The Romantic Revolution: A History

201 Pages·2011·2.95 MB·English

by  Tim Blanning

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2011 Modern Library Edition
Copyright © 2010 by Tim Blanning All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a division of
Orion Publishing Group, Ltd., in 2010.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Blanning, T.C.W.
The romantic revolution: a history / Tim Blanning.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-67960500-3
1. Romanticism—Europe. 2. Europe—Civilization—19th century. 3. Europe—Intellectual life—
19th century. I. Title.
PN751.B53 2011 700.9′033—dc22 2011004269
Jacket design: Christopher Sergio
Jacket painting: Rudolf Friedrich August Henneberg, The Fortune Hunter, c. 1868 (detail)
(Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource,
N.Y./Klaus Goeken) www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
C
ONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
1 T C of A of R
HE RISIS THE GE EASON
ROUSSEAU ON THE ROAD TO VINCENNES
ROUSSEAU’S LOVERS: FROM A MIMETIC TO AN EXPRESSIVE AESTHETIC
NATURE AND NATURE’S LAWS
THE CULT OF GENIUS
THE ELEVATION OF THE ARTIST AND THE SACRALIZATION OF ART
THE PHILISTINE PUBLIC
2 T D S M
HE ARK IDE OF THE OON
DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
THE WONDER-WORLD OF THE NIGHT
THE SLEEP OF REASON
THE OPIATE OF THE ARTISTS
GREAT WITS ARE SURE TO MADNESS NEAR ALLIED
ROMANTIC HEROES AND HEROINES
3 L , H M
ANGUAGE ISTORY, AND YTH
THE LANGUAGE OF THE PEOPLE
THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE
MEDIEVALISM
LANDSCAPE AND MYTH
CONSERVATIVES AND REVOLUTIONARIES
C D T
ONCLUSION: EATH AND RANSFIGURATION
Photo Insert
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
I
NTRODUCTION
Between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth
centuries, Europe changed so rapidly and radically that one can
reasonably speak of a watershed in world history. Those who lived
through it were constantly using the word revolution to express their
awareness that they were living in exciting times, as in “the American
Revolution,” “the French Revolution,” or “the Industrial Revolution.” To
these, historians have added several others, notably “the agrarian
revolution,” “the commercial revolution,” “the communications
revolution,” and “the consumer revolution.” Contemporary astonishment
at the pace and variety of change was indeed acute. In 1818, for
example, the German publisher Friedrich Perthes exclaimed that “in the
three generations alive today our own age has combined what cannot be
combined. No sense of continuity informs the tremendous contrast
inherent in the years 1750, 1789 and 1815. To people alive now, they
simply do not appear as a sequence of events.”1 Twenty years later, the
Belgian music critic François Fétis, born in 1784, wrote that during his
lifetime the world had changed in more ways than during all of previous
human history.2
It was not only the material world that was affected. Those who lived
to see the world of Voltaire, Reynolds, and Haydn make way for the
world of Hugo, Turner, and Wagner could appreciate that a great
cultural revolution had also occurred. This was “the romantic
revolution,” which deserves to be accorded the same status as the other
revolutions. If it had no starting point as clear-cut as the Declaration of
Independence or the fall of the Bastille, contemporaries were well aware
that a monumental upheaval in the cultural world was under way. Even
those chary of acknowledging their own affiliation had to admit that
they had been affected. Delacroix, for example, wrote: “If by
romanticism one understands the free manifestation of my personal
impressions, my aversion to models copied in the schools, and my
loathing for academic formula, I must confess that not only am I
romantic, but I was so at the age of fifteen.”3 In just two or three
generations, the rule book of the classical past was torn up. In its place
came not another set of rules, but a radically different approach to
artistic creation that has provided the aesthetic axioms of the modern
world, even if a definition of romanticism has proved elusive.
In December 1923 Arthur Lovejoy, professor of philosophy at Johns
Hopkins University, gave a lecture to the annual meeting of the Modern
Language Association of America titled “On the Discrimination of
Romanticisms.”4 He entertained his audience by listing some of the
candidates previously nominated for the title “father of romanticism,”
ranging from Plato to St. Paul to Francis Bacon to Reverend Joseph
Warton to Rousseau and Kant, to name just a few. After reviewing the
various types of romanticism and their manifold incongruities, he
concluded wearily: “Any attempt at a general appraisal even of a single
chronologically determinate Romanticism—still more, of ‘Romanticism’
as a whole—is a fatuity.”5 This was a verdict repeated with varying
degrees of vehemence throughout the twentieth century. In an
influential book on England, for example, Marilyn Butler used the word
romantic in her title but then announced on the first page that it was
“anachronistic” and would not have been recognized by the poets to
whom it was applied.6
Equally various have been the starting points identified. They include
Piranesi’s Roman Antiquities of the Time of the First Republic of 1748
(Michel Florisoone); the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (Kenneth Clark);
Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse of 1761 (Maurice Cranston); Herder’s
journey to France in 1769 (Rüdiger Safranski); Blake’s Songs of Innocence
of 1789 (Maurice Bowra); and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and
Ludwig Tieck’s Heartfelt Effusions of an Art-Loving Monk of 1797 (Hans-
Joachim Schoeps).7 Other popular runners are Rousseau’s conversion
experience on the road to Vincennes in 1749; Horace Walpole’s
nightmare that led to the writing of his Gothic novel The Castle of
Otranto in 1764; and Goethe’s enthusiastic response to Strasbourg
Cathedral in 1770.
Much scholarly energy has also been devoted to establishing when the