Ein Frauenzimmer, das den Kopf voll Griechisch hat, wie die Frau Dacier … mag nur immerhin noch einen Bart dazu haben” (Kant, “Beobachtungen” 230). 11. “Le régime, comme une bonne & tendre mère, qui ne voit qu’avec douleur s’éloigner d’elle ceux qui lui ont coûté tant de peines, … retiendra la plus grande partie de ces jeunes gens, pour les attacher à la maison” (Betskoi 1: 103). 12. “S’il est nécessaire de donner aux filles les instructions que l’on donne aux garçons” (Betskoi 1: 200). 13. “Deviendront des modèles de vertu et de savoir” (Betskoi 2: 247).

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14. “Diriger les magasins, vendre et débiter les marchandises, calculer le profit ou la perte, régler ce commerce pour le mieux, et connoitre à fond tous les détails d’un ménage” (Betskoi 1: 207). 15. “Se procurer un établissement honnête” (Betskoi 1: 103). 16. “Malgré les titres & la naissance, tous les hommes naissent toujours égaux” (Betskoi 1: 205). 17. “On dit encore que quelques-unes avaient porté le sceptre avec gloire, mais que sont un petit nombre d’exceptions brillantes?” (Talleyrand 177). 18. “On ne peut d’abord séparer ici les questions relatives à leur éducation de l’examen de leurs droits politiques” (Talleyrand 175). 19. “Une moitié du genre humain exclue par l’autre de toute participation au gouvernement des personnes indigènes par le fait et étrangères par la loi sur le sol que les a cependant vu naître; des propriétaires sans influence directe et sans représentation, ce sont là des phénomènes politiques, qu’en principe abstrait, il paraît impossible d’expliquer” (Talleyrand 175–6). 20. “Les moyens de subsister indépendantes, par le produit de leur travail” (Talleyrand 180). 21. “La prévoyance de la loi … doit encore préparer des ressources pour les exceptions et des remèdes pour le malheur. La patrie aussi doit être une mère tendre et vigilante” (Talleyrand 179). 22. “Dans l’esclavage, l’homme ne peut avoir ni lumières, ni vertus” (Mirabeau 5). 23. “C’est d’une bonne éducation publique seulement que vous devez attendre ce complément de régénération qui fondera le bonheur du peuple sur ses vertus, et ses vertus sur ses lumières” (Mirabeau 6). 24. “Les femmes ayant ces même qualités, ont nécessairement des droits égaux” (Condorcet 10: 122). 25. “Il serait absurde de les exclure de celle [l’instruction] qui a pour objet les professions qu’elles doivent exercer en concurrence” (Condorcet 7: 216). 26. “Dans les institutions d’une nation libre, tout doit tendre à l’égalité, non seulement parce qu’elle est aussi un droit des hommes, mais parce que le maintien de l’ordre et de la paix l’ordonne impérieusement” (Condorcet 7: 223). 27. “On ne pourrait l’ établir [l’instruction] pour les hommes seuls, sans introduire une irrégularité marquée, non seulement entre le mari et la femme, mais entre le frère et la sœur, et même entre le fils et la mère. L’égalité est partout, mais surtout dans les familles, le premier élément de la félicité, de la paix et des vertus. Quelle autorité pourrait avoir la tendresse maternelle si l’ignorance dévouait les mères à devenir pour leurs enfants un objet de ridicule ou de mépris” (Condorcet 7: 218–9). 28. “Ces observations qui demandent une exactitude presque minutieuse, une grande patience, une vie sédentaire et réglée” (Condorcet 7: 217). 29. “Nous vous supplions, Sire, d’établir des écoles gratuites où nous puissions apprendre notre langue par principes…. Nous demandons à sortir de l’ignorance, pour donner à nos enfans une éducation saine & raisonnable, pour en former des Sujets dignes de vous servir” (Anonymous, “Petition” 7–8). 30. “On me pardonnera de ne point écrire d’un style élégant, fleuri & exact, comme fait un homme que de longues études ont formé à l’art de composer ainsi; mais j’espère exposer des vérités frappantes, & être conséquente dans mes raisonnemens” (Mouret 467). 31. “Les ténèbres de l’ignorance et des préjugés, et les dangers du luxe et de la frivolité” (Mouret 462). 32. “Utiles à la patrie” (Lemaignan 474). 33. “Pour nos filles avant même celui de nos fils” (Lemaignan 478). 34. “Ces sociétés de citoyennes pourroient encore être chargées de surveiller l’éducation publique…. Des patriotes zélées veilleroient à ce que l’on apprît aux enfans les droits des hommes, le respect et l’obéissance dues à la loi, le devoir des citoyens, les décrets de l’assemblée nationale … au lieu de la légende des saints et l’almanach des miracles?” (Palm D’Aelders, “Lettre” 27). 35. “De l’éducation fade et énervée des cloîtres … vous achèverez votre ouvrage en accordant aux filles une éducation morale, égale à celle de leurs frères; car l’éducation est à l’âme, ce que la rosée est aux plantes; elle la féconde, fait éclore, fortifie, et porte le germe générateur des vertus et des talens à parfaite maturité” (Palm D’Aelders, “Adresse” 40). 36. “Sur la même fondation … une éducation nationale” (Palm D’Aelders, “Plaidoyer” 64).

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37. “Doivent être également admissibles à toutes dignités, places et emplois publics selon leurs capacités, et sans autres distinctions que celles de leurs vertus et de leurs talents” (de Gouges 207). 38. “Toutes les facultés intellectuelles” (de Gouges 206). 39. “Ce sexe est trop intéressé … pour convenir de notre supériorité” (Mme L. 458). 40. “Sont plus susceptibles d’apprendre que les hommes. Moins turbulentes, moins dissipées dans leur enfance” (Mme L. 459). 41. “Gelehrsamkeit … gibt oft einen ungleichen Gang” (La Roche 1: 15). 42. “Bäuerinnen, Künstler- und Handwerksweiber und Töchter verstehen alles, was zu den Berufsarbeiten ihrer Männer gehört” (La Roche 1: 33). 43. “Ich glaube wie Sie, daß die Männer noch nie mit einer besonderen Aufmerksamkeit über unsere Ausbildung nachdachten…. Stärke und Gewalt ist, was die Männer am meisten schätzen…. Denn immer sehen sich die Männer als Herren der ganzen Schöpfung an” (La Roche 1: 170–5). 44. “Warum bildet man uns nicht schon in der ersten Jugend zu Menschen?” (Ehrmann “Anzeige” 5: xxiii). 45. “Wie kann dieses unterdrückte Geschlecht gute Mütter hervorbringen, ehe es gute Bürgerinnen hat?” (Ehrmann, Amaliens 1.7: 77). 46. “Das Gesuch, welches die Natur für die Weiber einreicht” (Hippel, Verbesserung 121). 47. “Der galanten Bastillen, der häuslichen Zwinger und bürgerlichen Verließe, worin sich das schöne Geschlecht befindet” (Hippel, Verbesserung 17–8). 48. “Ist es nicht unverzeihlich, die Hälfte der menschlichen Kräfte ungekannt, ungeschätzt und ungebraucht schlummern zu lassen?” (Hippel, Verbesserung 20–1). 49. “Ohne allen Zweifel bestimmte die Natur das andere Geschlecht zu diesem großen Erziehungsgeschäfte und versah es mit den nötigen Anlagen und Fähigkeiten … um jene große Bestimmung zu erfüllen” (Hippel, Verbesserung 134). 50. “Ehre, Rechte und Belohnungen werden alsdann nicht ein Geschlechts-Prärogativ, sondern Folgen des persönlichen Verdienstes” (Hippel, Verbesserung 143). 51. “Und hysterische und andere angeblich ärgere Übel Leibes und der Seele Gutes und Ehre sind gehoben” (Hippel, Verbesserung 199). 52. “Die Scheidewand höre auf! Man erziehe Bürger für den Staat, ohne Rücksicht auf den Geschlechtsunterschied, und überlasse das, was Weiber als Mütter, als Hausfrauen wissen müssen, dem besondern Unterricht und alles wird zur Ordnung der Natur zurückkehren” (Hippel, Verbesserung 132–3). 53. “Würden die Staatsgeschäfte wiedergebären … einen neuen Himmel und eine neue Erde” (Hippel, Verbesserung 217–8). 54. “Meine gebetenen Gäste von Opponenten” (Hippel, Verbesserung 209). 55. “Die Sklaverei des andern Geschlechts indes bleibt ein Wurm, der nie stirbt, und ein Feuer, das nie verlischt” (Hippel, Verbesserung 47). 56. “Unsere landesmütterlich Sorgfalt” (Maria Theresa 3: 496).

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VI. Generic Expansions

Among the most frequently mentioned characteristics of romanticism is its headlong and impetuous disregard for long-established generic conventions and a corresponding enthusiastic mixture of widely disparate forms that had traditionally been kept separate and distinct. Within the context of nonfictional romantic prose, numerous genres were explored and came to a striking new prominence as the boundaries were extended by the growing need for new modes of expression. The genres treated here — the familiar essay, the periodical, the pamphlet, the literary almanac, and the costumbristic narrative — are not per se new among the romantics: each has a history extending back through the eighteenth century and beyond, but each was put to a distinctive use by romantic writers. Frederick Garber begins his analysis of the romantic familiar essay asking what distinguishes it from other kinds of essays and what it does that others do not. He notes that it tends toward candor and self-disclosure yet takes any notion of self with all due caution; though fragmentary, partial, and provisional, it is inclined toward systematic wholeness, but that inclination arises from lived experience rather than abstract speculation. Departing from the seminal role Montaigne played in the history of the European essay as a means of at once positing and exploring the self, Garber turns to a discussion of Charles Lamb’s contribution to the genre and particularly its dialogic dimension, which in turn leads to an exploration of Friedrich Schlegel’s Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation About Poetry) as one of romanticism’s most important attempts to account for itself. The examination of the Gespräch makes clear that the familiar essay should by no means be regarded as a subordinate literary form but instead as a richly varied mode of expression with essential ties to what many consider fundamentally romantic: dialectics, the dialogue, the conversational, and the familiar. Taking a more encompassing view of a literary institution that often included the essay, John Boening stresses the importance of the periodical in early nineteenth-century literary culture. Though short-lived, the Athenaeum — the periodical edited by August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel (with the important assistance of Schleiermacher) that provided the most important public articulation of early phases of German romanticism — became the locus of a many-voiced conversation and played an important role in shaping the expectations of the reading public. Beginning with the founding of the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review in Great Britain, the appearance of critical literary reviews in major European countries from the Deutsches Museum and the Zeitung für Einsiedler through the Journal des Débats and the Revue des deux Mondes to the Biblioteca Italiana and the Concilatore as well as Cartas españolas and Revista española is assessed. Like the periodical, the almanac is a kind of serial publication, but it typically appeared annually rather than with the greater frequency of most periodical publications. They usually contained a calender but in their presentation of all manner of literary, social, cultural, and educational topics were much more than simple appointment books. From the perspective of the beginning of the twenty-first century when almanacs have forfeited almost all of the currency they once enjoyed, it easy to lose sight of how enormously popular and widely



266 disseminated they were during the first half of the nineteenth century. Although touching on the range of almanacs in North and South America — including some in North American Indian languages — Madison U. Sowell explores their nature as well as their literary and social functions in Germany (where the scholarship has been particularly attentive to the almanac), Italy, and France. Although pamphlets are in no sense serial publications like periodicals and almanacs, they share some of their ephemeral qualities. The fact that during the nineteenth century they were one of the principal means of mass communication can easily be forgotten in an age of widely accessible electronic communication. Pamphlets, moreover, were a mode of expression that attracted the attention of some of the nineteenth century’s most distinguished writers including Büchner, Heine, Foscolo, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Shelley, and Eminescu. Monica Spiridon points out that the pamphlet gained acceptance as a legitimate genre on the boundary of other closely related genres — the essay, oratory, the newspaper editorial, and the religious sermon — and in the world of Realpolitik embodied many of the same dialectical tensions characteristic of romantic thought in general. Her wide-ranging discussion also clearly demonstrates that the romantic pamphlet was in many cases the literary genre closest to political practice, particularly in terms of nineteenth-century pamphleteers’ covert political activity in Germany, France, Italy, Romania, and Poland. The short narrative sketch of traditional manners and customs — the essence of custumbrismo — has long been appreciated as Spain’s most distinctive contribution to international romanticism. The rise of the tradition owes much to the efforts of several writers to preserve in written descriptions the customs of Spain that were rapidly slipping away at time of significant and rapid social change. They — Estébanez Calderón, Mesonero Romanos, and Larra were among the best known — had ready access to the periodical press and, thus, were able to present their compatriots with snapshot-like and often nostalgic portrayals of characteristic indigenous culture. José Manuel Losada surveys the origins and development of this most distinctive aspect of Spanish romanticism and, significantly, shows its close stylistic and sociological links to the portrayal of social types, memorable local practices, and peculiar but often engaging national habits, particularly in France and Great Britain. These nostalgic sketches, thus, emerge as a link between the wide-spread commitment to retrieving and preserving vanishing local traditions that characterized romantic thought from at least Herder on and the depiction of social types exploited so masterfully later in the nineteenth century by Balzac, Dickens, and Zola. S. P. S.



The Romantic Familiar Essay FREDERICK GARBER State University of New York at Binghamton

What is the familiar (conversational, personal) essay? What does it have or do that other modes of the essay do not? Montaigne is widely acknowledged as originator of the essay as we know it. Given that he used terms like “familiar,” “conversational,” or “personal” to describe the body of his work, the pervasive modes of its language and rhetoric, the problem of characterizing the familiar essay and distinguishing it from other varieties may be more formidable than it appears, as uncertain as Montaigne would seem to want it to be. The two most frequently quoted essays on the essay, those by Lukács and Adorno, offer little help in this regard. Lukács’ essay is drenched in his early idealism; Plato is, in his reading, the greatest essayist ever, though he also names Montaigne and the Kierkegaard of the fictive diaries. The essayist seeks through tested, lived experience, but each essay must develop its vision from within. This means that no two can be alike, each voice necessarily unique. Fragmentary by nature, essays express a longing for system but the longing always emerges from life as lived. Adorno is more specific, radically earth-bound, more in conformity with the history of the essay, ultimately more convincing. In Adorno’s view rather than longing for system the essay suspects it. It subverts all claims for wholeness and totalizing, all arguments that ignore the fragmentary nature of existence. Only the essay raises doubts about claims for method. It cherishes the transient, embraces history and the individual with it, rejects all claims for recoverable originary conditions. Adorno finds support in romantic fragment theory (as does Benjamin in his closely related theory of allegory that strongly influenced Adorno). Autonomous, self-sustaining, the essay expresses the personality that creates it. With that question of expression Adorno approaches the mode of the familiar essay, as does Lukács when he emphasized the primacy of unique experience; but they ignore subsidiary divisions, to the extent that there are any, within the essay as form. The most useful study of the familiar essay to date appear in Philip Lopate’s groundbreaking anthology. In his reading the familiar essay is informal, intimate, autobiographical, urbane, conversational, light, open in its form, driving “toward candor and self disclosure” (xxiv). It puts selfhood fully up front, yet takes any notion of self with all the requisite caution. Often melancholy, it needs to control tone so as to keep a complex bundle of attitudes and feelings in a very delicate balance. Without spelling the point out, Lopate implies what is, to my mind, the inevitable conclusion: the familiar essay is a mode within the form, exploring characteristics fundamental to the essay as such but with particular emphases that define the familiar version specifically. Whatever the requisite adjustments and tucking-in, Lopate offers the cleanest definition to date; yet there is another voice to be heard and it makes an additional point that is equally indispensable. In his incisive study of the essay, Graham Good observes that “forming sub-

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genres in terms of tones or style seems to offer very little, in that all essays are more or less familiar” (x). The difference would seem to be in degree rather than kind. After Montaigne, the essay went off in one prominent direction and several sketchier ones, primarily toward English development of the form. Partly under Bacon’s influence, partly through Florio’s translations of Montaigne (published in 1603), English practitioners took over development of the essay, which flourished to the point where it seemed — in fact still seems — to be a native phenomenon indigenous to those isles. Though there are various reasons for the flourishing, they clearly have much to do with a home-grown English sense of English national character. When one thinks of the essay as relaxed, informal, common-sensical, it would seem to represent England as the English envisioned themselves. Related to this reading of self is the relatively early development of the bourgeoisie in England, making the essay an especially congenial form that combines a sense of class and being with an image of good company and easy manners. Figures like Dryden and Cowley, the latter in particular, practiced the familiar essay with fluency and panache. From this brilliant stage the essay developed into the great periodical writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the growth of a market for the essay encouraging the development of the form. Still, though the essays in such periodicals as The Spectator sometimes approach the familiar mode, they skirt all intimacy and show little interest in private self-exploration in the manner of Montaigne. From these lines developed what most critics consider the post-Montaigne apogee of the familiar essay in the writings of Lamb and Hazlitt, with Hunt, De Quincy, and others contributing. That high point shall concern most of the remainder of this study. Despite the example of Montaigne no major body of French work emerged until the eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment began an evolution of the essay into its nineteenthcentury flowering in Nerval, Sainte-Beuve, and Renan. (Rousseau’s Rêveries, masterpieces of the mode, did as much as any to establish its later evolution.) Early skimpiness of production marks the German essay as well, but Enlightenment practices fostered the development of the German version into its nineteenth-century flowering and the achievement of Friedrich Schlegel, master practitioner, not a writer of familiar essays but fully aware of their import (Haas 18–30; for Schlegel see Rohner 1: 15; see also below). Indeed it has been argued that the familiar essay found little interest in Germany until well after Schlegel (Chadbourne). That as-yet-unwritten, comprehensive, and international history of the essay will explore the sociopolitical, sociocultural bases and biases of its various national developments and their varying pace. One needs to deal, for example, with comments like those in a study of Nerval’s “essayisme” that broaches the question of the familiar essay with obvious distaste, asserting that Nerval, with “his well-known modesty and reticence,” would never have touched such a mode; this, after referring to but not quoting a comparison of Lamb and Nerval suggested by Champfleury (Chadbourne 37). “Modesty and reticence” are fascinating terms in the context of the familiar essay, not only because that mode necessarily centers on selfhood but also because those terms have only dubious relevance to Montaigne’s founding texts. His frankness still startles, even upon rereading, some of it — especially some comments on acts of the body — far beyond anything Lamb ever made public. Yet Lamb is aware of such issues, of a reticence so needful that it did much to determine the workings of his mode, how an essay by Lamb sounds, what it expects

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from its readers. He broached the conditions for that sounding in a letter to Taylor, his publisher, on 7 December 1822, in which he drafts a preface to his first collection of essays by Elia. Hoping for a friendly reader who will take these texts as one takes “an after-dinner conversation,” he warms up just enough to see where he is going, then drops the whole idea: “On better consideration, pray omit that Dedication. The Essays want no Preface: they are all Preface. A Preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they do nothing else” (Lamb 848). As for Elia, let him “come forth bare as he was born.” The pseudonymic Elia, addresser of these essays, has to risk total exposure because the preface that would cover him turns out to be redundant, such “talk with the reader” already prevalent throughout. Prefaces address the reader, chat with that addressee. So too do these essays. Lamb knew the history of his genre, its epistolary origins, its basis in the act of addressing. Elia would have to stay exposed, undressed, precisely because of the necessary workings of address. Lamb tried a preface again for the second set of such essays in 1833. This time he turned out a major document in the history of the familiar essay. The preface is by one named only “a friend of the late Elia,” the title announcing what the first sentence would confirm, that the Italian clerk who signed and whose voice uttered these essays is now unquestionably dead (Lamb 135). From that point Lamb balances all manner of ironies, taking up in particular the questions of modesty and reticence. At one point early on, the unnamed author confesses that Elia was a phantom, but he goes on to treat the phantom to an elaborate analysis, producing an outstanding instance of the familiar essay’s pleasure in drawing a “character.” In short the preface is, itself, a familiar essay. As for the public face of the phantom, those who hardly knew him thought him “egotistical.” What they did not know was that, under cover of the first person, he absorbed into his essays events that occurred to “friends and connections,” just as the novelist does, just as the “intenser dramatist” does. Elia is a maker of selves, the making of an Elian essay the making of a self for that essay, that place in its moment. Under cover of his own first person, he utters “the passion uttered by another”; under that passion he utters his own, disguised, “blameless,” “his own story” expressed “modestly.” (This preface anticipates by a century and a half the critic who claimed Lamb lacked modesty and reticence.) Elia’s first person is actually a third person transmuted into an “I.” The maker of a text/self is inevitably a performer, a player. What this maker performs is a play of “I” and “You” and “He” that cannot finally be split into demarcated categories, divided and inscribed in precise distinction. But of course — backing out, insofar as we can, from Elia’s fictive world — that phantom Elia is himself a self-as-text, a front for Charles Lamb. Lamb’s friends knew how to read him, how to take what now seems a kind of text so complex, so labyrinthine in its weavings, that no string could lead to its center. In fact the idea of a center is difficult to construe, Lamb himself an origin easier to think of than to trace. He elaborates implications inherent in the familiar essay from the time of Montaigne, confirming Montaigne’s claim that self and text are consubstantial. In that existential status Lamb finds all manner of implications that make romantic autobiography — including the romantic journal and texts as different as The Prelude and Adolphe — suspect on its face. Lamb develops further ironies in his practice of this genre that always vaunts upfront selfhood. How can we argue upfrontness with all these masks, these disguises? Does such artifice/impersonation challenge Montaigne’s defining practice, his sense of his “nature,” the

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truth of his self? Lamb specifically says it does not, openly echoing Montaigne: “They had not been his, if they had been other than such; and better it is that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him” (135). Montaigne’s argument for sincerity is transferred to nineteenth-century London, seeming to parody but actually confirming the romantic passion for sincerity. Elia (Lamb?) is upfront after all: to impersonate is his nature, to make fictions is his truth. In a genre founded on first persons, selfspeaking, honesty, in a period in which the self had become an object of obsession, he took the familiar essay to intricacies that showed no urge to arrive at an end and were matched in elaboration only in Montaigne. In the work of this stuttering clerk the problematizing of address, the making of “I” and “You” and “He” (we need a four-dimensional screen on which to project such pronouns), were taken ironically, cannily, to intricacies that define the time as well as the form. It is typical of Lamb as unconfessed romantic to personalize such issues. It is equally typical of him to thematize the issues, making them personal by making them part of the speaker’s experience. I use the concept of the personal in the exceedingly complex sense it takes in Lamb’s essays; in, for example, the handling of the personal in “Oxford in the Vacation.” Consider its introductory paragraph, obviously designed as a set of instructions for reading (Lamb 8). Only after working through an extended third person in a labyrinthine sentence does the introductory paragraph reveal itself to be an address to the reader, the “You,” the second person. The sentence/paragraph ends with the name of Elia, that is with (a fictive) “I,” making the set complete (though that has to be qualified because part of the set is fictive, part of it metaphor; only the “You” of the audience has any location outside of the text). Elia runs the gamut in a sentence that makes the reader the equivalent of a connoisseur (sometimes we too get transformed; why should we be left out?). By having the reader, in the person of the connoisseur, pronounce the image he inspects to be “some rare piece” by a Vivarus or a Woollet, Elia offhandedly exalts his own work. But more, by having the figured expert glance at the quis sculpsit, Elia can have the reader glance at the end of the essay and ask, “Who is Elia?” Turning the addressee (“You”) into the connoisseur (“He”) and then back again is only part of the extraordinary shifting of person and attention in this compact paragraph. The text reveals the personal, ends with the most radical questioning of the personal; yet at the same time — given the rapid interchange of “He” and “You” and “I,” their sometime simultaneity within the same person — the text also queries where the personal begins and ends. The paragraph speaks, speaks to, the complexities of the genre in which it takes active part, teasing out issues, endemic since Montaigne, of particular local interest to Lamb’s contemporaries. The rest of the essay tries to answer the question “Who is Elia” and does so with some potent querying of such questions. Elia makes much of the point that he has to work for his living, turning out columns of figures by day and short, discontinuous texts (“sonnets, epigrams, essays”) by night. Oxford is, for “I,” a place one visits on vacations, and there are far fewer of those with the decline of “red-letter days.” When he goes there he goes to perform, his acts performance art, Oxford his theater: “I can here play the gentleman, enact the student…. Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I please” (Lamb 10). In a list of stations and roles in university life, he shows himself performing all the conditions Oxford permits. Selfhood is in part an enactment, and what Elia

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says of antiquity in the following paragraph is what he suggests of himself as enactor: “Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art everything!” (Compare Keats on Shakespeare and negative capability.) In these linked paragraphs the transference is pertinent, exact, joining the self with history, showing the acts of the self to be historical acts. Though Elia is Other to these places, these personages he plays (he “has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic institution” [10]), for the length of these holidays he becomes that which is Other to Elia. Yet, to be most exact — given that he performs these roles because he never filled them in history, given that his defrauding is the basis for his enactments, given, thus, that he is always present within those performances — he is, in those performances, momentarily Other but always, inescapably, he who missed university. There is a sense in which Elia takes a vacation from himself, insofar as he can, does so by assuming fictions. Still, even as he takes that vacation he is never more truly himself. To make the same point from another angle, recall what Elia’s friend would be speaking of in the preface to the later volume: “They had not been his, if they had been other than such.” To be truly Eliatic is to be someone else, to take on Otherness. To be true is to be false; to be another, or Other, is to be even more of an “I.” In Elia’s case his fictions confirm his selfhood, what is “natural” to him. The charge that the familiar essay is “egotistical” (reported in the friend’s preface, heard by us later in the comparison with Nerval) is true in one sense, in the sense that it makes Elia even more of what he is. To go forward at this point we have to go back to Elia’s comments on his profession, their import clearer now that we have seen his impersonations. He begins his answer to “Who is Elia?” with the description of his daily routine as clerk. Only when we get to the performances around Oxford does their full import begin to emerge: part of the answer to the question of Elia’s identity takes in his socioeconomic position, apparent not only in his current role as clerk but in his being deprived of the university life he now seeks to enact. I have already suggested that questions of rank and class seem inherent in the familiar essay, endemic to the mode. No one makes that clearer than Elia, Italian clerk in London, phantom maker of fictions. Those fictions are not only self-consoling; they are also self-confirming. Part of what they confirm is the phantom’s social construction, the socioeconomic aspects of what it means to be Elia. That is not to say that the obsession with selfhood holds only for the “I” that utters the familiar essay. It touches those essays at every point and in every grammatical person. Such essays, we have noted, are fascinated by the “character,” any or all of whom can be subject to the vagaries of “I,” all of whom figure as steps in the stream of consciousness on which these essays ride. “Oxford in the Vacation” begins as we saw it, shifts to the overriding question the essay seeks to answer, shifts to a description of the activities of “I,” regrets the vacation days no longer granted, announces that the scene of this writing is the university associated with some of the ecclesiastical authorities who changed the holidays, moves to the impersonations we have looked at, marvels at the antiquity of some of Oxford’s kitchens, apostrophizes antiquity, speaks therefrom of old books, then mentions “by the way” that he had met G. D. (George Dyer, an old friend of Lamb and Coleridge) poring over some obscure manuscripts — and then he puts the rest of the essay to the service of a character of Dyer. Those are Montaigne-like movements of mind, confirming once again the consubstantiality of self and text, and such is a typical ending of a typical familiar essay (if there is a typical one; no two, as Montaigne affirmed, can be

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precisely alike). It ends as much by accident as by design, concludes without being conclusive, just as one ends a relaxed, private conversation. And yet Lamb wants to have it several ways at once, romantic open-endedness Friedrich Schlegel would understand and a consistency of issues that never leaves the text (Schlegel would understand that too). That is one of the functions of G. D. in “Oxford in the Vacation.” To begin with he was familiar to Lamb’s most select audience, friends like Wordsworth and Coleridge who knew or knew of, and knew what to think of, Dyer. (Note that this suggests a private audience, a particular “You” within the more general “You,” precisely what Montaigne had described in “Au Lecteur.”) Then again, Dyer presents the opportunity for a Theophrastan character of the sort such texts cherished from Seneca’s letters on. Further, Dyer continues the thematic of shifting selfhood, the character responding at the end of the essay to the question with which it began. Building G. D. as otherworldly, absent minded (as he could well afford to be with his “moderate fortune”), Elia happily repeats the story of Dyer’s two visits to a house in Bedford Square. Forgetting on the second visit that he had called at the house only a few hours before and no one being home, had signed the visitor’s book, “he is about to print his second name (his re-script) — his first name (scarce dry) looks out upon him like another Sosia, or as if a man should suddenly encounter his own duplicate!” (Lamb 12). The rest of the essay speaks of his sometime absence from the body “[a]t the very time when, personally encountering thee, he passes on with no recognition — or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised.” The rest of the penultimate paragraph focuses on “You,” the addressee/reader, and then the essay concludes with G. D.’ s happiness among Oxford’s halls and colleges. Thus does Elia continue the issue of the self’s flexibility, its uncertainties, changingness (would a “re-script” of Dyer’s signature produce a precise duplicate? How does that square with Elia’s comments on time and antiquity, given that the few hours between the first and second visits made G. D. a different person the second time around? What about the relation of “re-script” to the first paragraph’s “quis sculpsit”?). Thus does “I” end the essay at what seems a good point to stop, the introductory question continued but never resolved, as though it ever could be. Still, that open-endedness has given us some purchase on the romantic familiar essay. The ongoing shiftingness of “I” (better, its shiftiness), its frequent supplantation by “You” or “He” or both, suggests an ongoing dialogue among nervous personal pronouns (nervous because none seems quite fixed into its position). It is worth recalling that Lukács, among others, put the dialogue on the list of the essay’s progenitors and kindred. Seneca, we also recall, began a letter to Lucilius by quoting Lucilius, putting his correspondent into a dialogue in which he performed several positions at once. Similar complexities occur in Lamb’s own correspondence: master of the familiar letter, he used his correspondence to test positionings in preparation for the essays. Lamb, one should expect, would try out the essay as dialogue, thinking not only of the dialogue in itself but the dialogic elements in this literary form that invests so much in voices speaking to and among themselves, performing multiple addressings. Consider, for example, “Old China.” That title has no more claim to authority, no more obligation to cover more than a starting point, than any of Montaigne’s. The essay begins by talking of old china but at every point touches and pursues other elements, especially the linkage of persons and economics. And if “Old China” returns to old china at the end, it moves with a patent, potent echo of the form that Meyer Abrams has called “The Greater Romantic Lyric,”

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examples of which Lamb would know in, for instance, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “Dejection.” Lamb’s essay, like such lyrics, returns to its beginning but in between has gone through extraordinary flights of the soul. That is, it begins with a ground and ends with a return to that ground, much happening within that circuit. In “Old China” the ground is old china; but the introductory paragraphs had already offered the clue that much more would be broached. The first word in the essay is “I,” and every sentence in the following four paragraphs speaks prominently of “I.” Old china links up with selflhood, and the remainder of the essay dialogically, dialectically, explores that concatenation. When Elia returns to the subject of old china at the end, he returns, at the same time, to its linkage to the Subject. To take this from another angle: what happens at the beginning puts art and “I” in the same context but posits the world of art as foreign, strangely other. Depicted on the old china cup is a “world before perspective” with its own, exceedingly odd, geographies and dimensions. As it stands we cannot be certain whether “far or near can be predicated of their world” since “[h]ere is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver — two miles off.” If we float in water or air they “float about, uncircumscribed by any element” (217). Lamb posits what Keats posits in a poem nearly contemporary, his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Both contemplate the strangeness of art vis-à-vis ourselves, not so much its eternality (that comes from a misreading of Keats’s poem) as its static otherness, problems of the sort Lessing posed in the Laokoon. We handle, fondle, old china, refresh our bodies and souls from it, but puzzle the peculiar dimensions in which its characters are perfectly at home. Our finest, most precious products silently speak their alterity while we speak to each other of them. What that alienness suggests brings Lamb even closer to Keats: Elia’s cousin Bridget (undisguisedly Mary Lamb) laments the loss of the delight they had when they were poor and could not afford those rare books they bought on rare occasions. In his response Elia reminds her that “those natural dilations of the human spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten — with us are long since passed away” (Lamb 220). Those days when they thought nothing of walking thirty miles are no longer days for them. Elia makes his predictable move, bringing our fleetingness to the table. In “Oxford in the Vacation” it came from apostrophizing antiquity. In “Old China” it comes in the dialogue’s fluent movement from what they can now afford to what they can no longer do. The china cup as text, the cup as domestic art, turns Montaigne’s sense of the protean into this city-bred flâneur’s sense of mortal transience. Once again Lamb’s work can be seen as a comment on contemporaries, an echo and an extension. “Old China” is also a comment on itself, just as Plato’s dialogues are, just as Seneca’s dialogic letters are comments on themselves. Because they are dialogues they show address in action, performed by separate characters who alternate positions from “You” to “I” and back and even occasionally to “He.” To put a familiar essay in the form of a dialogue is to reify the interplay of pronouns in such essays, to put it out on stage. We have already spoken of Lamb as a performer, his work a kind of performance art (related, surely, to his lifelong love of theater). He is never more openly so than in this essay/dialogue in which, in response to another kind of art, he offers, dramatized, the image of his own, its workings laid bare in this model. “Old China” represents (in several senses of the term) the kind of which it is one, stands as synecdoche. It shows the familiar essay to be a mode of dialectic, dialogic at its base. It reports a conversation too laid back, too familiar, to be anything like a debate. The familiar essay

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enfolds a form of community, its talk community speech composed of shifting acts of address in intricate relation, each performer taking turns as “I” and “You.” The mode is, at once, dialogue and conversation, what the term “Gespräch” encloses within itself. Friedrich Schlegel explores those meanings in his “Gespräch über die Poesie,” one of the time’s major attempts to explain itself to itself. As such his text suggests how conversation and dialogue can be crucial to such attempts, not only as modes but ideas, as ways of acting that are also ways of being-in-relation. That calls attention to Schlegel’s narrative frame, the way the text changes modes, the modes into which it changes. In his introduction to the edition in the Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, Hans Eichner suggests that the text’s character as symposium came from Schlegel’s profound familiarity with Plato (Schlegel lxxxviii). That form permits him not only to depict a variety of positions through a variety of voices but to model those voices on his close and chatty circle of friends in literary Jena, carefully, subtly modeling a series of personalities. Schlegel’s text is, at once, dialectical and intimate, conversational and, in the presentations written for the fictive meeting, self-consciously formal. In a striking fusion of meaning and mode this essay/symposium that contains a gathering of essays flaunts a variety of forms, just as it unfolds a variety of ideas in an argument that mirrors the fertile chaos it promotes. Schlegel wants us to attend to where the title points. After the title itself that pointing continues with the activities of the “I,” the narrator whose comments begin the exploration of mode by chatting not only of his interests (his mode at this point that of the familiar essay) but of the friends with whom he shares them. Speaking of how he enjoys discussing poetry with poets and the poetically inclined (“Dichtern und dichterisch Gesinnten” [286]), the narrator describes a typically casual and impromptu meeting of the group, one that leads to a decision to prepare, for a subsequent occasion, a set of formal lectures on fundamental topics. Most of Schlegel’s text is a report of their next meeting, the narrative reproducing the essays the friends deliver. It shifts in tone and mode, seeking variety. This puts the question of conversation — its looseness of framework, its tendency to ramble, its sense of the informal, spontaneous, and intimate — into a context of discourses that meditate upon discourse. Though Schlegel’s Gespräch is not an impromptu it contains the report of one as well as the texts of essays prepared by members of a group that commonly worked out ideas in spontaneous conversation. In this text the mode of expression is as much a part of the meaning as are the lecture on mythology and the prevalent concept of chaos. What the narrator narrates is not only a report of two meetings; he speaks also of ways of speaking. Modes make much of the meaning of Schlegel’s dialogue; more precisely the text demonstrates that modes make much meaning. The Gespräch needs to be taken not only as an exploration of current theorizing but also as a speculation on ways of speculating, a limited thesaurus of kinds (the formal essays also differ among themselves in manner of presentation, from the cool to the rhapsodic). Further, the various speakers represent various kinds, represent them by performing them. Schlegel’s text matches Lamb’s in its awareness of performance, its demonstration that the speaking of a kind — chatty or formal, cool or rhapsodic — is the playing of a role. Those players include the narrator, who approaches his role in a tone located somewhere between the casual modes he speaks of and the formal he reproduces. Taking performance as a group endeavor with particular roles and positionings (closely related to the roles and positionings of “I,” “You,” and “He”), we learn much from Schlegel’s text about romantic sociality, especially

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its relation to such issues as conversation. For example, the “I” remarks that the poet is a social being (“ein geselliges Wesen” [286]), countering well-known contemporary claims that the poet is an isolated being, claims Schlegel would have known from at least the Wertherian model and that would echo even farther, at least as far as John Stuart Mill. He shows his gathering of poets and the poetically inclined to be socially intent, needful of a collective. René and Childe Harold would have to prove their claims for the value of the isolated, single/singular voice against the contrary claims for speaking made by Schlegel’s more sociable set. That group would readily understand the essay’s focus on conversation, the basis in chat that comes with essays of all kinds, the familiar kind in particular; that is, they would understand Lamb, his differences from Wordsworth. Whatever the considerable differences between the writer of Lucinde and the writer of “Old China,” they share an elaborate sense of what it means to converse. The social context we saw in the Epistles of Seneca and the Essais of Montaigne would link in Lamb’s time (and, partly through his agency, thereafter) with aspects of the romantic that Schlegel worked hard to promote. That is one of the ways in which “Oxford in the Vacation” connects to the seemingly very different “Gespräch über die Poesie”: each is grounded in conversation, and conversation is fundamental to various, disparate romanticisms. The familiar essay is patently no minor sport of the time but a rich mode of prose with fundamental ties to what many readers see as fundamentally romantic: dialectic, the dialogue, the conversational, the familiar. Only with such understanding can we suggest, with tighter precision, the context and substance of the romantic familiar essay, in particular its relation to different romanticisms. On, for example, the issue of the conversational — so essential to any reading of the familiar essay that it will occupy much of the remainder of this study — there is a largely unexplored history with a richness of example in the century and a half from Swift to Sainte-Beuve. That history explains a great deal about the works and workings of Lamb and offers a crucial corollary to the history of the essay that starts with Seneca’s letters. At the beginning of the sequence relative to our issues an English neo-classicism, partial to mordant ironies, shares the literary scene with a series of periodicals unmatched in any time. Both together lead through a sinuous history in England, Germany, and France to a series of causeries (chats) addressed by Sainte-Beuve to a French bourgeois audience that had once known the very different tones of Volupté. An outline of that history will indicate the place of the familiar essay within it. Somewhere between 1708 and 1710 Swift sketched out several “Hints Toward an Essay on Conversation,” predecessor to his lengthier “Introduction to Polite Conversation” published in 1738. Swift makes much of the status of conversation as a marker for our civility. His “Hints” offer suggestions for avoiding errors in conversation: talking too much, talking too much of oneself, and so forth. People who met together in “the politer age of our fathers” parted satisfied “with each other and with themselves” (Swift 71). They knew that conversation has a quasi-Horatian purpose, “to entertain and improve those we are among, or to receive those benefits ourselves” (71). That form of dulce et utile is as much a mark of class as of particular modes of relation. Most precisely it is a marker of classes in relation, the members among themselves and, in turn, among other classes. Now, that “politer age” departed, Swift regrets its highpoint, “the peaceable part of King Charles the First’s reign” (74). More generally (and more flattering to models such as Charles, if they exist in our time), “human nature is most debased, by the abuse of that faculty, which is held the great distinction between

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men and brutes” (73–4). The values of this class turn on what it means to be human. We are not far, it seems, from the last book of Gulliver. The “Hints” may well have been preliminary notes to the “Polite Conversation.” The later text, written by a “Simon Wagstaff,” supplies a collection of model sentences for conversations on various occasions, much as Richardson wrote a series of letters for various occasions (they led to Pamela). Thus does Swift address the audience for The Spectator’s teachings. Those readers would be attracted by a series of examples of “conversation between persons of quality” (201), the putative audience for these models (of course persons of quality were themselves part of that audience, with certain specific ironies reserved for themselves). But the mockery surreptitiously suggested three decades earlier emerges more openly, broadly, in this tongue-incheek treatise. Simon Wagstaff’s collection sums up the “genius, humour, politeness and eloquence of England” (203), which far exceeds all Europe in the art of conversation. But these conversers, the people of quality — “courtiers, male and female, but principally … maids of honour” — turn out to be vulgar fools (210). Wagstaff collects, for their benefit, a series of ancient witticisms, none less than a century old, to help them through hard moments. The objects of his irony extend from tasteless, ignorant courtiers to potentially dupeable bourgeois students of upper-class manners. Covering a broad swath of society he affirms the social nexus of conversation and demonstrates several kinds of failure of relation. In order to show his sentences in action he shapes his study into three dialogues and, whatever else that does, it confirms his understanding of the dialogic, the dialectical, the play of “I,” “You,” and “He,” what those factors mean for the conversational. Whatever their different milieus, their different intentionalities, Swift knew the basic issues of address, relation and community that Montaigne knew, that Schlegel and Lamb were to know. Henry Fielding wrote a similar “Essay on Conversation” in 1736 (published in 1743) and Lord Chesterfield wrote on the subject, as did Johnson, Addison, and Steele. The question of conversation fascinated English figures from the aristocracy down, through to those bourgeois who aspired to the sort of manners that would polish their money as well as themselves. They looked, that is, for codes, public and therefore recognizable. Conversation was clearly a place (more precisely, it occupied certain places) where such codes could be both enacted and observed. Lamb would pick up on such issues in his “gentle” parodies of local gentility, for example his enactment of university behavior when he went to Oxford on vacation. Aristocracy to bourgeois, when they got together on all but the most formal occasions (and even on some of those) they conversed, understood that they had to. One way of showing they understood was to commission paintings of themselves going about their conversing business, not at coffee houses or soirées but at home, among family and friends, at ease and intimate in the way the British were supposed to be. That is one of the fundamental reasons for the popularity of “conversation pieces” among clients of eighteenthcentury painters, images derived, in their mode, from Dutch genre work but largely, as some critics have suggested, a British phenomenon. Edmund Pillsbury calls it “that distinctly British genre of small-scale, informal portraiture” (D’Oench vii). If the term is now frequently used for theater pieces based in conversation, that affirms the habit of enactment that went with conversation pieces from their heyday in the British eighteenth century. Such pieces took part in the portraiture that rendered certain levels of socioeconomic

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achievement. They record what has been accomplished, if not by oneself then by one’s ancestors, the silent, invisible part of the community depicted. Conversation pieces may be indoor or outdoor, different in what they can show and therefore in their approach to showing that one has arrived at a desirable status or has, it seems, always been there. In either case they were domestic, sometimes depicting a single figure, sometimes communities of two, but often expanded to include familiars and good friends. Informal and collective, they showed fashionable people at ease in their ordinary clothes, reading, playing cards, writing letters, daydreaming, taking comfortable moments between more public and formal activities. Interior pieces often focused quietly on the things of the owner’s world, busts, paintings of landscapes or ancestors, unostentatious furniture that was clearly as much of quality as the personages who used it. At times such tables held tea sets of patently quality china (Chardin and Cézanne would understand the sense of such things), probably as old as the kind Lamb treasured and splurged on in his earlier, less affluent years (Lamb knew what Chardin and Cézanne knew). Often there were windows, not bulking large in the mise en scène but restrainedly there all the same, looking out not at the next door neighbor’s walls but at open lands, parks, and uncultivated fields. Outdoor conversation pieces took the scene into nature, arguing, as Ann Bermingham has shown, for nature’s approval of these folks and their achievements, now, in effect, naturalized (Bermingham 14–33). Status is approved and confirmed simply by putting one into one’s place: who one is gets affirmed by where one is and (we can afford to relax, dress casually, speak intimately if at all) how one comports oneself there. If some of these figures may be, in other, less private surroundings, the vulgar fools Swift made certain courtiers out to be, they are at the same time shrewd enough to gauge the public code that takes in what one does in moments of private leisure. In fact we are not very far from the tone of the familiar essay, itself, as we saw, an enactment. Lamb was as cognizant of codes as any of the figures in the conversation pieces, as adept at making codes work as any of the painters of such pieces. In fact it would make much sense to treat the essay on “Old China” as one of Lamb’s shrewd verbalizations of this popular visual form. It clearly contributed significantly to his adaptation of Montaigne. It contributed at least as much to the lyrics Lamb’s friend Coleridge, writing at the turn of the century, would call “conversation poems.” Coleridge calls only one of his poems a conversation poem: “The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem,” published in 1798. Even that one-time naming has its complexities, the designation shifting, in different publications, from “conversation” to “conversational.” (At one point there is no designation at all.) Coleridge was clearly concerned with specifying his mode, his attentiveness stemming not only from the word’s derivation but the tonalities he was adding to the sense of “conversation.” Scholars have made a convincing case for a group of his early poems as conversation poems, beginning with “The Eolian Harp” in 1795 and culminating in “Dejection: An Ode,” written April 4, 1802. That grouping defines a tendency in the early Coleridgean lyric, a mode of extraordinary importance in the history of the romantic lyric and its successors in figures as different as Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. That he calls it conversation or conversational suggests not only his sense of stance and tonality but also the surprising after-life of the conversation piece, hitherto seen largely in its eighteenth-century frame. Coleridge clarifies crucial elements of a complex history in which he takes an important part, a history that will lead to Lamb, Hazlitt, and beyond.

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That this history includes an evolvement from the conversation piece to the conversation poem comes clear in the earliest poem of the group, “The Eolian Harp.” It begins by establishing a setting that is one of the group’s defining factors. His “pensive Sara,” her “soft cheek reclined” on his arm, shares with him a “Cot” overgrown with jasmine and myrtle, flowers he sees as emblems of “Innocence and Love.” This is a moment in a honeymoon scene, a moment looking back to the “late light” of the clouds (now, strangely, “saddening round”), the local sounds as much of silence as of the sea’s “stilly murmur.” Alone, intimate, at ease in their surroundings, they inhabit what is less a scene than a mise-en-scène, place, person, detail, and tonality working in mutual definition. It is the same mise-en-scène one finds in the conversation piece, and versions of it appear, with more or less detail, in all the Coleridgean lyrics that have been called conversation poems. That climate continues through “The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem,” by which time the subtitle confirms what many readers of those lyrics would recognize, its derivation from a popular mode of portraiture with specific, wellunderstood links to a socioeconomic system. That sense of the social ground of the conversation piece emerges in the prevalent cast of the places in these poems, the openly humble surroundings: the “Cot” (capitalized) in “The Eolian Harp” establishes the type for the settings that followed. Coleridge’s point is social as well as personal, but that is only one of the intricacies, the multiple emphases, these poems generate. It seems that the cot in “The Eolian Harp” is also the site of a theological/metaphysical quarrel between the lovers, he speculating on a heresy, a pantheism she cannot tolerate. Those ironies affect not only our reading of the poem’s history but the tone of its mode as well. They turn the bourgeois setting of the informal portrait into the scene of a humble condition that, as it turns out in Coleridge’s case, does not offer as much ease as the tradition wants it to show. One senses a skepticism over the truth of any such scenes, whether pieces or poems. “Conversation,” then, becomes a sign of public intimacy and domestic ease, informality in style, a certain communality of which we have seen verbal versions since Seneca and Montaigne, of which the closing century had known many visual versions that were to culminate in the ironies of Gainsborough’s outdoor scenes (Bermingham 28–33). Coleridge knows the conditions of that visual history (he must have seen a number of conversation pieces), knows where he is coming from, what he is leading to. “Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement” (1795, just after “The Eolian Harp”) begins with a similar scene (“Low was our pretty cot”). But then — the likes of Gainsborough in mind — the poem brings in a “wealthy son of Commerce,” sauntering by on the Sabbath, who pauses, eyes their cottage and says (the reader, one hopes, keeping “The Eolian Harp” in mind) that they “were bless’d.” Thus does Coleridge locate the scene in relation to a bourgeois context, their visitor out of the world of the conversation pieces, likely with some on his walls. The designation of “The Nightingale,” three years later, as a conversation poem confirms what the lyrics had been saying all along. The series continues through the magnificent “Frost at Midnight,” which takes the honeymoon scene to an evening vigil with his babe sleeping beside him, and it concludes in the personal collapse imaged in “Dejection: An Ode.” Such threats to personality were the origin of the tensions suggested as early as the lovers’ quarrel in “The Eolian Harp,” a spat that hints at what will finally emerge as a fundamental disorder. The ironies extend not only to Coleridge’s play with the conversation piece but his attempts to locate it in humbler surroundings. His

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sociopolitical claims undermined by endemic flaws of self, the whole edifice comes down. Lyric intimacies were not enough to save those claims but they showed, whatever the ironies, how conversation could be developed in a secluded romantic frame. Elia, close reader of Coleridge, knew what to make of all that. His own conversational texts reveal his amused awareness of what such ironies could do. The shift in social scene from coffee house and soirée to the private get-togethers of the relaxing well-to-do to the tighter intimacies of the conversation poem calls, inevitably in this age, for a dialectical contrary. The latter would carry conversation from such closely focused enclosures to sublimer spheres and language. Adam Müller supplied a version of that dialectics in “Vom Gespräch,” an essay on current politics published in 1816 from a lecture delivered in 1812. Those dates make him contemporaneous to Lamb and Hazlitt as well as Müller’s friend, Friedrich Schlegel, to whom the essay pays homage. What Coleridge did with single figures — bride, friend, son — Müller does with nations and their populace working in grand “Gespräch.” They engage in “Konversation” that drastically shifts the scale (but not the conditions or methods) of the dialogic practices seen in intimate groups. He models his ideas on “französische” and “britische Gespräche,” (483–4). Müller draws on a well-established tradition, modern ponderings of which were more than a century old, and builds on the conditions of conversational intimacy to form a grander dialogue. He projects the subjective onto a scale that mirrors the private and social in the most public arenas; projects, that is, the acts of the self on the greater world. In doing so he reiterates several central gestures of the romantic self in relation. Indeed, relation as he describes it is radical to experience, from the individual self to communities within the world and, for Müller finally, to the world itself. Speaking of the “Verhältnisse der Dinge untereinander” (484) in as general a sense as Wordsworth does in “Tintern Abbey,” one of the touchstones of romantic experience, Müller goes deeper than any we have seen in assessing the conversational as universal practice, found at every level of being: what he suggests for nations and their citizens, is, he cannily implies, only the most natural of acts. Whatever the level involved, the genuine Gespräch builds on such meetings and is composed of conversation, the speech of convergences. It involves a play (“Spiel”) of roles (480), “Spiel” at least partly suggesting that we are subject to chance and accident (“Zufall”). The true, effective Gespräch involves a diligent counter-voice, another “Redner” (converser) who is not only contrary to us but “einig” (at one) as well. Dialogue takes place within a mottled, tense tonality, built on a dialectic of likeness and difference, agreement and disagreement. Drawing on the ways personalities work in encounter he shows that what is good for two can also be good for thousands and eventually for all the world. The dialogic play of the contented landowner; of the poet with his nervous bride and then his child and his childhood self; of Elia the fashioned taker (faker) of roles who, at every turn, vaunts his desires to his readers — all these figures own the potential for, set the conditions for, that political romanticism argued brilliantly in Müller’s essay. They are models of the conversation the time needs to enact. All these figures are enactors, dramatic personae of a period that Müller sees in broad and grand socio-cultural terms. He pushes the model of conversation back to the court of Louis XIV (recall how Swift sees the great moment of courtly conversation in the court of Charles the First); then, as though to balance off royalism with a democratic scene, he suggests that many such models have their basis in the great institution of the British Parliament, now a thousand

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years old and still the locale of conversation at its most effective. He hopes for such an institution in contemporary Germany, which needs its own mode of national conversation; but Germany’s world is too fragmented, split, “zerfallen” (fallen to pieces) to support intranational conversation, not to speak of the nation speaking in an international one. He ends by extolling Lessing, master of dialogue, model for all Germans. The final words of the essay refer to the unnamed Friedrich Schlegel, the Lessing of modern times. If the “Gespräch” is “die Seele aller Rede” (the soul of all speech [492]) Schlegel is the master soul-maker of his time, a mode of exaltation Lamb would love to have at his mercy. Hazlitt would have too though in a very different style, his judgments and sardonicism more directly put. He preferred a matter-of-fact analysis that would expose the weakness of words that were weightier than called for, inappropriate to essay tone. More overtly a theorist in the genre he shared with Lamb, Hazlitt saw shrewdly into the natural history of the familiar essay, saw its Montaignesque bases and its British derivations, wrote masterly essays in both modes. “A Farewell to Essay-Writing,” confessional, self-exploratory, deliberate Montaignisme, displays his skills at echoing the master, Hazlitt adapting that mode to his own needs as a master of the craft. In that not-quite-final essay he wanted to show that he still could do anything in that style and was leaving because he chose to; and the “Farewell” does show his control of a middle level of language, what he had spoken of for years as conversational. Yet Hazlitt is not only a master practitioner but the time’s chief British theorist of conversation, especially aware of how it affects the familiar essay. If he says little about the genre’s history, he is so adept at modern theories of conversation that he refers to Swift’s essay on “Polite Conversation” at precisely the right place, knowing how it establishes a century of speculation (Hazlitt 17: 68). Hazlitt’s reading triangulates the modern familiar essay and the modern theory of conversation, showing how the work of Lamb and Leigh Hunt (and, of course, his own) stands at the intersection of two dense histories and makes the most of that meeting. He shows this largely through analyses of language, especially the relation of words to the communal order, good writing to social decorum. Language speaks of class, the nation’s cultural and social systems, as much as it speaks of craft, Hazlitt’s frequent preoccupation. The language that interests him most, especially as it affects the writing of the modern essay, is grounded in and echoes the history of the bourgeoisie, its claims and aspirations. Hazlitt is nowhere more explicit on that point than in “On Familiar Style,” especially its introductory passage. One must not, he argues, confuse familiar style with vulgar and random writing. Precise, pure, such style rejects “all unmeaning pomp,” the low, the loose, the unconnected, the slipshod (Hazlitt 8: 242). One looks, that is, for “the best word in common use.” “Common” is a key; so also is the sense that the style he describes is “the true idiom of the language,” what English is all about. “To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation” (242). That is, to write (to be) true English is to be genuinely familiar, conversing in the way customary to inhabitants of that isle (at least some inhabitants). To be essentially English is to do what comes naturally in speaking and writing: “to write naturally is the same thing in regard to common conversation, as to read naturally is in regard to common speech” (242). That equates the familiar with the best English, conversation with the language as it ought to be written. It also comes close to claiming the familiar essay as such for writers of the English language or (Montaigne always in mind) for those who

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had shown the English how to write familiarly, put conversation in print. The history his essays speak of, running from Montaigne and Bacon through Addison and Steele to contemporaries like Lamb and Hunt, claims Hazlitt’s native discourse as the universal model; claims, in effect, that the best native demeanor, the sort that fosters such writing, has as much to do with cultural decorum as with its choicest expressions, a decorum he identifies with English ways of being. “You must steer a middle course”: that not only echoes an Aristotelian golden mean, shunning the manner of the pulpit or the stage as much as one shuns the vulgar and clownish; it also sounds the energetic chat of the finest English conversation. Still, whatever their chauvinism, Hazlitt’s theories of the familiar-conversational affirm the grounding of language in a perpetual mimesis of elements in the social order. They clarify fundamentals in the history that preceded and that which followed as well. But Hazlitt did not stop there in his study of fundamentals. Convinced by Swift’s connection of language and daily demeanor, he explores that issue further in several essays on conversation, class, and profession (“On the Conversation of Authors,” “On the Conversation of Lords”) and also several essays on the relations of writing and speaking (“On the Difference between Writing and Speaking,” “On Old English Writers and Speakers”), all of which extend his studies of language and being-in-the-world. That issue also emerges in essays addressed to associated questions, for example “On the Prose Style of Poets.” Style, he says in that essay, must be “allied to spirited conversation” (Hazlitt 12: 7). In someone like Leigh Hunt “the genuine master-spirit of the prose-writer is there; the tone of lively, sensible conversation.” Hunt’s “familiar and miscellaneous papers have all the ease, grace, and point of the best style of Essay writing…. [He] inherits more of the spirit of Steele than any man since his time” (16–7). That is the spirit of The Spectator, which educated its readers not only in what to say where and when but, surreptitiously, on what it means to speak of language as representation. Steele and, later, Lamb stage-managed these issues, in effect acting out a sociolinguistics. Hazlitt put the issues more directly, though his sense of an essay’s voice made him as much a stagemanager, in his own manner and mode, as any in his line. The familiar, we see again, is finally a mode of performance. Of course it has always been that, performing chat at least since Seneca, performing significant romantic versions in several figures we have inspected. Yet there are romanticisms and romanticisms, and the few attempts to place the familiar essay as such within a romantic context miss a number of major issues, miss the fuller tenor of the romantic familiar essay, its bases and biases. Gerald Monsman makes some of the best remarks on this subject, all in relation to Lamb but extendable to others. Elia’s essays are “sly critiques of the central dogmas of romanticism” (Monsman 16). Though sympathetic to the Lyrical Ballads Lamb sharply qualifies “the Coleridgean notion of the reconciliation of opposites and the Wordsworthian and romantic doctrine of presence — the claim that hidden places of power are open to the imagination under certain circumstances.” Opposites, Monsman argues, do not reconcile in Lamb, and that openness is, without question, one of Lamb’s central effects (as it is in the familiar essay in general, a point Monsman does not make). Less convincingly, he sees Lamb arguing that “any wholly straightforward correspondence between the self and ultimate reality is a hoax” (17). But that assumes the concept of a transcendent, holistic reality, and the reality Lamb describes is

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anything but that. Lamb undercuts all nostalgia (especially his own) by showing “the destabilizing and empty spaces of the past” (44). As Monsman puts it, Lamb’s “all-encompassing nimbus of negation undermines the absence of the glory of the past and the priority of the imagination” (44). One should also add that such a view destabilizes that strong central self on which the concept of the imagination is predicated, making it possible at all. Montaigne’s notion of the consubstantiality of self and text should also come in at this point and be extended to a consubstantial self, text, and universe, not only in Lamb but in Montaigne and much of the history of the familiar essay. Monsman later speaks of Lamb and the demonic. Lamb, he suggests, rejects the Wordsworthian search for a “metaphysical plenitude” because he fears that it will generate a terrifying and self-referential “absence of meaning”: “Lamb therefore rejects the visionary and demonic poetry of the egotistical sublime and replaces it with a prose model of a safe and nourishing social reality” (56). But such an overall social reality is as questionable in Lamb or Hazlitt as in many of their romantic compeers. Safety appears in Lamb and Hazlitt only in small, select communities, groups of friends at a related social occasion (Hazlitt makes much of these) or, in Lamb’s case, the community of two that Elia and his cousin Bridget make between themselves. Social reality as such is no more safe and nourishing than the romantic argument for transcendence that, Monsman rightly argues, Lamb effectively rejects. Monsman’s generally fine study falls short on two crucial issues. He says nothing about the history of the familiar essay, inseparable from everything it came to mean to the romantics and beyond. His study also suffers significantly from a reading of romanticism that confines romantic doctrines to the work (some of the work) of Wordsworth and Coleridge, continuing the mistaken argument of many Anglo-American critics that their work is coterminous with romanticism, finally defines its character. That too is a question of history, the sort that omits Blake and Byron and those of their European contemporaries for whom the organic and its attendant metaphors, as well as its extension into poetics and the reading of self, were never fully acceptable. Monsman unwittingly shows this dispute at work within his own reading and some of the contradictions therein. He argues, accurately, that Coleridge’s conversation poems permit only “the most precarious ‘reconciliation of opposites’ or defeat it altogether” (16). Yet, in a passage we have already noted, several sentences later, he speaks of romantic dogma, including in it Wordsworth’s doctrine of presence and “the Coleridgean notion of the reconciliation of opposites.” Such flat-out contradiction emerges not only from a reading of Coleridge that puts aspects of his work into separate compartments but, again, from a cripplingly narrow reading of romanticism as such. It would be quite another issue if Monsman regarded such contradictions as basic to romantic dogma, saw endemic aporia as the tenor and form of that dogma. Sometimes contradictions emerge from the clash of various “schools” (Byron contra Wordsworth, to continue with British models); sometimes they emerge within a single figure: Coleridge, for instance, sported such antinomies not only among several elements of his work but within individual texts, dramatically so in the conversation poems. Could Coleridge have thought of such poems as conversational because that mode suggests, in its chatty, rambling discourse, the casualness of daily speech, that random thinking which often results in bundlings of contradiction? We looked at a tight, brief history of conversation that makes such an argument credible. It defines conversation as a particular mode of rhetoric with its own rules and purposes, its own

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intentionality. Chat cannot be held to the rigorous consistency we have the right to demand from a philosophical tract. For one thing, each of us plays several roles in such chat (consider Coleridge as bridegroom and philosopher in “The Eolian Harp”), and so various a collection of very different positions cannot be expected to yield a firm consistency. Coleridge’s roles in these poems of conversation are often inconsistent, discontinuous among themselves, however coherent each position might be. Those roles are precisely as discontinuous as many arguments and positions established within the poems, and that is because the roles represent those arguments and positions. That makes the organic, the totalizing and continuous, a single separate stance within a condition of being and not that being’s masterplot. If we seem to be edging toward the Schlegel of the Athenaeum, there are good reasons for that. Any reading of theories of the essay, familiar or otherwise, comes eventually to the phrase “discontinuous prose” (we heard Bacon speak of its alternate, “dispersed meditations”). That phrase needs a denser, more precise definition, given not only its frequent use but what happens when the essays of Montaigne or Lamb or Sainte-Beuve are collected into a book and we uncover within such a book all sorts of consistencies — steps that develop into tracks, a reappearing voice, tonalities as positions, readings of the world that we can call, say, “Montaignesque.” “Discontinuous” has to mean that the pieces are separate and distinct, each coterminous only with itself. Like a Schlegelian fragment each has within itself all that it takes to be itself, whatever happens to its meanings (those meanings will certainly expand, take on all manner of relation) when the pieces are collected into a bound bundle of essays. Discontinuity, then, is in the nature of such pieces, fundamental to their character. Indeed we are often surprised when we collect separate essays and find the collection revealing (more accurately, creating, since they did not exist before) unsuspected linkages. Discontinuous prose does not change in character, become purely continuous prose, when individuals become a crowd. We look at the pieces differently but that does not compel us to reject their previous discontinuousness, to see it as merely transient, the character of a phase. We do with essays what we do with letters or lyric poems or fragments or aphorisms or entries in a journal: all of those retain their discontinuous ways but add (reveal or create) further aspects of that character when seen in collective context. They add other modes of relation but do not change in kind. To put it another way: collecting the disparate and discontinuous creates a dialogue, brings out a potential for dialectic within the discontinuous; but no matter the degree to which it exercises that potential it always remains, at some level, separate, self-substantiating, able to get by alone. Though Schlegelian-style fragments suggest the split, the broken-off, they are completely what they are, fundamentally independent and sufficient unto themselves, wholly, totally fragments whatever their place within other wholes. The familiar essay fits in precisely with such a “system” (that term, in any such context, has to be ironic). “Old China” begins with a pair of paragraphs inhabited by a selfhood that cannot settle down, stay constant or consistent. A set of instructions for reading signals to the reader what to expect in what follows: a tendency to wander that well-made narratives have to abhor. Such texts rarely come to a conclusion on any subject but, as Montaigne showed, simply end at some point, end in the way of the semicolon rather than the way of the full stop. This happens at the end of “Old China” where the reader meets a condition so ambiguous and ambivalent — does Elia or does he not lament the poor old days? — that no full-stop conclusion



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can close its openness. Further — given the model of, say, “Oxford in the Vacation” — we cannot confidently guess where such an essay would wander next, were it to continue. These essays have less in common with Aristotelian plots than with stream of consciousness sequences; more with Don Juan than with The Prelude; more with Swift and Sterne and Schlegel than with Novalis and Lamartine and the Sainte-Beuve of Volupté; more with conversation than the soliloquies of the artist. Those aspects of romanticism that spoke the discourse of discontinuity, romantic irony for example, offer a congenial context for the time’s familiar essays, a complicit, collusive milieu that finds its ultimate place in a like reality. Montaigne’s consubstantiality of self and text, already suggested in the letters of Seneca, promoted by every version of the familiar essay, finds a relevant echo in the existential world of texts like Kater Murr that house the discontinuous at every point and level. As I suggested earlier such essays are not spots but integral to the time. They speak a proper discourse that takes in dialogue, dialectic, the conversational, the familiar; most encompassing of all, the discontinuous. They remain a defining product we are just starting to understand.

References Adorno, Theodor. 1968. “Der Essay als Form.” In Rohner, 69–94. Bacon, Francis. 1985. The Essays. Ed. John Pitcher. London: Penguin. Bermingham, Ann. 1986. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860. Berkeley: U California P. Chadbourne, Richard. 1982. “Gerard de Nerval’s ‘Essayism.’” The French Essay. Ed. A. Maynor Hardee. Columbia, SC: U South Carolina P. 35–42. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1969. Poetical Works. London: Oxford UP. D’Oench, Ellen G. 1980. The Conversation Piece: Arthur Devis & His Contemporaries. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art. Friedrich, Hugo. 1991. Montaigne. Ed. Philippe Desan. Trans. Dawn Eng. Berkeley: U California P. Good, Graham. 1988. The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay. London and New York: Routledge. Haas, Gerhard. 1969. Essay. Sammlung Metzler 83. Stuttart: Metzler. Hazlitt, William. 1967. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Ed. P. P. Howe. 21 vols. New York: AMS. “A Farewell to Essay-Writing.” 17: 313–20. “On Familiar Style.” 8: 242–8. “On the Prose Style of Poets.” 12: 5–17. Lamb, Charles. 1935. The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb. New York: Random House. Lopate, Philip. 1995. The Art of the Personal Essay. New York: Anchor Books. Lukács, Georg. 1968. “Über Wesen und Form des Essays.” In Rohner, 32–54. Monsman, Gerald. 1984. Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer: Charles Lamb’s Art of Autobiography. Durham: Duke UP. Montaigne, Michel de. 1958. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford UP. ———. 1962. Œuvres Complètes. Eds. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat. Paris: Gallimard. Müller, Adam. 1968. “Vom Gespräch.” In Rohner, 480–94. Rohner, Ludwig. 1968. Deutsche Essays: Prosa aus zwei Jahrhunderten 1. Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1967. “Gespräch über die Poesie.” Charakteristen und Kritiken I. Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe II. Ed. Hans Eichner. 284–362. Seneca. 1969. Letters from a Stoic. Trans. Robin Campbell. Baltimore: Penguin. ———. 1988. Seneca: 17 Letters. Trans. C. D. Costa. Wiltshire: Aris and Phillips. Swift, Jonathan. 1907. “Hints Toward an Essay on Conversation.” Literary Essays. Ed. Temple Scott. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. London: George Bell and Sons. 58–75.



The Unending Conversation The Role of Periodicals in England and on the Continent during the Romantic Age JOHN BOENING University of Toledo

Periodicals are already in fact collaborative books. Writing as a communal project is an interesting symptom that presages a great advance for literature. (Novalis 645)1

There are those who have looked back on the cultural history of various European nations and have — with a good deal of warrant — pronounced the eighteenth century the “age of periodicals” (e.g. Berghahn 32; McCarthy; Wilke 1:64; Martens passim), and there are those who have, with equal warrant, applied the same designation to the middle and later nineteenth century, which saw the emergence of the “man of letters” and the rise of journalism, literary and otherwise, as a profession (Cox 188; Dudek 226; Houghton 3; Kent xiii). While one can argue that the situation surely looks different from different national perspectives — even making allowance for the fact that scholars of particular periods and traditions have an almost inevitable tendency to see the events in their own field of vision most prominently — it is still almost impossible not to acknowledge that the real sea-change, the tectonic shift in western Europe with regard to the role of periodicals and their impact on cultural practices, took place roughly in the period we now call the romantic age, that is, between the 1790s and the 1830s. How can one imagine the literary and intellectual history of Europe in the period from the French Revolution to the age of realism, its contours and controversies, without the changes wrought by the Edinburgh Review and its progeny in Britain, without the impact of the Schlegel brothers’ Athenaeum in Germany, without the presence of the Globe in France, or, for that matter, without the Conciliatore in Italy or the Europeo in Spain? The age we commonly call romantic was the product and site of many “revolutions”: political, industrial, social, and economic. Jürgen Habermas, moreover, has seen the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century — from enlightenment to romanticism — as the transformation of the private into the public sphere with both cultural and social consequences just as Rolf Engelsing, Robert Darnton, and others have spoken about a parallel “reading revolution” involving a change from “intensive” to “extensive” reading practices. Though many scholars have taken issue with the sweeping nature of theories such as those of Habermas and Engelsing (e.g. Klancher 20–4; Davidson 16–7; Moran 7–8), they and other theoreticians have nonetheless drawn attention to revolutionary changes in the relation between writer, text, and audience in the early nineteenth century.

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To these transformations — one hesitates to invoke the now-shopworn phrase “paradigm shifts” — should be added what might justifiably be called the “periodical revolution.” For reasons that have partly to do with new technologies of printing and distribution, partly with political developments, partly with economic changes in the form and structure of the marketplace (including the literary marketplace), as well as with developments in literary aims and tendencies, the years between the French Revolution and the 1830s in Europe saw the periodical press move from an ancillary to a central place in the literary landscape. Not only did periodicals of all kinds proliferate creating a whole new world of literary activity, they also began to challenge books (and pervasive eighteenth-century institutions like lending libraries and reading societies) in terms of both readership (i.e. in quantitative terms) and in terms of their role as both the primary reflectors and shapers of the spirit of the age. As a consequence, the distinction between primary and secondary texts becomes more problematic: whereas during the eighteenth century, the periodicals were principally reactive in nature reviewing and commenting upon literary texts and events, they now (even when ostensibly “reviewing” books or commenting on the “literary situation”) came to see themselves — and be recognized — as primary texts that interacted reciprocally with other periodical articles, with the reading public, and with authors and institutions. The periodicals became, in other words, active participants and agents not only in building and shaping an audience or “reading public,” which had already been the great Enlightenment project, not only in the shaping of “public opinion,” which had also long been the province of the press, but also in the shaping of the European literary agenda. Joseph Görres, an active participant in those years, wrote that “literary journalism … was not just a reflection of literary life,” but was also “in fact its active organ” that “thematizes the literary currents of the age and thereby gives them public contours” (Wilke 1:2).2 As early as 1824, Blackwood’s Magazine ran an article revealingly entitled “On the Reciprocal Influence of the Periodical Publications, and the Intellectual Progress of This Country.” Published anonymously but now attributed to William Stevenson, it emphasizes the interactive nature of the relationship between the newly powerful periodical press and the literary and intellectual currents of the age. The historical ramifications of this “periodical revolution” are numerous and far-reaching. Even as periodicals proliferated and became more specialized, the domain of the press and that of literature converged in the new periodicals, contributing (along with changes in the status and pay accorded to periodical writers) to the emergence of what John Gross has called the “man of letters” and, over time, to a profession of letters. The most significant legacy of the periodical revolution, however, is more literary than public. The new profusion of periodicals, intent on engaging each other and the voices and forces of the public realm in a continuing succession of exchanges and controversies, initiated what might be called a never-ending conversation, which is not simply dialectic or dialogic, but multivocal and multilateral. Equally important, the generation of periodicals that initiated and participated in this conversation were themselves in their new form and compass composite and multivocal texts. As Kathryn Sutherland has aptly put it, “Characteristically, the early nineteenthcentury periodicals are multivoiced and [sic] univoiced…. Further, in the typographic presentation of contributions, knowledge is seen as a matter of contexts, of graphic alignments and juxtapositions, which foster connective links between the act of reading within the periodical and the interpretation of society’s juxtaposed ‘texts’ beyond it” (Sutherland 25).

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The periodical, in one sense, was the natural medium of romanticism. In his afterword to a modern reprint edition of the Athenaeum, Ernst Behler has written about the Schlegel brothers: That only a periodical should be the medium of their joint ideas — on that they were agreed. Their age already shows in its sociological nature a deep affinity for this form of expression, and romanticism itself only intensified this tendency. At each step of the way, this movement was always accompanied by periodicals, and the development of romantic thinking and feeling can be traced from beginning to end by following the genesis of the romantic journals.

Behler notes that the periodical also helped to overcome the notorious romantic inability to integrate the diversity of the new experience of the world into a systematic set of relationships, in the way that the idealistic systems could, or in the kind of mechanical unity of the French Encyclopédie, and yet it was also the natural form of representation for this movement, which strove for plurality and paradox of perspectives, for a close-knit community of thinkers, for liveliness of expression, for a blending of the disciplines and literary genres. The periodical was, in a word, the romantic form of the encyclopedia, it was the expression of the exploded, the open system. (“Nachwort” 12–3)3

To the Schlegel brothers, then, the periodical represented, as it did to Novalis, the public form of the new “Gemeinschaftswerk” or collective undertaking. As Jon Klancher has noted, “The monthly and quarterly journals had begun to absorb their writers into the discursive mode of each journal, often merging writer, editor, and publisher into a corporate, collective ‘author’ “(48). In an elegant and well-known essay that attempts to understand the apparently contradictory features and claims of German romanticism and to identify its most lasting contributions, Maurice Blanchot examines the Schlegel brothers’ short-lived journal Athenaeum and the German romantic doctrine of Universalpoesie postulated by Friedrich Schlegel in his “Fragmente,” which appeared in the first volume. Blanchot reminds us that “romantic art … formulates the ambition of a total book, a sort of perpetually growing Bible that will not represent, but rather replace, the real … ; The novel, according to all the great romantics, will be that Book” (170). However, Blanchot continues, This total novel, which most of the romantics were content to dream of in the manner of a fable or in the fabulous form of the Märchen … only Novalis would undertake and, remarkably, would not only leave it incomplete, but would foresee that the only way to complete it would have to be to invent a new art, that of the fragment (170).

Blanchot contends that this is one of the boldest adumbrations of romanticism: the search for a new form that mobilizes — renders mobile — the whole even while interrupting it in various ways…. From the same perspective, both [Novalis and Schlegel] will affirm that the fragment … is an anticipation of what one might call plural writing, of the possibility of writing collectively, an innovation whose signs Novalis recognized in the development of the press” (170–1).

Blanchot thus calls attention to the fact that Novalis had already made the connection between the rise of the press (that he saw as the harbinger of collective authorship) and the great implicit romantic project, the never-ending conversation. “Just as a genius,” Blanchot says, “is nothing

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other than a multiple individual (Novalis) or a ‘system of talents’ (Schlegel), what counts is to introduce into writing, through the fragment, the plurality … which responds to the ‘incessant and self-creating alternation of different and opposed thoughts’ “(171). Though the fragment figured prominently in the theoretical musings of the German romantics, they did not publish a large number. What they did create and leave — almost, though not quite, incidentally — was a new landscape of which the literary periodical constituted an essential element. As it happened, it was not only the individual periodical that served as the voice for the multiple contending and contradictory claims of the age; it was the emergent network of periodicals as a new collective force. Thomas Carlyle, taking note of the spread of the periodical press and of literary journalism, wrote in the Edinburgh Review in a review of Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosopische Vorlesungen (an essay to become famous as “Characteristics”): Far be it from us to disparage our own craft whereby we have our living! Only we must note these things: that Reviewing spreads with strange vigour; that such a man as Byron reckons the Reviewer and the Poet equal; that at the last Leipzig fair, there was advertised a Review of Reviews. By and by it will be found that all Literature has become one boundless self-devouring Review. (369)

To understand just how pervasive this periodical revolution really was, and how it varied from country to country, it would be worth taking a closer look at the situation in various of the European literatures. For any number of reasons, an overview of the role and function of periodicals in the romantic age might well begin in Britain. For one thing, British periodicals of the eighteenth century — most prominently the Tatler and the Spectator — had already been instrumental in setting the tone and background for so many continental developments; for another, in England and Scotland the changes in the form and function of periodicals in the early nineteenth century were most pronounced and discernable. These include the transformation of book reviewing into what we now call literary (“philosophical”) criticism, the introduction of long, discursive articles, the displacing of literary hacks by independent — and decently paid — contributors, and, arguably most important, periodicals taking a central and indeed primary — rather than a marginal and reactive — place on the literary landscape. For all of these reasons, it is not surprising that the rise and role of periodicals in England has received proportionally the most subsequent scholarly and critical attention. The world of periodicals in early nineteenth-century England was a dense one indeed. As was the case in Germany and France as well, it included numbers of journals that were already on the scene such as the Gentlemen’s Magazine (1731), the pioneering Monthly Review (1749) in whose pages William Taylor of Norwich became the first champion of German literature in England while at the same time inventing the discursive review essay (Boening), the Critical Review (1756), the European Magazine (1782), the English Review (1783), the Analytical Review (1788), the British Critic (1793), the Monthly Mirror (1795), and the Monthly Magazine (1796). Just before the turn of the century and as preparation for the political dimension that was to become an important part of the British periodical world were the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner (1797) and the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine (1798). Also worth noting is Robert

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Southey’s short-lived Annual Anthology (1799–1800), one of the numerous British imitators of the German Musenalmanache. But all this was prologue. The key event in England was of course the founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802. The Edinburgh was the first — and the prototype — of the “great reviews” that forever altered the literary landscape and the profession of letters in the Englishspeaking world: the Edinburgh, in Bagehot’s words, “began the system and became its model” (Bagehot 1). Coleridge wrote that “the founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 constituted ‘an important epoch in periodical criticism’, and its significance was not confined to the realm of literature” (qtd. in Jack 8). In the minds of the editors and proprietors of almost every quarterly review founded subsequently was the ambition, admitted or not, “of imitating, challenging, or overthrowing its position” (Shattock, Politics 7). Hazlitt had written, “To be an Edinburgh reviewer is, I suspect, the highest rank in modern literary society.” Shattock says, “Hazlitt’s comment, even allowing for a hint of irony, suggested the status and prominence, which quarterly reviews had attained by the second decade of their existence” (qtd. in Shattock, Politics 1). The Quarterly Review, launched in 1809 to provide a Tory counterpart to the ER’s Whiggish politics, was similar to the ER in format and rates of pay. Between them, these two journals dominated the literary and intellectual scene: by 1818 the Edinburgh and Quarterly together were selling about 14,000 copies, each of which was certainly read by many people. Despite their considerable political differences, both were basically conservative. They had no major rival until the reformist Westminster Review in 1823, which “roughly corresponds to the rise of a third party in British politics” (Graham 251) and to which J. S. Mill was to be major contributor in the Victorian age and only a few opponents of lesser note such as the British Review (1811–25). Besides the great quarterly reviews, there were also such monthlies as the Eclectic Review (1805–68). It would be difficult to overstate the significance of the turningpoint marked by the advent of the British quarterly reviews. They sallied forth onto a literary landscape and into a periodical culture that had only just begun to shed patterns and forms set almost a century earlier. Apart from treating “many topics that have since been handed over almost exclusively to students and specialists,” they “offered serious writers an enviable amount of page space, to say nothing of handsome rates of pay; they set a precedent for the solid journals of opinion — what the Russians called the ‘thick journals’ — which were to play such a central role in the intellectual life of nineteenth-century Europe and America” (Gross 7). Though the Edinburgh and the Quarterly remained dominant forces into the 1830s, beginning the in the 1820s, “they were gradually surrounded by a growing band of competitors, monthly and weekly rivals as well as other quarterlies” (Shattock, Politics 155). If the Edinburgh and the Quarterly established the pattern for the general review of cultural and political interests, that for the lighter and more varied miscellany was set by Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (which came to be known simply as “Maga”), founded in 1817. Blackwood’s and its imitators covered an extraordinary range of material, from stories and verse to essays, political and literary articles of all degrees of seriousness, and such grotesque semidramatic topical dialogues as John Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianae. As in the heavier reviews, all contributions were anonymous; but in Blackwood’s they were often also of composite authorship. (Cox 189)

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Blackwood’s was selling 6,000 copies by 1818, and by 1831 circulation had risen to 8,000. A host of new magazines followed in Blackwood’s wake, most notably the London Magazine (1820–29), which was also most supportive of the younger romantics (unlike Blackwood’s). The LM was more serious and literary than Blackwood’s. A growing rival of the London during the 1820 was the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (1814–84). Of the weeklies, the most significant was Leigh Hunt’s Examiner (1808–81), which was selling over 7,000 copies by 1812. Radical in politics, it countered Blackwood’s and the Quarterly on behalf of the younger romantics (it published poems by Keats and Shelley). The Literary Gazette (1817) was a sixteenpage Saturday paper that functioned more like a comprehensive literary chronicle. Both the Examiner and the Literary Gazette continued into the late Victorian period. In the 1830s another spate of new titles came on the scene, many of which eventually shaped the thought of the Victorian period, beginning with Fraser’s Magazine (1830), which picked up the German interests of Coleridge and Carlyle and including, most prominently, such new titles as the British and Foreign Review (1835), the Dublin Review (1836), the Dublin University Magazine (1833), Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal (1832), the Metropolitan Magazine (1831), and Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (1832). For the later period, the two weeklies founded in 1828, the Athenaeum and the Spectator, were more important. But just as the ER and the other reviews did not come into a vacuum, so also did they not leave one when their circulation began to decline in the 1840s. “Overtaken politically in the 1840s by the newspapers [which was the case in France as well] and outstripped in terms of readership by the weeklies and monthlies of the 1850s and 1860s, the Edinburgh Review endured until 1929, and the Quarterly, almost unbelievably, until 1967…. The legacy of 1802 still had a long way to run” (Shattock, Politics 158; on circulation, see 97–100). In the preface to one of the volumes of his comprehensive survey of British periodicals, Alvin Sullivan reminds us that “the Romantic Age fostered a number of innovations — the first international review (the Foreign Quarterly Review); the prototype of Reader’s Digest (the Mirror); the practice of identifying reviewers (the London Review); the serialization of fiction (the Metropolitan); … and the anticipation of the popular cheap magazines (Nic Nac) and popular but literary ones (Chamber’s) that would flower in the next age” (Sullivan ix). A working-class press with its own fascinating history was also emerging (Murphy). More important, Sullivan also reminds us that while “every artistic movement has some advocate in print, … the Romantic movement was embraced [though not always supportively] by more journals, reviews and miscellanies than any other” and almost from the start “became a rallying point,” i.e. the subject, at least ostensibly, for the quarrels and controversies of the literary magazines. The Edinburgh opposed the Quarterly; Scourge supported the Edinburgh … and excoriated the Quarterly and Examiner. John Scott (of the London Magazine) lost his life over a quarrel with Blackwood’s. David Douglas wrote a satirical pamphlet in 1820, Visions of Taste, parodying the London Chronicle and Weekly Review, the Literary Gazette (1817–1863), and the London Magazine as three feuding cocks on a dunghill.” (Sullivan viii)

John Hayden says that “at least one small journal, the Literary Guardian, became famous in its time for publishing letters from Byron that explained his role in another Romantic journal … ,

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the Liberal [in which he collaborated with Leigh Hunt]” (Sullivan viii). In Germany, as in Britain, the periodicals of the romantic age did not enter a vacuum. On the contrary, they entered a world in which periodicals were already playing an important role, though perhaps not yet a dominant one. Though eighteenth-century Germany had also witnessed a proliferation of newspapers and periodicals of all types — moralizing, political, literary, learned, entertaining, fashionable, and eclectic — in matters literary, the role of periodicals had been a largely reactive one, either by reviewing or reacting to current controversies. Books remained the central medium of literary production and exchange. As the century neared its end, though, more and more controversies were being launched and stoked in the periodicals themselves (e.g. by Lessing, Kant, and others). By the early nineteenth century, German periodicals, like their counterparts in England, had moved more and more toward center stage as integral parts of, rather than commentaries on, the literature and intellectual cultural scene. Two of the most important predecessors and precursors of the German literary (and learned) journals of the early nineteenth century were both founded by the Berlin bookseller Friedrich Nicolai: one was the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften, begun in 1757 under Nicolai’s editorship with G. E. Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn as major contributors. After its fifth number, Nicolai turned the editorship of the BsW over to Christian Felix Weiße, who continued the publication until 1804. The other, the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, was founded in 1765 and continued publication until 1806. It was directed at a more learned audience with the intention of providing notices of all books appearing in Germany as well as other general news about the world of letters. The AdB became the leading literary journal of the German Enlightenment, whose contributors included Christian Gottlob Heyne and J. G. Herder (the number of these contributors went from 120 in 1787 to 1500 in 1803). But the AdB’s circulation peaked before the turn of the century: its ideology was too rationalistic for the new atmosphere. Other noteworthy precursors were the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, founded in 1785 in Jena, also with many prominent contributors, including Kant and Schiller, and the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften (1757–1805) with Nicolai, Weiße, and Moses Mendelssohn as collaborators. Other periodicals that had their roots in an earlier age but constituted a kind of transition to those of the romantic period include C. M. Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur (1773–89), his Der neue Teutsche Merkur (1790–1810), Schiller and Goethe’s short-lived monthly Die Horen, the earlier Deutsches Museum (1776–91, edited by H. C. Boie), which was close to the Göttinger Hainbund and which championed German literature against the hegemony of France. These were joined, in the era of the French Revolution, by a number of periodicals that combined literary and political agendas. In the romantic age as such — without entering the minefield of literary periodization, which is as problematic for Germany as it is for the other continental literatures — a whole new world of periodicals emerged on the German scene. Given the politically fractured nature of the German-speaking realm, with numerous competing cultural capitals, they appeared in many different cities and were often associated with various groups of writers. There were literally scores of such ventures over the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth century (Houben 1904, Bobeth 1911, Kirschner 1958), among them the Athenaeum (1798–1800), Kynosarges (1802), Europa (1803–05), Polychorda (1803–05), Phöbus (1808), Prometheus (1808), Zeitung für Einsiedler (1808), Pantheon (1810), the Berliner Abendblätter (1810–11), Die Jahreszeiten

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(1811–14), Deutsches Museum (1812–13), Die Musen (1812–14), Salina (1812–18), the Rheinischer Merkur (1813–18), Die Harfe (1815–19), Die Hesperiden (1816), Für müssige Stunden (1816–21), Die Wünschelruthe (1818), Die Morgenröthe (1819–21), Concordia (1820–23), and Die Muse (1821–22), not counting the Musenalmanache or other annuals and occasional publications. In terms of impact, the most important of these were Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum, Europa, and the Deutsches Museum; A. von Arnim’s short-lived Zeitung für Einsiedler, organ of the second romantic generation — the Heidelberg romantics — with Clemens Brentano, Joseph Görres, J. and W. Grimm, whose contributors included a virtual who’s who of German romanticism: the brothers Grimm and Schlegel, Ludwig Uhland, Tieck, Jean Paul (J. P. F. Richter), de la Motte Fouqué, and Zacharias Werner (it maintained a special interest in the literature of the Middle Ages, German folk tales, folk poetry, and Märchen); and H. von Kleist and A. Müller’s Phoebus. In 1813 Görres founded Der Rheinische Merkur. It was suppressed in 1818, one year before the infamous Karlsbader Beschlüsse, decrees drawn up at Prince Metternich’s behest by the German princes effectively suppressing political dissent by imposing severe press censorship. Even under this harsh regime, a few liberal/reformist magazines, such as Ludwig Börne’s Die Wage (1818–21), managed to stay alive for a few years before being suppressed. Reacting in part to Metternich’s oppressive policies, the Young Germany movement of the 1830s founded its own half-political, half-literary organs, whose “program is analogous to that of the periodicals of the French Restoration: public life, the sciences and the arts, considered in their intimate unity” (Des Granges 24–5).4 It is difficult to overstate the degree to which the literary careers of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and his brother August Wilhelm (1767–1845) were intertwined with the periodical life of their time. During his lifetime Friedrich contributed to no fewer than forty-five different periodicals and was involved in the founding of at least four. His brother has been connected with the Horen and the Heidelberger Jahrbücher der Literatur. Of all their undertakings, the Athenaeum stands out, certainly in any theoretical consideration of the literary periodical in its day (Behler, “Nachwort” 1). Edited, like the Deutsches Museum, by both brothers for two of its three volumes (the third volume was edited by Schleiermacher), the Athenaeum appeared twice yearly from 1798 to 1800. It published both creative work, perhaps most notably Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, as well as literary criticism and theory, including Friedrich Schlegel’s “Gespräch über die Poesie,” thus incorporating like many of its counterparts among the new magazines what had traditionally been in the German periodical world two genres: the Literaturzeitschrift (journal of literature), which published imaginative writing and the literarische Zeitschrift (literary journal), which published reviews and criticism. The aim of the Athenaeum, as A. W. Schlegel put it, was to replace “Rezenserei” (mere reviewing) with the “particular insights of a writer who lives in and with the world of literature.” The journal was concerned neither with comprehensive accounts of literary works nor with judgments of the merits of individual works, but rather with establishing a “living dialogue with the readers, in order to make it possible for them to arrive, in an informed way, at dissenting or assenting opinions” (Behler, Zeitschriften 10).5 In short, to initiate a conversation. The Athenaeum’s conception of the periodical as collective work clearly fit the mood of the times. Novalis wrote to Friedrich Schlegel on the appearance of the first issue, “I have long been

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awaiting your journal. It will usher in a new era in literature” (Hocks and Schmidt).6 This idea of the periodical as encyclopedia and collecting point for kindred spirits is in no way restricted to early romanticism. As Hocks and Schmidt note, “similar notions can be found in almost every program, preface, introductions, and invitations to contributors of other earlier, contemporaneous or later journals of the time…. The periodical must achieve its programmatic aims — tying together all the spirits, all the subject matter and all the forms — not as a ‘closed’ but only as an ‘open form’ “(Hocks and Schmidt 3–4; see also Schwabe 5).7 Like England and Germany, France had a strong eighteenth-century periodical history. Unlike Germany, it had long been a politically unified country with a cultural center. But unlike Germany and England, France had suffered — and was to suffer — a series of disjunctions and ruptures, the Revolution not the least of them, which makes the history of periodicals far less evolutionary and progressive than in the British or German-language realm. Not the least of the obstacles was political censorship and suppression, which according to Albert George “became a fine art” (George 61). Curiously, George writes, It was under the great dictator that the first important newspapers appeared, the Journal des Débats, for instance, which quickly earned a magisterial reputation in the field of ideas. Since politics were taboo, the Débats centered its attention on literature and one of its critics, Geoffroy, attained a dubious kind of immortality by inventing the feuilleton, incidentally raising circulation to the then incredible figure of 32,000. (61)

During the Restoration the press was at first permitted greater freedom, but the Bourbons, too, soon cracked down. “Almost every year, from 1817 on, the Bourbons found an excuse to reduce freedom of the press,” until the new law of 1827 “placed all publications at the mercy of the monarchy while taxing them unmercifully” (George 62–3). As in Germany, different scholars “periodize” French literature differently. Some rely on a traditional periodization based on political developments, while others have posited a two- or even a four-stage view of French romanticism (e.g. van Tieghem; Charlton), or more revisionist ways of dealing with the issue (e.g. Nemoianu). “In its own day, the Globe ran a series of twelve articles, each proposing a different definition” of romanticism (Allen 13). Nonetheless, the important dates for what we have been calling the periodical revolution in France are between 1818 and 1825, a time that is also, not at all coincidentally, referred to as the period of the bataille romantique. This period is not only characterized by Charles Nodier’s three key articles in the Débats on Mme de Staël’s De l’Allemagne in 1818, but also by the appearance of so many new periodicals which entered the fray, either in the theoretical battle over romanticism, the nineteenth-century reprise of the ancients-and-moderns controversy, or the political debate between liberals and royalists (all but the first of these contemporaneous with parallel debates in England). In Charles Des Granges’s classic study, some of these periodicals fall into a “liberal” group: Le Mercure (1815–18, replaced by La Minerve 1818–20), the Censeur européen (1817–20), the Courrier français (1823), the Miroir, the Pandore (1821–28), the Album (1821–29), the Minerve française, the Minerve littéraire (1820–22), the Revue encyclopédique (1819–33); others into a “romantic” group: the Conservateur littéraire (1819–1921), the Muse française (1823–24), the Annales de la littérature et des Arts, the Mercure du XIX siècle; and yet

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others into what Des Granges calls the “doctrinaire” group: the Archives philosophiques (1817–18), the Lycée français (1819–20), Le Globe (1824–31), La Revue française (1828–30). The years between 1818 and the late 1820s were characterized by the formation (and dissolution) of groupings and cénacles, e.g. around the Conservateur littéraire in 1820 and the conservative Societé des Bonnes-Lettres in 1821, whose political and royalist views in turn provoked a counter grouping by the liberals, including Stendhal; the founding of the Muse française in 1823, which, though ostensibly literary rather than political, stimulated the liberals to start the opposing journal the Mercure du XIXe siècle in the same year. They witnessed Nodier’s appointment as librarian at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in 1824 and his welcoming there of many young royalists and Christians from La Muse. Partly as a liberal countermeasure to the growing influence of Nodier and his group, the journal Le Globe was founded with Paul Dubois as editor in 1824. With the Hugo brothers dominating the Conservateur littéraire since its founding in December 1819 and gathering the romantics of royalist persuasion about them, the incessant polemics between royalists and liberals as well as the classic/romantic debate “continued without decision through 1823 and 1824. The word romanticism meant so little that the first volume of the Mercure du XIXe siècle (1823) complained of the vagueness of the term” (George 8). Accompanying these developments and debates, the genre of the revues arose in France, prominent among them the Revue philosophique (1794–1887), the Revue encyclopédique (1819–33), the Revue britannique (1825–1901), the Revue des deux mondes (1829–58), and the Revue de Paris (1829–58). Nodier noted that “a group of able writers had set up La Revue de Paris after the fashion of the Edinburgh Review. The Gazette littéraire, which commenced late in 1829, had a plan and form similar to those of the English weekly reviews … a kind of periodical new to France” (Partridge 321). European in their interests, heavy on cultural commentary, the revues launched a French genre that flourishes to this day (as do some of the original titles). It is noteworthy that, according to Walter Graham, the Fortnightly Review was modeled on the Revue des deux Mondes: “Following the example of the Revue, the editor of the Fortnightly included in his pages a variety of miscellaneous contents, like most of the magazines. In fact, the Fortnightly combined in itself the merits of both ‘magazine’ and Review, as its French model had done from the beginning” (258). Of the periodicals that had entered the lists in France, the most important was Le Globe. Founded by Paul Dubois, the Globe was a newspaper dedicated to liberalism and the new literature. Le Globe began as a journal littéraire with liberal tendencies; collaborators always included philosophers and political intellectuals. Its expanded subtitle later made this explicit: in 1825 it became Recueil philosophique et littéraire, then in 1828 Recueil politique, philosophique et littéraire. Some scholars contend that “politics and philosophy, indeed were the main raison d’être of Le Globe during these years as much as when, from 1830, … it developed into a SaintSimonian journal” (Charlton 1:17, following Bray 131; Hunt). Le Globe was where Saint-Beuve made his debut by expressing his distrust of the royalism and mysticism of the romantic school, though, as Roger Fayolle observes, “It was not long before he was won over by the anticlassical temerities of the new school” (262). Le Globe was opposed both to royalism and Catholicism; it was one of its collaborators, Viter, in fact who defined romanticism as “le protestantisme dans

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les lettres et les arts” (Charlton 1:17–18). On the glories of Shakespeare, as a counter to a “dead” classicism, however, the liberals of Le Globe were of one mind with erstwhile Catholic royalists like Hugo and Lamartine from the La Muse française. By 1826, when Hugo had become the unchallenged leader of the romantics, he moved closer to Le Globe effecting a merger of the various factions of romanticism under his guidance. Thus by 1827, “the new school could boast of an active chief, a center of operations, friendly papers and critics, and some conception of a doctrine” (George 9). It was as if the world of the periodicals had, in fact, as elsewhere, moved to the very center of the literary landscape. There is little doubt that Italian romanticism was launched by de Staël’s article, “On the Method and Value of Translations” (“Sulla maniera e l’utilità della traduzione”), in the January 1816 issue of the Biblioteca Italiana, a middle-of-the-road paper published in Milan from 1816 to 1857 urging Italian writers to “familiarize themselves with foreign literatures as a means of liberating themselves from traditionalism and pedantry” (Wilkins 410). This article was immediately attacked, even by other BI contributors, as insulting to the literary glory of Italy, but beginning in June of that year, separate pamphlets supporting de Staël, now famous as the inaugural manifestos of Italian romanticism, were published by Lodovico de Breme, Pietro Borsieri, and Giovanni Berchet (Calcaterra 1968). In June de Staël also sent a letter defending herself to the Biblioteca Italiana. Two years later Italian romanticism became a force with which to be reckoned. Not only did Ugo Foscolo publish two widely read articles on Dante in the Edinburgh Review that year, but 1818 also saw the founding of the most prominent of the Italian romantic journals, the Milanese Conciliatore (it only lasted until the autumn of 1819, when it was suppressed by the Austrian censors). The Conciliatore published not only poetry, but such important essays as Ermes Visconti’s “Idee Elementari sulla Poesia Romantica” emphasizing the German contribution to the romantic spirit. The Conciliatore’s Florentine successor was the Antologia (1821), which, understandably adopted a more cautious program. The editorial principles of these two journals followed from Foscolo’s treatise “Opinions on the Situation of a Literary Review” written at the time the Austrian government offered him a directorship of the Biblioteca italiana in exchange for his political allegiance. Instead, Foscolo urged the Italian writer to pursue a path of independence and impartiality. Though the polemics between the classicists and the romanticists launched in 1816 continued for the next few years, the romantics were for the most part active patriots, and in 1820 and 1821, “most of their leaders were imprisoned or driven into exile; and the romantic movement, as a coherent enterprise, came to an abrupt end” (Wilkins 413). Though romanticism as a general literary attitude remained widespread in Italy and was to continue to exert an influence on Italian literature, the days of the periodical controversies had been cut short. While the literary and intellectual histories of Italy and Spain have very different trajectories, there was, in the early nineteenth century, an important similarity. In both countries, romanticism was actively political and deeply concerned with issues of patriotism. More concretely, two prominent Italian liberal journalists, as emigrés, helped found the leading Spanish romantic journal. One could almost say that with the shutting down of the Conciliatore, the leading voice of romanticism in Italy in 1819, the spirit of that journal was in a sense transported to Spain.

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During the period between 1820 and 1823, when “Spain enjoyed a respite from absolutism during the trienio constitucional” (Flitter 23), its periodical press also flowered. Like its European neighbors, Spain also produced its own passionate controversialists and men of letters. The best known among them, Mariano José de Larra (born in Madrid in 1809, Larra committed suicide in 1837) became “what we now call a columnist. Larra, whose articles dealt with politics, manners, and literature, were often published under various pseudonyms,” including the one that was to become best known, “Figaro,” the “rebellious and popular character from the work of Beaumarchais” (Diaz-Plaja 250). According to Guillermo Diaz-Plaja, Larra was the earliest Spanish journalist in the modern concept of the word. Of the new wave of Spanish periodicals, the first — and most notable — was the “little weekly” El Europeo (Peers, History 119), published in Barcelona in 1823 and 1824. It was founded by a fascinating collective (itself unusual in Spain) of five writers: Ernest Cook, an English scientist; the two Italian exiles, Fiorenzi Galli and Luigi Monteggia; and two Spaniards, Buenaventura Carlos Aribau and Ramón López Soler. El Europeo championed medievalism, the picturesque, Scott, Byron, Chateaubriand, Schiller, and oriental subjects as well as original Spanish imaginative writing. A considerable number of scholars see the Europeo’s romantic leaning as the legacy of the now-defunct Milanese Conciliatore, partially perhaps through the Europeo’s two Italian collaborators but more especially as a result of the influence of Monteggia (Krömer 379), though others attribute Europeo’s romantic tendencies to wider European currents. In literary matters, the Europeo, like its Italian precursor, “had little to do with revolt and much with revival” (Peers, History 121). Though it was not recognized by the more institutional press of its time, the Europeo was significant “not only because of its attempt to incorporate Spain in the intellectual movement of Europe, but also, and chiefly, for its literary position vis-à-vis romanticism” (Peers, History 119). Gabriel Lovett points out that while romanticism in England and Germany had begun in the last years of the eighteenth century and in France around 1820, the movement took longer to manifest itself in Spain. This was partly due to the devastating war against Napoleon and the despotic regime of Fernando VII … and partly to the considerable influence still wielded by the Neoclassics [sic]. Nevertheless, while full-fledged romanticism came to Spain only after 1833, European romanticism became known at an earlier date. (97)

European, especially German, romanticism, however, arrived in Spain principally through the efforts of one man: J. N. Böhl von Faber, the influential German consul in Cádiz, who is often credited with introducing ideas of the Schlegel brothers to Spain, as well as, somewhat ironically, his own admiration for Calderón. Böhl wrote an influential article for the Madrid review, Variedades de Ciencias, Literatura y Arte in July 1805 acclaiming Shakespeare and referring warmly to the German romantics. After the War of Independence in 1814, Böhl published in the Mercurio Gaditano his “Reflexiones de Schlegel sobre el teatro,” which led to a heated controversy between Böhl and the poet José Joaquin de Mora representing the neoclassical camp (Mora later became a leading romantic). “Böhl was able to use the periodical press until 1818, when Mora saw to it that all newspapers barred him from publishing articles in them” (Lovett 97). But Böhl continued his campaign through pamphlets, in 1820 he was

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elected an honorary member of the Spanish Academy. The classic-romantic battle and the periodical controversies in Spain began again in earnest with the return of the exiles in the 1830s, and another host of new periodicals emerged: Cartas españolas (1831–32) favored the romantics; its successor, Revista española (1833–36) was liberal and progressive; anti-romantic were the Estrella (1833–34) and the Eco de Comercio (1834–48) and the Abeja (1834–36); all published die-hard classicists. Other periodicals included the Ensayes Literarios (1836), and the Seminario Pintoresco Español (1837); El Siglo XIX (1837–38) edited in Madrid by Eugenio Ochoa, published both original lyrics and essays. El Vapor (1833–38) was the successor of the Europeo with Lopez Soler, a supporter of Böhl von Faber, as its first editor. It, too, saw itself as the champion of “cosmopolitanism, medievalism, patriotism and chivalry” and its “dominating influence was that of Walter Scott” (Peers, Short History 103). But in the 1830s and though it lasted only a year and a half, “the Romantics’ principal organ was El Artista, founded and edited by Ochoa and Federico Madrazo. Ochoa, who was well-known as a translator of Hugo, hailed Homer, Dante and Calderón as the ‘true apostles of romanticism’ “(Peers, Short History 101). According to Peers, the Artista’s lineal descendant was No me Olivides (1837–38, edited by Jacinto Salas y Quiroga), which published a number of romantic manifestos and which adopted the blue flower — Novalis’s forget-me-not — as the symbol of Spanish, as well as European, romanticism. This cursory overview of the wave of periodical writing that swept across England and the continent has necessarily been selective and telegraphic and cannot do justice to parallel developments in the other parts of Europe, such as the Scandinavian and Slavic countries, which witness the same flowering of the periodical press (van Tieghem). Even in treating literatures of England, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, the periodicals — with three or four paradigmatic exceptions — have for the most part been considered in the aggregate. But there is a kind of justice in that approach, as Alfred Estermann has pointed out, for literary periodicals, historically speaking, take on importance less as individual enterprises than “in the combination of many titles. Only through the detailed examination of their connections, their mutual inter-penetration and their interplay can the deeper structure of historical processes be made visible” (“Zeitschriften” 2009).8 In their own way, the periodicals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries both answered and realized the romantic challenge: in their multiplicity and diversity they created a multivocal, temporal conversation, which came to challenge the individual book as a medium for literary and intellectual expression and exchange. Though the periodicals of the later eighteenth century, as one German scholar has observed, had already implicitly sought a “productive” reader who would “think and feel along with the text, Romanticism consciously demands from the reader and the critic this creative collaboration. According to Novalis, ‘reviewing is the complement of the book’ and ‘the true reader must be the enlarged author’” (Carlsson 115).9 Though it is not the all-encompassing “Bible” or the great timeless novel envisioned by the German romantics, nor the “great poem” to which the English poet Shelley alludes (Rowland 24), the world of the romantic periodicals and the continuing conversation it brought into existence have had profound effects. From the last years of the eighteenth century onward, according to a contemporary observer, “periodicals spread across the … landscape like mountain snow” (Ungern-Sternberg 135).10 By the end of the romantic age, they had already

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established themselves as “the characteristic mechanism of nineteenth-century literary production” (Manning 49). And by the twentieth century, John Gross writes in his The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, the impact of the mass media on literature is both a cliché and a source of bitter controversy. Whether the essential nature of our response to the written word has been radically, McLuhanishly transformed by advances in technology is, to say the least, open to question. What no one is likely to dispute, however, is that other media are constantly competing for attention with books, and that as often as not they tend to win the competition.” (287)

Though in our day, and for most people, these “other media” may well be visual and electronic, for those involved in the world of words and ideas, the conversation of greatest interest and import continues in the journals.

Notes 1. “Journale sind eigentlich schon gemeinschaftliche Bücher. Das Schreiben in Gesellschaft ist ein interessantes Symptom — das noch eine große Ausbildung der Schriftsellerey [sic] ahnden läßt” (Novalis 2:645). 2. “Der literarischer Journalismus ist nicht nur Reflex des literarischen Lebens, sondern auch sein eigentlich aktives Organ. Er thematisiert die literarischen Strömungen der Zeit und gibt ihnen damit Konturen für die Öffentlichkeit” (Wilke 1:2). 3. “Daß nur eine Zeitschrift das Medium ihrer gemeinsamen Ideen sein sollte — hierin waren sie sich einig. Ihr Zeitalter zeigt schon seiner soziologischen Natur nach eine tiefe Affinität zu dieser Ausdrucksform, und die Romantik selbst hat diese Neigung nur noch vertieft. Diese Bewegung ist auf ihrem Wege immer von Zeitschriften begleitet gewesen, und aus einer Genesis der romantischen Journale ließe sich lückenlos die Entwicklung des romantischen Fühlens und Denkens ableiten. Die Zeitschrift half hinweg über die bekannte romantische Unfähigkeit, die Vielfalt des neuen Welterlebens in systematischer Verkettung, nach dem Vorbild der idealistischen Systeme, oder nach der mechanischen Einheit der französischen Enzyklopédie zu entfalten, und war doch auch die natürliche Darstellungsform dieser nach Pluralität und Paradoxie der Gesichtspunkte, nach innigster Gemeinschaft ihrer Denker, nach Lebendigkeit des Ausdrucks, nach Vermischung der Disziplinen und literarischen Formen strebenden Bewegung. Die Zeitschrift war mit einem Wort die romantische Form der Enzyklopädie, sie war der Ausdruck des gesprengten, des ‘offenen Systems’“ (Behler, “Nachwort”12–13). 4. “dont le programme est analogue à celui des périodiques de la Restauration: la vie sociale, les sciences et les arts, considérés dans leur union intime” (Des Granges 24–5). 5. “Privatansichten eines in und mit der Literatur Lebenden…. Dabei kam es ihm keineswegs auf Vollständigkeit in der Berücksichtigung von Werken, noch in der Beurteilung eines einzelnen Buches an, sondern auf einen lebendigen Dialog mit den Lesern, um diese durch die Mitteilung zur “Entwicklung entgegengesetzter oder übereinstimmender Gedanken zu veranlassen” (Behler, Zeitschriften 10). 6. “Euer Journal ist lang von mir erwartet. Mit ihm kann eine neue Periode der Litteratur beginnen” (Novalis, qtd. in Hocks and Schmidt 3). 7. “Ähnliche Überlegungen finden sich in fast allen Programmen, Vorreden, Einleitungen und Einladungen zur Mitarbeit anderer früherer, gleichzeitiger und späterer Journale…. Nicht als “geschlossen”, sondern nur als “offene” Form kann die Zeitschrift ihre programmatischen Ziele — Verbindung aller Geister, Stoffe und Fo