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Romanticism A volume m THE DOCUMENTARY HISTORY of WESTERN CIVILIZATION ROMANTICISM edited by B. jOHN HALSTED Palgrave Macmillan 1969 ROMANTICISM Introduction, editorial notes, and compilation Copyright © 1969 by John B. Halsted Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1969 First published in the United States 1969 First published in the United Kingdom by Macmillan & Co 1969 Published by MACMILLAN & CO LTD Little Essex Street London wc 2 and also at Bombay Calcutta and Madras Macmillan South Africa (Publishers) Pty Ltd Johannesburg The Macmillan Company of Australia Pty Ltd Melbourne Gill and Macmillan Ltd Dublin ISBN 978-1-349-00486-7 ISBN 978-1-349-00484-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-00484-3 Contents Introduction I Part I. Aesthetics August Wilhelm von Schlegel: Lectures on Dramatic I. Literature 43 Madame de Stael: Germany 55 2. 3· Heinrich Heine: The Romantic School 6o 4· William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads 72 5. Percy Bysshe Shelley: "A Defence of Poetry" 8 I 6. John Keats: Letter to Benjamin Bailey 97 7· Victor Hugo: Preface to Cromwell IOI 8. Charles Baudelaire: "The Salon of I 846" I I 8 Part II. Religion 9· Novalis: "Christendom or Europe" 122 Friedrich Schleiermacher: Speeches on Religion to Its 10. Cultured Despisers I 38 I I. Fran~ois de Chateaubriand: The Genius of Christianity I49 I 2. Felicite de Lamennais: Words of a Believer I6I 3· The Saint-Simonians: The Doctrine of Saint-Si,mon: 1 An Exposition, First Year, I828-1829 176 Part Ill. Politics I4. Edmund Burke: An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs I89 15. Joseph de Maistre: Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions I95 I6. Friedrich von Savigny: Of The Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence 200 7. Walter Savage Landor: Imaginary Conversations I 2 1 2 CONTENTS I 8. Giuseppe Mazzini: Letter to Lamennais 22I I9· Adam Mickiewicz: Prologue to Pan Tadeusz 228 Richard Wagner: "The Revolution" 20. 232 Part IV. History 2 1. Sir Walter Scott: Dedicatory Epistle, Ivanhoe 2 39 22. Thomas Carlyle: Past and Present 250 2 3· Jules Michelet: Preface to Historical View of the French Revolution 26I 24- Alphonse de Lamartine: History of the Revolution of I848 27I Part V. Personal Ideals 25. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther 285 26. Jean Jacques Rousseau: Confessions 294 2 7. Friedrich Schleiermacher: Soliloquies 304 28. Lord Byron: Cbilde Harold's Pilgrimage and Manfred 3 I 3 29. Alfred de Musset: Confession of a Child of the Century 338 30. Selections from Goethe, Novalis, and William Blake 35 I Chronology 355 Suggestions for Additional Reading 356 Index 358 Introduction We all feel we know what "romantic" means: the word conveys notions of sentiment and sentimentality, of a visionary, idealistic lack of realism, of fantasy and fiction. It has been associated with distant places and times-the island of Bali, the world of the Arabian Nights, the age of the troubadours. Advertising links it with the effects of lipstick, perfumes, and soap. Such a range of implication causes little trouble in common parlance, but schol ars have been quarreling over the meaning of "Romanticism" for nearly ;o years. The editor of a volume of documents illustrating I such a subject cannot avoid implicitly imposing his definition upon his choice of documents. I will seek in this Introduction to suggest some of the considerations which have guided my choices, indicating thereby my view of Romanticism. I feel definition should serve as a heuristic device, and hence, for a variety of purposes, a variety of definitions of Romanticism might prove most illuminating. In the present instance, my concern is to ex emplify major aspects of an era in the intellectual life of Europe. Therefore it does not seem to me particularly useful to follow some leading scholars in identifying Romanticism as one of the two, or one of the very few, permanent dispositions of the human spirit and "Romantic eras" as those wherein that disposition be came dominant. We lose thereby the advantages of a distinctive name for a unique epoch in the history of ideas, the period from about 780 to about 8; o. "Romanticism" in this sense may serve I I as a concept for a period, as does the term "Enlightenment." The term "Romantic" gained currency during that time-1780 to 8 so-although a wide variety of meanings were attached to I it. The very variety of such meanings makes it the more legiti mate, I think, for later students of the period to qttempt some greater coherence of definition and to try to make the terms "Ro mantic" and "Romanticism" match more closely the traits we find a large number of intellectuals in that era had in common-or 2 ROMANTICISM what many of them seem to have felt they had in common. This intention leads me to prefer a scope of meaning similar to "gen eral world view" or "a way of answering the main questions men face," which would give the terms "Romanticism" and "Enlight enment" a comprehensiveness like that of "Humanism." This broad sense allows us to include and to go beyond the traditioml usage of "Romanticism" as a name simply for a type of art and of artistic taste, usually contrasted to "classicism." A narrow defini tion of this latter sort would, I believe, shape the readings in such a way that the complex reality of an era in the history of ideas would be lost. I will restrict use of the phrase "Romantic movement," as is normally done, to the arts, where in Germany and France at least there was conscious and coordinated effort to effect change. Though in revolutionary and religious sects such efforts also oc curred, they were not coordinated with the arts, and there seems no way to view them all together as one movement. In the wider sense in which I wish to use it, Romanticism is a name for inter related and similar ideas and attitudes-and related and deriva tive forms of behavior-in the whole range of intellectual con cerns, in the arts, of course, but with equal import and novelty, I suggest, in religion, history, and politics. To speak of a "Romantic era" is to identify the period, circa I 78 o to I 8 50, in which these ideas and attitudes arose and had currency and in most areas of intellectual concern became fully dominant. But it is not to suggest that older ideas disappeared or ceased to exert influence. As we shall note, Romantic ideas arose both as implicit and explicit criticisms of leading eighteenth century views; they were adumbrated largely out of a sense of the inadequacy of the dominant ideas of the Enlightenment and of the society which produced them-or what Romanticists identified as "those" ideas and "that" society. As time went on, Romantic ideas appeared in conflict against the inheritance and the in heritors of the Enlightenment-or again, what Romanticists took them to be. Our problem of defining Romanticism and identify ing Romanticists is made easier by the effort Romanticists made to distinguish themselves-and their key ideas-at first from the classi cists and philosophes, and later from philistines, economists, and the rest. Despite changes that evolved throughout the period, we can point to considerable similarities and considerable consistency, INTRODUCTION 3 which allow us legitimately to use a broad class term such as Romanticism for the period 1780 to 1850. Romanticism was the new thought, the critical ideas, the crea tive or despairing efforts to cope with the insufficiency of old ways of confronting experience. The Romanticists were the pro ponents, exemplars, and followers of the newly emphasized ideas and patterns of behavior that arose in the period following 1780. The Romantic era was one in which there was a widespread sense of crisis, a sense evident even before the outbreak of the French Revolution that the old order was coming to an end. And once the Revolution had broken out, the activities of intellectuals gained in urgency as fear of political disaster spread-fear of the Terror, of Napoleonic armies, of the chaos in internal and inter national politics as war continued for twenty-five years. Then the coming of the Industrial Revolution, already begun in Britain and spreading to the Continent after 1 8 20, added social concerns. There were now new urban masses affected by the factory sys tem, and the French Revolution had revealed some of their politi cal potentialities and provided the model for visions of class war. The rapid growth of manufacturing wealth in a competitive mar ket spread fear that egoistic individualism might enhance the sauve qui peut attitude already too evident among the fearful or the politically uninvolved, which many believed threatened politi cal order, unity or progress. Egoism, materialism, unconstrained freedom, these ideas now had their theoretical and propagandizing advocates. All seemed likely outgrowths of the dissolution of old disciplines and traditional political forms and hence raised the threat of moral disaster. Men faced the need to build new systems of discipline and order, or to reshape old ones. The era was prolific in important and innovative ideas and art forms. Theory proliferated (often under the stress of intense emotion) to come to terms with rapid, apparently unmanageable, change. Of course, much of the theory, many of the ideas were mere transfers, or reinterpreta tions, of old theories and ideas. But such has ever been the way theories grow and change. For example, Burke and other con servatives feared and disdained "the swinish multitude," which was believed to have generated the "excesses of the Revolution." Subsequently, their views of revolutionary mobs helped shape the
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