German Romanticism

“ The older Romanticists begin, without exception, as the apostles of "enlightenment." They introduce a new tone into German poetry, give their works a new colour, and, in addition to this, revive both the spirit and the substance of the old fairy-tale, Volkslied, and legend. They exercise at first a fertilising influence upon German science; research in the domains of history, ethnography, and jurisprudence, the study of German antiquity, Indian and Greek-Latin philology, and the systems and dreams of the Naturphilosophie all receive their first impulse from Romanticism. ”

“ Other obvious fruits of the movement were the revival of the poetry and dignity of the Middle Ages, both in art and life—that colorful, form-loving musical era which the Age of Enlightenment had so crassly despised. That this yearning for the beautiful background led to reaction in politics and religion is natural enough; more edifying are the rich fruits which scholarship recovered when Romanticism had directed it into the domains of German antiquity and philology, and the wealth of popular song. ”

“ A more hopeful chaos or one more rich in fertile seeds we have not possessed since the days of Romanticism. It is surely worth while to study this literature, and in all its twists and turns to admire the heliotropism of the German ideal and the importance which our German literature has won as a mediator, an experimenter, and a model for that world-literature, the outline of which the prophetic eye of the greatest German poet was the first to discern, and his hand, equally expert in scientific and poetic creation, the first to describe. ”

“ The shaft to which we are about to descend is that of the German "soul," a mine as deep, as dark, as strange, as rich in precious metal and in worthless refuse as any other. We shall note the imprint received by this soul in the days of Romanticism, for this purpose dwelling at length on the Romanticist who above all others is the poet of the soul—Novalis. ”

“ These men were not only contemporary with Hebbel and Ludwig, but may indeed be called their artistic counterparts. Though widely differentiated by individual temper and talent, these painters and poets belong to the same phase of mid-century German literature and art: the striving of Romanticism beyond itself, the struggle for a new style uniting depth of feeling and terseness of delineation, the longing for a new view of life harmonizing the worship of the past with the demands of modern society and the problems of the day. ”

“ To such mystical constructions of the inner eye a certain group of German writers who flourished in the beginning of the nineteenth century and were known as the Romantics, darkly groped their way out of the confining realities of their own time. The most modern spell of romanticism, the one through which our own generation was but yesterday passing, measures its difference from any previous romantic era by the difference between earlier states of culture and our own. ”

“ The fusing of these elements by means of the imagination into one whole is what constitutes German romanticism. The music destined to correspond with this ideal should be bright, highly-coloured, and varied, full of sharp contrasts, subjective rather than objective, the artistic forms constantly evolving themselves in obedience to the arbitrary direction of the imagination. Hence arose two alterations of position, both of great importance in opera, the one between the instrumental and vocal parts of the music ”

“ Those who, in studying the history of German Romanticism, pay special attention to the growth of the reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century, are struck by the inferiority of the German Romanticists in single-minded strength of character to such a reactionary as De Maistre. It is to be remembered, however, that they were not statesmen and politicians, but authors; even those among them who, like Gentz, represent the transition from literature to politics, have no real significance except as writers. ”

“ On the other hand, from nature comes a love for home and country, and this love serves as a bridge to the patriotism which was the vital force in the Wars of Liberation and which, by well-marked gradations, destroyed the cosmopolitanism engendered by the French Revolution. Art went hand in hand with nature; the wild, weird landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, fascinating and specifically German, express the Romantic spirit fully as well as the delicate, spiritual, and thoroughly sane fancies of Philip Otto Runge, the artist of early Romanticism. ”

“ The soul of the German people, which in former centuries gave birth to mysticism and romanticism, is filled with a yearning for the infinite that cannot in the long run be contented with a materialistic philosophy; and the home of the German people, broad and fertile Germany, presents other pictures than a view of coal mines and swarming streets seen through the narrow space between factory chimneys. As a reaction against naturalism there arose therefore a neo-romanticism, and as its national modification, an art of the native heath (Heimatkunst) . ”

“ Thus arose the German Romanticism, which believed that in the creations of the popular mind could be found truer, more natural sentiments for literary expression than in the artificial productions of a select upper class. Possibly the chief activity in the direction of a simpler literature was developed by the brothers Grimm, who, by their collections of fairy tales and mythological lore, laid the foundation for a nationalistic movement which was soon to sweep over Europe. ”

“ Every really great German Master—Weber, Spohr, Marschner, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Raff, Goetz, Wagner,—has more or less strictly carried out the same principle to its legitimate conclusion, and used either the ideal freedom of Imagination, or that of Romanticism, as a stepping-stone to his own individual greatness. ”

“ The present occupation of this nation of philosophers and poets is assuredly not poetry-writing and philosophising. Even highly cultured Germans know little about philosophy now-a-days—not one German student in twenty has read a word of Hegel; interest in poetry, as such, is practically dead; political and social questions rouse a hundred times more attention than problems of culture or psychical conundrums.
And this is the people which once was lost in Romantic reveries and speculations, and saw its prototype in Hamlet! Hamlet and Bismarck! Bismarck and Romanticism! ”

“ Only at the universities—in Göttingen, Heidelberg and Berlin—did the movement continue, in the best sense, to be productive; German philology, German historical science and German jurisprudence benefited by Romantic ideas, long after Romantic poetry had fallen into decay. The day of Romanticism was clearly over; but a return to the classic and humanitarian spirit of the 18th century was impossible. The social condition of Europe had been profoundly altered by the French Revolution; the rise of industrialism had created new economic problems, the march of science had overturned old prejudices. ”

“ For it is a grave mistake to assume, as has been assumed only too often, that, after the great epoch of Classicism and Romanticism in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Germany produced but little of universal significance, or that, after Goethe and Heine, there were but few Germans worthy to be mentioned side by side with the great writers of other European countries. ”

“ The Romantic school was the first to try to place the conception of national literature as a whole on an autochthonous basis, and the scientific speculation to which Romanticism gave rise, has, since the Brothers Grimm, also resulted in serviceable rules gained from the increasingly thorough knowledge of language, of national development, and of social conditions. This new point of view reaches its climax in the attempts of Karl Müllenhoff and Wilhelm Scherer to trace the native literary development directly back to the nature and destiny of the German nation. ”

“ Since genius was congregated at Weimar, German literature has ever taken the lead in civilized humanity. We were the inventors, foreigners were the imitators. We provisioned the world with poetic forms and ideas. Romanticism originated among us, and only became a literary and artistic [508] fashion in France a good many years later, whence it passed on into England. Görres, Zacharias Werner, Novalis, and Oscar Von Redwitz, created lyric mysticism and neo-Catholicism among us, and these have only just reached France. ”

“ But he advanced quite rapidly towards liberalism both in politics and religion. And of the young men who surrounded him, like Gautier, Labrunie, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, De Vigny, and others, it can only be affirmed that they were legitimist or republican, Catholic or agnostic, just as it happened and without affecting their fidelity to the literary canons of the new school. [3] The German romanticism was philosophical; the French was artistic and social. The Parisian ateliers as well as the Parisian salons were nuclei of revolt against classical traditions. ”

“ One point in which the French movement differed from both the English and the German was in the suddenness and violence of the outbreak. It was not so much a gradual development as a revolution, an explosion. The reason of this is to be found in the firmer hold which academic tradition had in France, the fountainhead of eighteenth-century classicism. Romanticism had a special work to do in the land of literary convention in asserting the freedom of art and the unity of art and life. Everything that is in life, said Hugo, is, or has a right to be in art. ”

“ It is obvious that I then misunderstood what constitutes the veritable character both of philosophical pessimism and of German music,—namely, their Romanticism. What is Romanticism? Every art and every philosophy may be regarded as a healing and helping appliance in the service of growing, struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: on the one hand those that suffer from overflowing vitality, who need Dionysian art, and require a tragic view and insight into life ”

“ Again with Goethe's dilettante beginnings we compare a school of weak imitators, which unhappily was protected by Goethe himself (and also by Schiller in his literary organs) ; again with the Strassburg period and its Storm and Stress we compare Romanticism, which is characterized by its German nationalism and its antique tendencies, which is sentimental and philosophical, critical and programmatical like the time of Götz, which latter surely must have had a strong effect on men like Tieck and Arnim. ”

“ That he himself could not write waltzes of the same mad, irresistible swing was to him a source of conscious regret. Yet the accompaniments which he wrote for series of German folk-songs are ineffably beautiful. In them, he interprets the spirit of the northern races to which by birth and character he belonged. That which would have made him the interpreter of all mankind, that quick emotion which is the essence of the human race, [Pg 461] the current of warm blood which flows through us all and makes us all as one, he bound and concealed within himself. He cannot speak the common idiom. ”

“ Preface to Victor Hugo's "Cromwell," dated October, 1827. The play was printed, but not acted, in 1828.
[20] In modern times romanticism, typifying a permanent tendency of the human mind, has been placed in opposition to what is called realism. . . [But] there is, as it appears to us, but one fundamental note which all romanticism . . . has in common, and that is a deep disgust with the world as it is and a desire to depict in literature something that is claimed to be nobler and better.—Essays on German Literature, by H. H. Boyesen, pp. ”

“ Now from these circles of the younger geniuses, one especially stands out in interesting prominence. It is the circle which delighted to call itself the Romantic School. From its often crude efforts sprang a movement, the romantic movement in a wider sense, which lasted far on into our own century. It is this romantic movement in the wider sense that has proved the most characteristic outcome of modern German life as it was before 1848. To the romantic movement must be credited the whole wealth of German tales and songs that we love best after the greatest works of Goethe and of Schiller. ”

“ Music, by its very want of precision, which in this special case is a quality, goes where the German soul proceeds.
If the German spirit had as much density as expansion,—that is to say, as much will as power,—she could, at a given moment, lift up and save the human race. Such as she is, she is sublime. ”

“ In the categorical imperative, and not in logical reasonings, the individual becomes aware of his destiny; in the sense of duty, the love of truth, loyalty to country, respect for the rights of man, and reverence for ideals, spirit speaks to spirit and man glimpses the eternal.
Among the elements in this idealism that appealed to the Romanticists were its anti-intellectualism, its intuition, the high value it placed upon the personality, its historical viewpoint, and its faith in the uniqueness of German culture. ”

“ Throughout we find singers who in verse or prose chant the national glory, and no episode of importance is without its poetic chronicle or interpretation; the national enthusiasm vents itself in war-song, in satire, in mock-heroics, or in rhyming chronicle. Wandering poets living on the scanty proceeds of their lieder; craftsmen who have taken up the sword; soldiers by profession—these are the bards of the time. Rugged and unpolished sometimes are their verses, for the Middle German is in a transition state, and poetry has long since left courts and descended among the people. ”