The very beginning of the romantic movement, the decade of the 1770s, saw the phenomenon of Sturm und Drang, ‘storm and stress’, a young generation of German poets who rebelled against their strict education and social conventions to explore their emotions.54 The best-known of these ‘ill-considered’ works was Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).55 Here we have the perfect romantic scenario, in which the individual is set against and is at odds with society. Werther is a young, enthusiastic, passionate individual isolated amid strict, desiccated, pious Lutherans. But Goethe was only the beginning. The despair and disillusion, the sentimentality and melancholy of Chateaubriand and Rousseau kick-start romanticism, alongside Goethe, exploring the ways in which conventional society is unable to meet the spiritual needs of its heroes. The vast, the sprawling panoramas of Victor Hugo and the ‘Bohemian groves’ of Théophile Gautier and Alexandre Dumas, in which political and personal ambitions are intertwined, confirm Hugo’s argument that ‘romanticism is the liberalism of literature’.56 The approach of Stendhal and Prosper Mérimée, viewing art as a ‘secret paradise forbidden to ordinary mortals’, highlights one of the aims of romanticism, which became know as l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake. Balzac stressed the ‘unavoidable necessity’ of taking sides in the great questions of the day, the argument that one could not be an artist and sit on the sidelines.57
Whereas French romanticism was essentially a reaction to the French Revolution, the English variety was a reaction to the industrial revolution (Byron, Shelley, Godwin and Leigh Hunt were all radicals, though Sir Walter Scott and Wordsworth remained or became Tories). As Arnold Hauser frames it, ‘The romantics’ enthusiasm for nature is just as unthinkable without the isolation of the town from the countryside as is their pessimism without the bleakness and misery of the industrial cities.’58 It is the younger romantics – Shelley, Keats and Byron – who adopt an uncompromising humanism, aware of the dehumanising effects of factory life on life in general, and even the more conservative representatives, Wordsworth and Scott, share their ‘democratic’ sympathies in that their work is aimed at the popularisation – even the politicisation – of literature.59 Like their German and French counterparts, the English romantic poets believed in a transcendental spirit which was the source of poetic inspiration. They wallowed in language, explored consciousness, and saw in anyone who had the power to generate a poetic form of words an echo of Plato’s contention that here was some sort of divine intention. This is what Shelley meant by his famous epigram that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind’. (Wordsworth feared an ‘apocalypse of the imagination’.60) In a sense the poet became his own god.61 Shelley is perhaps the classic romanticist: a born rebel, an atheist, he saw the world as one great battle between the forces of good and evil. Even his atheism, it has been said, is more a revolt against God as a tyrant, than a denial of Him. In the same vein, Keats’ poetry is imbued with a pervading melancholy, a mourning for ‘the beauty that is not life’, for a beauty that is beyond his grasp. The mystery of art is in the process of replacing the mystery of faith.
Byron was probably the most famous romantic. (Describing ‘the romantic moi’, Howard Mumford Jones aptly notes that whereas Wordsworth’s egotism was internalised, Byron’s was ‘there for all Europe to see’.62) In his work, Byron’s portrayal of the hero as an eternally homeless wanderer, partly doomed by his own wild nature, is by no means original. But earlier heroes of this type invariably felt guilty or melancholic about the fact that they were outside society, whereas in Byron the outsider status becomes transformed into ‘a self-righteous mutiny’ against society, ‘the feeling of isolation develops into a resentful cult of solitude’, and his heroes are little more than exhibitionists, ‘who openly display their wounds’.63 These outlaws, who declare war on society, dominate literature in the nineteenth century. If the type had been invented by Rousseau and Chateaubriand, by Byron’s time it had become narcissistic. ‘[The hero] is unsparing towards himself and merciless towards others. He knows no pardon and asks no forgiveness, either from God or man. He regrets nothing and, in spite of his disastrous life, would not wish to have anything different . . . He is rough and wild but of high descent . . . a peculiar charm emanates from him which no woman can resist and to which all men react with friendship or enmity.’64
Byron’s significance went wider even than this. His idea of the ‘fallen angel’ was an archetype adopted by many others, including Lamartine and Heine. Among other things, the nineteenth century was characterised by guilt, at having fallen away from God (see Chapter 35), and the tragic hero of Byronic dimensions fitted the bill to perfection. But the other changes wrought by Byron were equally significant in their long-term effects. It was Byron, for example, who encouraged the reader to indulge in intimacy with the hero. In turn this increased the reader’s interest in the author. Until the romantic movement, the private life of a writer was largely unknown, and of little interest, to readers. Byron and his self-advertisements changed all that. After him, the relationship between a writer and his audience came to resemble, on the one hand, that of therapist and patient and, on the other, that of a film star and his fans.65
Associated with this was another major change, the notion of the ‘second self’, the belief that inside every romantic figure, in the dark and chaotic recesses of the soul, was a completely different person and that once access to this second self had been found, an alternative – and deeper – reality would be uncovered.66 This is in effect the discovery of the unconscious, interpreted here to mean an entity that is hidden away from the rational mind which is nonetheless the source of irrational solutions to problems, a secret, ecstatic something, which is above all mysterious, nocturnal, grotesque, ghostlike and macabre.67 (Goethe once described romanticism as ‘hospital-poetry’ and Novalis pictured life as ‘a disease of the mind’.) The second self, the unconscious, was seen as a way to spiritual enlargement and was expected to contribute to the great lyricism that was such a feature of romanticism.68 The discovery of the unconscious is the subject of Chapter 36.
Furthermore, the idea of the artist as a more sensitive soul than others, with perhaps a direct line to the divine, which went back to Plato, carried with it a natural conflict between the artist and the bourgeoisie.69 The early nineteenth century was the point at which the very concept of the avant-garde could arise, with the artist viewed as someone who was ahead of his time, ahead of the bourgeoisie certainly. Art was a ‘forbidden fruit’, available only to the initiated and most certainly denied to the ‘philistine’ bourgeoisie. And it was not far from there to the idea that youth was seen as more creative than – and as inevitably superior to – age. The young inevitably knew what the coming thing was, inevitably had the energy to embrace new ideas and fashions, being naturally less familiar with more established patterns. The very concept of genius played up the instinctive spark in new talent at the expense of painfully acquired learning over a lifetime of effort.
In painting romanticism produced Turner, whose pictures, said John Hoppner, were like looking into a coal fire (a metaphor adopted for the music of Berlioz), and Delacroix, who said that a picture should above all be a feast for the eyes. But it was in music that romanticism surpassed itself. The great generation of romantic composers were all born within ten years of one another – Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Verdi and Wagner. Before all these, however, there was Beethoven. All music leads up to Beethoven, says Mumford Jones, and all music leads away from him.70 Beethoven, Schubert and Weber comprised a smaller grouping, of what we might call pre-romantic composers, who between them changed the face of musical thought, and musical performance.